Does Punters have an API or Odds Comparison feed?.For now, in a well-written story that rarely slows down, the driver can go it alone.ĭeuel is the author of “Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East. What does the future hold? Truckers, Murphy writes, are just wagon trains for a modern world, and when robots replace all the human labor, which they will, all that will hark back to the original movers is likely the way engines will still be measured in horsepower.įor what seems like forever, John McPhee and professional nonfiction writers like him have been the ones to explain things like trucking to us. We root for Murphy to make it work, but he admits his real crush: National Public Radio’s Terry Gross, “because I’ve spent more time with her than anyone else in my life.” More truckers than you’d think, he says, listen to NPR. The one time Murphy tells us about his own vulnerability is when he sleeps with the wife of a military commander, furious because her cold husband no longer loves her. What they like is a full load and twenty-hour run at 65.” When you maintain one properly, he writes, the thing can run a million miles. What they’re probably missing out on, Murphy suggests, are lonelier and more poetic thoughts, such as the way the engines themselves, “want to work hard. The way Murphy thinks of it, most of the other long-haul drivers are all too happy to gather around the gas station and guffaw. Murphy’s a mover (or a bedbugger), not to be confused with car haulers (parking lot attendants), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers) or hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys.) What unites most of them, Murphy explains with some distaste, is how happily they communicate with each other over CB radios, in a kind of private social network Murphy doesn’t seem to relish like he does all that time alone. This unequivocation was very attractive to me then, as it is now.” “When you hired movers,” he writes, “they moved it. What hooks Murphy so thoroughly, despite society’s apparent disapproval, is that in addition to the money and freedom, the rough-and-tumble underworld of big trucks and long drives actually feels like a meaningful lesson in the pride and purity of hard work. “I’ve got a hard-muscled body, a big, comfortable, new tractor hauling a 53-foot moving trailer,” he writes in his first book, the memoir “Long Haul.” “There’s the whistle of the supercharger as I shift into the thirteenth gear, the whoosh of the air dryer, my mouth slightly sour, arms shaking from the pounding of the wheel, making money, setting my own schedule, the Manhattan skyline on my right, flying fast and furious.” With his hand on the wheel, our guide to this largely unexplored subculture is Finn Murphy: college dropout, long-haul trucker and the “Great White Mover,” cruising on what he estimates is his 3,000th job since acquiring a commercial driver’s license in July of 1980. Zoom ahead, pass quickly, make it just in time - but what we’ve unknowingly executed is a “suicide squeeze.” The tractor-trailer (fully loaded at 80,000 pounds) can struggle to stop, and if a front tire blows, the tractor might veer violently, sucking the big rig and every car nearby into a mayhem we don’t really want to comprehend. We’ve all done it: The exit’s up ahead, but there’s a tractor-trailer in the way, lumbering along, blocking the turn.
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