Contemporary Authors

• The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road W.W. Norton & Company (New York, NY), 2017

1. The long haul : a trucker's tales of life on the road LCCN 2016059479 Type of material Book Personal name Murphy, Finn, 1958- author. Main title The long haul : a trucker's tales of life on the road / Finn Murphy. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York, N.Y. : W W. Norton & Company, [2017] Projected pub date 1706 Description pages cm ISBN 9780393608717 (hardcover)

• Finn Murphy Home Page - http://www.finnmurphy.net/about

  Finn Murphy grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Colorado. He started working as a long-haul trucker in 1980. This is his first book.
  Finn Murphy
  Photo by Kevin Synder

  Contact Finn at info@Finnmurphy.net

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/02/14/585719252/long-haul-trucker-was-completely-seduced-by-the-open-road

  Long Haul Trucker Was 'Completely Seduced' By The Open Road
  February 14, 20182:00 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
  Terry Gross square 2017
  TERRY GROSS

  Fresh Air

  Finn Murphy has logged over a million miles hauling people's belongings across the country to their new homes. He describes life on the road as a "reaction against regimentation."

  The Long Haul
  A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road

  by Finn Murphy

  Hardcover, 229 pages purchase

  TERRY GROSS, HOST:

  This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. I drive a compact car, so I was interested in hearing about life driving a 70,000-pound truck whose trailer is 53 feet long. My guest, Finn Murphy, has written a new memoir called "The Long Haul" about his experiences logging over a million miles. His cargo includes the furniture, dishes, clothing, pianos, heirlooms and artwork of corporate executives and their families moving across the country to new homes for their new jobs. Murphy typically packs and unpacks the possessions as well.

  His memoir is filled with insights about life on the road and the subculture of truckers as well as about the attachments people have to their possessions when they're transitioning to a new home and having to decide what to keep and what to ask Murphy to throw in the dumpster. He's been driving a truck off and on since the late 1970s. He dropped out of college to become a truck driver.

  Finn Murphy, welcome to FRESH AIR. I want to start with a reading from the book, a short paragraph from the introduction.

  FINN MURPHY: (Reading) To the casual observer, all trucks probably look similar. And I suppose people figure all truckers do pretty much the same job. Neither is true. There's a strict hierarchy of drivers depending on what they haul, how they're paid. The most common are the freight haulers. They're the guys who pull box trailers with any kind of commodity inside. We movers are called bedbuggers, and our trucks are called roach coaches. Other specialties are car haulers - we call them parking lot attendants; flatbedders, skateboarders; animal transporters, chicken chokers; refrigerated food haulers, reefers; chemical haulers, thermos bottle holders; and hazmat haulers, suicide jockeys.

  Bedbuggers are shunned by other truckers. We will generally not be included in conversations around the truck stop coffee counter or in the drivers' lounge. In fact, I pointedly avoid coffee counters when there is one mostly because I don't have time to waste but also because I don't buy into the trucker myth that most drivers espouse.

  I don't wear a cowboy hat, Tony Lama snakeskin boots or a belt buckle doing free advertising for Peterbilt or Harley-Davidson. My driving uniform is a 3-button company polo shirt, lightweight black cotton pants, black sneakers, black socks and a cloth belt. My moving uniform is a black cotton jumpsuit.

  GROSS: Well, thanks for reading that. And apparently you don't wear jeans or belts 'cause they can scratch the furniture.

  MURPHY: Yes, that's correct.

  GROSS: (Laughter) So why are long-haul furniture movers at the bottom of the trucker hierarchy?

  MURPHY: Because we have to load and unload our trucks, first. Second, we have to deal with customers. So as a mover who works for a van line, I'm managing this move and this transition for this family. And that takes a certain amount of diplomacy and tact and social lubrication skills that a lot of drivers don't want to do. And then the third one is we get paid a lot of money to do this. So we're at the top of the earnings pyramid, which puts us sort of at the bottom of the coffee-counter trucker pyramid.

  GROSS: So you're not, like, part of the brotherhood so much.

  MURPHY: Not so much because of the - as I just read in the introduction there, we don't drive - you know, I don't drive 200,000 miles a year. I'm not doing 3,000 miles a week, 52 weeks a year from New Jersey to San Diego. A lot of my time is actually spent loading, unloading, interacting with the customers and then driving. So they don't - part of the fraternity is, you know, how many miles a year do you do? And we don't do that - as many miles as a freight-hauling trucker.

  GROSS: So does that translate to being treated by other truckers in a certain way?

  MURPHY: It does. Once they see the van line shirt - and it doesn't happen just with truckers, either. It happens with waitresses. It happens in the service bays, at the truck washes. The bedbuggers are - yeah, we are looked down upon in a certain kind of a way.

  GROSS: So describe your truck.

  MURPHY: My truck - I have a brand-new Freightliner Cascadia with a 435 Detroit Diesel engine. It's a Class 8 truck, which means the big tractor-trailers. I picked it up in Indianapolis in November. It had 42 miles on it.

  GROSS: Whoa.

  MURPHY: Yep.

  GROSS: Right out of the showroom (laughter).

  MURPHY: Brand-spanking new. I drove it right out of - (laughter) yep, I drove it right out of the lot. It's got a walk-in sleeper with a double bed in the back. It's got a bunk bed up above, a microwave oven, refrigerator, navigation system, a custom air ride seat that ergonomically fits to my body, cruise control. It's just a wonderful machine.

  GROSS: And you own...

  MURPHY: It cost me...

  GROSS: You own it.

  MURPHY: No, (laughter) yeah, I was just getting to that. I don't own it. I lease it, and it's $4,700 a month - is my truck payment. So it's like a big mortgage.

  GROSS: Yeah, bigger than some mortgages (laughter). So how does this truck compare to the truck you started driving back in - around 1980?

  MURPHY: Oh, so that was an International TranStar back then, what we call a cab-over. So there's no hood to it. So you're - the windshield is sitting right over the road, and you're sitting actually right over the front left tire. So it was very - and then had a cramped little sleeper that I had to crawl into in the back. So it's much, much different in terms of comfort. So the new Freightliner I've got now is what we call a conventional, so it's got a long hood. So my seat sort of sits in the middle of the truck. I've got an air ride suspension. And it's quiet.

  GROSS: Wow. If there's no hood in front, there's nothing to protect you from head-on crash.

  MURPHY: No, there isn't. And so let's avoid that (laughter).

  GROSS: (Laughter) Yeah, good idea. So that leads to, what are some of the roads or road conditions that you fear most?

  MURPHY: Hills I fear most. Snow and ice I fear. I fear rain and big cities. In fact, I love this question because I'm not sure that people think when they see a truck driver - they sort of look up, and they see somebody there, probably has big arms and way up high - that fear is a component of what we do every day. It's not something that drivers talk about, and I don't think it's something that four-wheelers - people that drive cars, we call them four-wheelers. We've got - in fact, we've got a whole nomenclature for (laughter) people that don't drive trucks. If you drive an ambulance, it's called a bone box. A school bus is called a cheese wagon. Motorcycle riders are called organ donors.

  GROSS: (Laughter) Oh, gee.

  (LAUGHTER)

  MURPHY: Yeah. And we call motorcycle - they're called murdercycles. Some - I mean, I can't even see motorcycles most of the time.

  GROSS: So have you ever been - I hope not - in an accident?

  MURPHY: Nothing serious. I've been in a few fender benders here and there, some - trying to make a tight urban turn. I got stuck in Boston once where the truck - in Cambridge, I was trying to make one of those turns, and the truck came right up against one of the lamppost things. And the cops came. And in Cambridge, they actually have a department in the police department. And this truck came out. They cut down the lamppost, got my truck out. Then they welded the lamppost back up. It took about 15 minutes.

  GROSS: Wow, (laughter) OK. So when people hire you to move all their possessions - and mostly you have very high-end clients - they're leaving all their possessions in the world to a stranger. And no matter how, you know, nice and diplomatic and caring you are when you meet them, you're still a stranger. What do people say to you to try to convince you to be nice to their stuff and take (laughter) good care of it because I'm sure there's really, like, nice ways of doing that and really, like, threatening ways of doing that.

  MURPHY: Yeah, so moving hits people right there in the - in that security spot. So on - when I show up on moving day, in fact, really what happens is what happens in the first five minutes of a move is almost going to dictate the tenor of how the day is going to go. So people are already - you know, it's very disruptive to a family. It's disruptive to children. It's disruptive to the parents. Usually there's a change in their jobs and so forth. So even before we get there, this is fraught with emotion.

  And then, you know, you've got the reputation of the moving industry, which is - you know, I'm very aware of the dismal view that the general public has about movers. And I try to assuage that as much as possible early on and to let them know that we're professionals, that we care about their things. But that said, some of the crews that I work with - I mean, we're talking about, you know, very big people (laughter). There's a lot of tattoos. It's all immigrant laborers - wonderful, wonderful people. And I have crews all over the country I've been working with for decades. But it can be a kind of unnerving initial physical presence at the beginning.

  GROSS: So you're entrusted with the possessions, and sometimes something goes wrong. And I think, like, the biggest example of that in your book is when you were moving a family, and the woman's baby grand piano was, like, the most prized possession of - was, like, a family heirloom in addition to being a piano. And it didn't really fit easily into the new home. And it was kind of a catastrophe. Would you describe what happened?

  MURPHY: (Laughter) It was a catastrophe. The first - the three words that all movers live by is not my fault (laughter). And so we had to bring this up an outside staircase. It was a baby grand piano, weighed about 700 pounds. And we were bringing it up the incline just with brute force, which is one of the really attractive things about the work that I do and that we do as moving crews. And so we were just manhandling this thing up. And as we got to the top of the stairs which was being held by those two sort of metal joist hangers, the joist hangers gave away. The piano fell about 14 feet down onto the ground. All of my movers scattered in all directions. And when the piano hit, it made - you know - remember that chord at the end of the "Sgt. Pepper" album...

  GROSS: Yes.

  MURPHY: ...When it goes bong (ph)? So that's the noise that the piano made. That was its death flurry. And we were all just shocked and standing around. And the customer was there with a toddler in her hand. And then the thunderstorm came, and it just started to rain on everything.

  GROSS: That's so horrible.

  MURPHY: And myself and my crew - we just looked over at the shipper. We call the customer the shipper. And one of my men, this big giant of a man, went over and put his arm around the customer, the shipper. And then the two of us went over, and we all just sort of put our arms around each other, watched the piano get soaking wet in the rain.

  GROSS: So you write that that truckers like you aren't sentimental about objects. I'll kind of leave a baby grand out of that because that's an instrument. That's different than (laughter) an object in my opinion. But so you write you're not sentimental about objects. You don't own much. I could easily see it being the other way around. Watching how meaningful possessions are to people, I could see you becoming more attached, not less attached to things in your life. So why are you less attached?

  MURPHY: Because we see objects or stuff in a continuum of the way people live. For example, in your 20s and 30s, most Americans are accumulating things. And then in the 40s and 50s, that sort of levels off. And then in the 60s and 70s, then they're dis-accumulating things or eradicating things. So we get to watch the whole continuum. So we see, for example, that the kids' kindergarten drawings that are on the refrigerator or the high school yearbook or Aunt Tilley's (ph) antique vanity - we see that those things are going to be put into storage at some point. And then when somebody is tired of paying the storage fees, then we're paid to take it and get rid of it.

  So movers are kind of Buddhist in a way. We sort of understand the transitory nature of manmade things because we're there at the point when it gets thrown away. So even if you can't bring yourself to get rid of your stuff, your heirs or descendants will have no such qualms at all.

  GROSS: Do you ever pick out things that you want for yourself when you're supposed to be putting everything in the dumpster?

  MURPHY: No (Laughter). But we get - movers get offered things all the time. In fact, so here are the - here's the four things that movers get offered most commonly - pianos, hot tubs...

  GROSS: (Laughter).

  MURPHY: ...backyard trampolines and pool tables.

  GROSS: Why?

  MURPHY: Every mover I know could have six or seven of these things if they wanted to have them.

  GROSS: Why are those the things?

  MURPHY: Because they're big and bulky. And depending on where they're moving to, they may or may not have room. They put it on Craigslist. They priced it wrong. And on moving day, it's still there. And then at that point, they just want to get rid of it.

  GROSS: They don't say, I'll leave it for the next family; they'll love having it?

  MURPHY: (Laughter) We do that, too because usually we're not taking the hot tub or the backyard trampoline.

  GROSS: Right, OK. Let me introduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Finn Murphy, and he's a long-haul trucker. He moves people long distances and moves all their possessions to their new home. Now he's written a memoir about it called "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales Of Life On The Road." We're going to take a short break, then we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF RHIANNON GIDDENS' "THAT LONESOME ROAD")

  GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Finn Murphy. He's written a new memoir about being a long-haul trucker. Basically it's like a huge moving van. He deals with high-end customers who are moving to distant locations. His memoir is called "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales Of Life On The Road."

  What's one of the strangest things that you've had to move?

  MURPHY: Probably a collection of Chinese gravestones. This gentleman that I was moving - he had eight of them, and he had purchased them somewhere. Each one was worth $80,000. He had a gallery set up in the center of this giant house - this 16,000-square-foot house in Aspen, Colo. And he had pedestals custom made. And it was our job to put the gravestones on each of the pedestals. And each one weighed 600 pounds or so. And this shipper - he treated us so badly. He - this is a house with 11 bathrooms, and he had gotten a port-a-potty for us to use during the move that was outside.

  GROSS: Wow.

  MURPHY: And he kept going...

  GROSS: He's entrusting you with this, you know, fortune's worth of stuff, and he won't even let you use his bathroom or one of his bathrooms.

  MURPHY: Right, yeah. That's how it works sometimes.

  GROSS: But if he's disrespecting you that way, how are you supposed to respect his possessions?

  MURPHY: Well, fortunately, movers and restaurant workers have some sort of retaliatory measures at hand.

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: Uh-oh. Here we go.

  MURPHY: So we didn't say anything to him. And he kept going down into town and bringing back food for himself and his wife and people and - anyway, we were starving, and we were using the port-a-potty. And we were putting - uncrating these gravestones. And one of the things that I had done in my not-so-stellar college career was I had taken a semester of Chinese. So I knew the orientation of the Chinese characters, and I was pretty sure that my shipper didn't. So when we installed his gravestones, we put them in upside down.

  GROSS: (Laughter).

  MURPHY: And he couldn't tell the difference. So we were really looking forward to the day when he was going to have a cocktail party and show off his gravestones. And somebody who was - understood Chinese would tell the philistine that he had them all wrong.

  GROSS: How does a house even support so many 600-pound gravestones?

  MURPHY: Well, he had an Olympic pool in the basement, so I imagine it was made...

  GROSS: Oh, my gosh, OK (laughter).

  MURPHY: Oh, yeah, this - I get to see some pretty amazing places.

  GROSS: Yeah, OK. So what's the view like when you're riding high up in the cab of a truck and all the other cars, especially the compact cars like me, are so far below you?

  MURPHY: So what people don't seem to understand is that I can see everything. And people tend to think that their automobile is anonymous. And I find that really amusing. So you've got this vehicle with windows all around it and a license plate on it. And you're out in public. It's, like, the least anonymous thing that you could be doing. But the behavior that people perform...

  GROSS: (Laughter).

  MURPHY: ...Inside their vehicles makes it look like they don't think anybody can see. Well, I can see everything. So I know what everybody's doing in their cars. And, you know, Americans - we're pretty good drivers in general. The worst drivers are in - around D.C. And the best drivers for some reason are in Michigan. I'm not quite sure what that is. But if Americans would just drive while they're driving instead of doing something else and driving, that would be a lot better for everybody.

  And here's - so here's what most people are doing in their cars that I can see. They're eating. They're drinking, either a legal or an illegal beverage. They're putting on makeup, texting obviously, disciplining kids in the back seat. That's a big one. But most of the time that I can see through the body language is people are working on their relationship with the person in the passenger seat. And sometimes that could be romantic and sweet, which is a nice little treat. And then most of the time it's conflict.

  GROSS: I thought you were going to say people are picking their noses.

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: I honestly thought that. And I thought something else you were going to say that has to do with body fluids. So, you know...

  MURPHY: This is a family show, Terry.

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: I know. So you've seen that, too. You're just not mentioning it.

  MURPHY: I haven't seen anybody actually eliminating fluids in a car, no.

  GROSS: All right.

  MURPHY: I haven't seen that. I have seen some romantic moments.

  GROSS: Yes, OK.

  My guest is Finn Murphy, author of the new memoir "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tale Of Life On The Road." We'll talk more, and Ken Tucker will review the new "Black Panther" soundtrack featuring Kendrick Lamar after we take a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE'S "THE RAMBLE")

  GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Finn Murphy, author of the new memoir "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tale Of Life On The Road." His specialty now is hauling the possessions of corporate executives and their families moving to new homes for their new jobs. He's been driving a truck since the late 1970s. He grew up in suburban Connecticut and dropped out of college, much to his parents' dismay, to become a truck driver.

  So you write that you've worked with people who are suspicious of your diction and demeanor. And white-collar people wonder what a guy like you who looks and sounds like them is doing driving a truck and moving furniture for a living. So people are suspicious of you or surprised on both ends. The truck drivers are suspicious of your diction and demeanor. And the people who you're moving wonder, like, what an educated guy like you is doing moving furniture for a living. So how does it feel to have both - what's my question?

  MURPHY: I'll toss in if you want.

  GROSS: What's my question, Finn?

  MURPHY: I think your question is...

  GROSS: (Laughter) You tell me.

  MURPHY: ...Is how - I love being an enigma like that. It's very satisfying to me. I'm sort of a typical, middle child, black sheep of the family kind of guy. So if I'm confusing people, I like that a lot. And I do confuse people because when I go into the truck stop or something like that, I don't speak with a Southern accent. And, you know, I don't change the way that - the kind of person that I am.

  GROSS: So you were - grew up in a suburb of Connecticut. You write, I was raised by conscientious parents, educated by the Catholic Church and fine-tuned by the sensibilities of a prestigious New England liberal arts college. None of it stuck. So you dropped out of Colby College after three years to be a long-distance trucker. What was the attraction of the work?

  MURPHY: Freedom - freedom first. So I had done - I had worked for a moving company in the summers between college. Remember when we had summer jobs instead of internships?

  (LAUGHTER)

  MURPHY: My parents always thought - but my parents thought it would be great for all of us. I have seven brothers and sisters. I come from this huge Irish Catholic family. My parents - we had to work summer jobs. And they wanted us to work laboring jobs so that we could see what the laboring world was like and then hopefully then stay in college and not become (laughter) one of those people, which I think they're probably - they probably rethought that since then. So I - that was my summer job - worked for a local moving company.

  And then at the - in my junior year summer, I took a - my first road trip with a long-haul driver. And I went down to Virginia Beach, Va., from Connecticut and took U.S. 17 down through the - crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel into Virginia Beach. And it was just - I mean, I was completely seduced by the open road, by the freedom of that, by nobody looking over my shoulder and telling me what to do. And it was that - basically it was a reaction against the regimentation I think that I had been brought up in.

  GROSS: You don't mention this in the book, but your father was John Cullen Murphy, who drew the popular newspaper comic strip "Prince Valiant." And you seemed to want to get as far away from his life as possible. But it sounds like being the son of a comic strip artist would be so great. And in fact I interviewed your brother recently who wrote a memoir about being the son (laughter) of a comic book strip artist. And it seemed to be great for him. So what were you rebelling against within your family?

  MURPHY: So it was great having my father as a commercial illustrator. In fact, he had a studio behind our house, so my father was always home. When we came back from school or whatever, he was right there. My father was one of the most gentle and affable people anybody has ever - you know, would ever have encountered. On the other hand, my mother is very much of a Irish matriarch. And with eight children to keep into line and make sure that we all got fed and clothed and had - took care of our various activities, it was a very strict household from my mother's end. And she was the one who managed the day to day of keeping eight children in order.

  And then I did 12 years of parochial school. So then that regimentation transferred into the school life as well. And then the social life was all around the church - St. Katherine of Siena Church. And those three power centers were in lockstep about what young children should be doing or adolescent children should be doing, and I didn't like that.

  GROSS: So how did it go over with your parents when you told them you were dropping out of college at the end of your junior year to become a long-distance trucker?

  MURPHY: So yeah, back to my father for a moment - probably the one regret of his life was that he was not able to go to college. His father died when he was 19. My father had to support his family. And all he ever wanted to do was to go to college. So for him, it was a huge thing to be able to have all eight of his children attend college, graduate from college and have some kind of a professional career.

  So when I said I was going to go and work for North American Van Lines and not return back to school, that hit him in a place where he felt vulnerable and a place that he felt that I was being very ungrateful, which I was being very ungrateful. And, you know, I had brought - basically I was bringing the wisdom of a 21-year-old with a chip on his shoulder into a career choice. And I hurt my parents. I hurt my family, and we didn't speak for a couple of years. It was actually - it was a little over two years that I never - I didn't even speak to my parents.

  GROSS: So you write, many young male neurotics find out early that hard labor is salve for an overactive mind. Running up and down staircases for hours on end, carrying dressers and refrigerators and pianos was to me a relief from stress. Hard work temporarily shut down the constant movie running in my brain that looped around in an endless cacophony of other people's expectations, obligations, guilt, anger and rebellion. So, like, you had to get out of your head through physical work?

  MURPHY: Yes, I did. That's a really good sentence by the way, isn't it?

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: Yeah. It's pretty good. Did you work on that a long time?

  MURPHY: No, I didn't actually. It just rolled right off the page. I had - one of my nephews actually - when the book came out, he copied that particular sentence and sent it to me and said, you betcha. So...

  (LAUGHTER)

  MURPHY: And he was talking about himself. He wasn't talking about me. But yes, one of the great things about manual labor and especially for - if anyone who's done continual manual labor over a long period of time, there's a zone in there that is very, very satisfying. There's a zone about working with men. There's something tribal about it. There's something elemental about it. This is how I think we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years. And I really enjoy that part of it. Also, it's a meritocracy. You're - on a moving van, you're either doing the work and capable of doing the work, or you're not capable of doing the work.

  So there's nothing about who you are, where you come from, what language you speak. All of that is gone on a moving van, and life is very simple. And the work is - has some specialized knowledge required to it, but the work is also very simple. And our days are, you know, 10 to 14 hours loading a truck or unloading a truck with a group of men and a few women now. There's a few women in the moving industry now, but it's still, you know, mostly men. It's still mostly immigrants. It's people who don't speak English in many, many cases. And you don't need language when you have work because the work is the language.

  GROSS: OK, so I can get how physical work can take you out of your head even though I sit at a chair all day...

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: ...On the computer. But I can understand that. But what I don't get is how being alone on the road would be good for you if you live in your head and you want to mute some of the tape loops that are constantly playing in your head 'cause you're alone on the road. Yeah, you can put on the radio. Yeah, you can listen to a book on tape. But being alone in a truck for long, long periods of time seems to me like a really good opportunity for personal demons to have their way with you.

  MURPHY: Yes, that's very true. And what you just enumerated there are various forms of distraction that I use or maybe you use or other people use in order not to face those kinds of demons. That's what a lot of us struggle with. That's what a lot of us work with.

  GROSS: Well let's, take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Finn Murphy. He's a longtime long-haul trucker, and now he's written a new memoir called "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales Of Life On The Road." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF DEEP BLUE ORGAN TRIO'S "TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD")

  GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Finn Murphy, who's written a new memoir about his life as a long-haul trucker. It's called "The Long Haul." And basically he has a really, really large 18-wheeler moving van and moves families who need to relocate often across the country.

  You stopped driving for about 10 years. You don't say in the book what you did during those 10 years. Can you give us a sense of what your life was like in the 10 years that you stopped driving?

  MURPHY: Yes. That was in an original draft of the book. Actually, that's going to be my next book, Terry - about what I did. But I will tell you what I did. So I was working for North American Van Lines, and I was getting basically burnt out. And one of the things that I had always intended to do when I left college was to save some money and go into business for myself. And that was really one of the goals. I didn't just quit college and just, you know, sort of flip the bird to everybody. I actually had some kind of a plan. And back then, you could - I could make a lot of money. I was making a hundred thousand dollars a year in 1981 as a mover.

  So I saved a bunch of money. I bought an import company importing - you know those beautiful fisherman's sweaters from Ireland? I used to import those into the United States from the west of Ireland. And I got into the other parts of the textile business and then started importing cashmere sweaters from Scotland and had a very successful business on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts.

  GROSS: And then you went back into trucking again.

  MURPHY: (Laughter).

  GROSS: So what happened?

  MURPHY: So I was on - living on Nantucket Island as a high-profile businessman and citizen and community activist. I was actually chairman of the county commissioners on Nantucket. I was a police commissioner. I was the airport commissioner. I was on the board of the chamber of commerce. I was a successful person, married, living in a small town. And, well, what happened is I got into a relationship with a woman who wasn't my wife. And my life exploded. Or probably more accurately, I took a match to my life and blew it to pieces. And so Nantucket is not a place where that kind of thing is going to be unnoticed or uncommented upon.

  And I moved to Colorado, and I called up an old driver friend of mine who started his own trucking moving company. And I said, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing now with my life. But I had always kept my commercial driver's license just because. And so then I went back out on the road because I didn't know what to do - completely lost. And you know what? There's a lot of us out there - a lot of drivers who are like that. And I knew I'd have plenty of company.

  GROSS: Well, changing the subject for a second, I have to say a paragraph I particularly enjoyed in your memoir has to do with how you listen to a lot of public radio when you're driving in your truck (laughter) and that you know a lot of other truckers who listen to public radio, too - and so my personal thanks for that and for a very nice mention of me and our show. But I love that one Klan member from Georgia calls NPR U.S. Jews and girls report.

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: That's pretty funny. And as you said, yeah, he might say that, but he listens.

  MURPHY: Yeah. He probably doesn't have the mug, though.

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: We don't know for sure, though, do we?

  MURPHY: I don't.

  GROSS: (Laughter) That would great if he did. So just a couple of questions before we wrap up - you can't just pull into any parking lot when you're driving an 18-wheeler. So it's kind of personal. (Laughter) It's kind of private, but what do you do for pit stops, like, when you need the bathroom? Do you have one of those jars, one of those bottles for truckers?

  (LAUGHTER)

  GROSS: Is that OK for me to ask you that?

  MURPHY: (Laughter) That's fine. So here's - so the trucker staple here is an empty Gatorade bottle. And if you go into a truck stop parking lot on a summer afternoon...

  GROSS: Oh, no (laughter).

  MURPHY: ...You'll see legions of flattened Gatorade bottles all over the parking lot, and that will provide an interesting olfactory experience. So yeah, there's that. I try to get out and be a little more civilized about it, which I can do most of the time. But you're right about trucks.

  So my truck is 73 feet long with a 53-foot trailer. So I cannot go many, many places. And this brings up an ambivalence for me because I talk in the book about how much I dislike suburban sprawl and auto-dependent development and all those kinds of things. But with a 73-foot truck, I actually rely on that kind of sprawl. I need to be in the Walmart parking lot or in the truck stop. So it's kind of difficult.

  GROSS: What do you do when you're starting to fall asleep at the wheel?

  MURPHY: It's really easy for me. So for you four-wheeler drivers out there, if you start getting that fluttering-of-the-eyelid thing, then you're - it's really time - it's actually past time to pull over. So see if you can remember that. And when I get that, I pull over. But the easy thing for me is I've got a double-bed in the back with 600-count sheets and a feather duvet, and it's tucked in with hospital corners. And I've got a climate control system. And I can take a 15- or 20-minute nap. And actually, I sleep better in the sleeper than I sleep anywhere.

  I can also pull my truck over and probably - if you pull a car over on the side of the highway, you're probably going to get hassled, or somebody's going to wonder what you're doing. But trucks - they just get completely left alone. So I'll take a 20-minute trucker nap right back in my comfy little bed and get back on the road.

  GROSS: All right. Good luck to you with your writing and your driving, and thank you so much for talking with us. It's really been fun.

  MURPHY: Thank you, Terry. I'm thrilled to be here.

  GROSS: Finn Murphy's new memoir is called "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tale Of Life On The Road." After a break, Ken Tucker will review the new "Black Panther" soundtrack featuring Kendrick Lamar. Ken calls Lamar's performance on the album almost ridiculously entertaining. This is FRESH AIR.

  (SOUNDBITE OF JIMMY AMADIE'S "YOU'D BE SO NICE TO COME HOME TO")

  Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

  NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

• Bookweb - http://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-finn-murphy-36258

  An Indies Introduce Q&A With Finn Murphy
  By Jessica Stauffer on Wednesday, Jun 07, 2017
  Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend by emailSend by email
  Finn Murphy, author of The Long HaulFinn Murphy is the author of The Long Haul, a Summer/Fall 2017 Indies Introduce debut title and a June 2017 Indie Next List pick.

  Murphy started working as a long-haul trucker in 1980 and now lives in Colorado when not on the road in his 18-wheeler, Cassidy. Jason Kennedy of Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who served on the Indies Introduce panel that selected The Long Haul, said Murphy’s memoir about trucking is “brilliant.”

  “Finn Murphy has moved his customers from one place to another for more than 20 years, packing, stacking, driving, and unpacking for each move he does. Long-haul movers know a lot about their customers’ private lives from the clues they leave around to be packed up,” said Kennedy. “Along the way, Finn makes some very astute observations about America’s heartland and the evolving workforce of today. Completely engrossing and worth the read.”

  Here, Kennedy and Murphy discuss the experiences that provided material for the author’s memoir.

  Jason Kennedy: The Long Haul is an eye-opening look at a vocation that I never thought could be so fascinating. The world of truckers is so complex, and you wrote about some of your blunders early on. Is there one in particular that almost ended your career?

  The Long Haul by Finn MurphyFinn Murphy: A running theme among readers of advance copies is that, like you, The Long Haul is a book they might not normally have picked up. Then they do, and they enjoy the ride. That’s very gratifying.

  An advantage of being a long-haul driver is that I work alone. I am what John McPhee called “the admiral of my fleet of one.” That means most of my really heinous mistakes weren’t/aren’t observed by my superiors. I was summoned to the North American Van Lines mover school early on in order to improve my quality score. They called the class “Cargo Handling,” and it was a week-long intensive taught by retired award-winning drivers. I wasn’t given the option to refuse. In a warehouse in Indiana, North American had a two-story frame house mockup set up with all sorts of furniture and stairways with twists and turns. We moved furniture all day under the steely eyed veterans and received correction on how not to ding walls or break things.

  JK: I like that you didn’t dress up being a long-haul driver — that you illustrated the good times and the hard ones. When you decided to write about your profession, did you plan to be brutally honest?

  FM: I knew I was going to try to give all sides of the life. Frankly, I get a little grouchy with the hagiography of the American myth of “The Road.” There are certainly moments of transcendent joy out there, but they’re rare. A great deal of both trucking and moving is long, hard work.

  More troublesome for me was how much of my own transgressions and travesties to include. I finally decided to let it all out, warts and all. I wasn’t a very nice guy in my early years and that comes through in the book. I’m pretty sure I’m a better man now.

  JK: Your brutal honesty includes descriptions of all the labor, extreme amounts in some cases, which had me rubbing my sore back. Has your body held up because of the job or in spite of it?

  FM: So far, so good. I credit my Irish peasant heritage and not any particular physical regimen on my part. You won’t find any gyms at truck stops and you won’t find any decent food, either. I definitely hire more help these days and leave the gun safes to the younger folks. I carry a lot of “chowder” out to the truck — small, light, goofy stuff like garden tools and toys and laundry hampers. My regular crew in Denver has gone so far as to joke about it. When someone carries out an ironing board or trash can, they call it “a driver’s lap.”

  JK: You have some amazing stories to tell. Is there one you wish you could have included but couldn’t?

  FM: The manuscript I handed in to W.W. Norton was about twice as long as the book is now. It was masterfully edited by Matt Weiland. I’m surprised and grateful that so many readers find the descriptions of the work and its complexity fascinating. A lot more exposition on the work itself didn’t make it to the final manuscript. Neither my editor nor I were sure how much the work narrative would resonate with readers. Ironically, everyone seems captivated by the work narrative. In the final analysis, I think we got the balance just about right. I like the book a lot.

  JK: What’s next on your plate?

  FM: The Long Haul is basically in two parts. Part one details my early years in the 1980s and part two is my return to trucking in the 2000s up to the present. I had an entirely different life in between, and that, too, was a rollicking ride. Maybe that’s my next book.

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Print Marked Items
Murphy, Finn: THE LONG HAUL
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Murphy, Finn THE LONG HAUL Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 6, 6 ISBN: 978-0-393-60871-7
A moving trucker shares stories from a life on the open road.Murphy is not your typical trucker. As a
moving truck driver, often known as "bedbuggers" hauling "roach coaches," he describes the strict hierarchy
among truckers and how his type are shunned as outsiders. He also touts his middle-class background in
suburban Connecticut and his nearly completed education at Colby College, a prestigious liberal arts school
in Maine, to distinguish himself from the "cowboy truckers" who think of themselves as living out some
modern fantasy of the Wild West. The author even mentions his nickname "The Great White Mover," which
refers to his talent and indirectly to the industry's widening racial gap. In fact, Murphy decided to leave
college a year before graduating (much to his parents' disapproval) to work full-time in the moving business
following his experience of the camaraderie of working with a local company as a teenager. Eventually, the
author worked his way up as a driver in the "high-end executive relocation" business, where he routinely
makes cross-country hauls for his high-profile clients. Throughout his recollections, Murphy maintains an
air of armchair philosopher, imparting common-sense wisdom and morals from three decades behind the
wheel. With carefully retold anecdotes that illustrate the minutiae of life as a trucker, Murphy sheds light on
this unique subculture. More than anything, he uses the narrative to combat the negative stigma against
movers, taking jabs at past customers who slighted him. One story in particular fittingly encapsulates the
author's background and mission: he purposely placed an abusive customer's antique Chinese gravestones
upside down (he took a course in college) to embarrass the owner, who wouldn't have noticed. Ultimately,
the behind-the-scenes appeal of Murphy's stories fades a bit after several chapters, but they shed light on a
world not experienced by most. An entertaining and insightful snapshot of the hauling life.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Murphy, Finn: THE LONG HAUL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489268435/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=74b01721.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
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The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life
on the Road
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
113.17 (May 1, 2017): p44.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road. By Finn Murphy. June 2017.256p. Norton, $26.95
(9780393608717). 388.4.
Murphy's chronicle of his life as a "bed-bugger" (a driver of long-distance moving trucks) affords an
interesting peek into a solitary job and the people it helps. Choosing freedom and money over finishing his
college degree, Murphy started driving a truck at 21 and hasn't looked back. Chapters tend to detail either
the dangers of driving a truck in mountains, on ice, through winding roads (you get the picture) or the
dangers of dealing with people he encounters at one of the most stressful times of their lives: moving day.
The fact that he is responsible for their precious belongings make their relationship, which could last for
days, even tenser. Murphy is a likable, easygoing man who loves his job, and his conversational, informal
writing reflects this. Mostly, the book works well, though occasional forays into social commentary are
under-supported and a bit jarring. Overall, a breezy, insider's perspective on a job many know little about
that fits in nicely with other employment-related memoirs.--Kathy Sexton
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 44.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034989/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=787aa370. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495034989
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The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life
on the Road
Publishers Weekly.
264.36 (Sept. 4, 2017): p89.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
Finn Murphy, read by Danny Campbell. HighBridge Audio, unabridged, 7 CDs, 8 hrs., $29.99 ISBN 978-1-
6816-8651-6
Murphy recounts some of his more curious, amusing, and private moments as a lifer in the long-haul
moving business. During his career he has driven across the country innumerable times in large trucks,
loading and unloading people's lives; through these adventures, he shares the trade lingo ("bed bug hauler"
is trucker lingo for a mover like him), secrets (movers could care less about people's stuff), and challenges
(exactly how you back a truck down a winding, narrow road). Campbell's genial and scratchy voice
perfectly matches the tone of Murphy's prose and Murphy's demographic. Campbell is also able to tease out
the more emotionally tense moments, projecting the anger and frustration when Murphy confronts his boss
or relaying the tenderness the author feels towards a companion he picks up on the side of the road. It's the
perfect audiobook for a long drive. A Norton hardcover. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 89. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468150/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f1ed51ca. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505468150
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MURPHY, Finn. The Long Haul: A
Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
Jennifer Rothschild
School Library Journal.
63.11 (Nov. 2017): p98.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No
redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
MURPHY, Finn. The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road. 256p. Norton. Jun. 2017. Tr
$26.95. ISBN 9780393608717.
Working at the gas station in high school, Murphy idolized the guys at the moving company next door.
Directionless and smoking too much pot, he dropped out of college to drive for the company full-time,
specializing in long-distance moves. A few decades later, he now moves high-end corporate clients and has
stories to tell. Readers may wonder if some of the details have been embellished over the years, but
considering Murphy's engaging style and ability to laugh at himself, the occasional big fish isn't distracting.
The author's years of observing every corner of the United States and untangling the reality from the
legends give this inviting book weight. Murphy has traversed the nation again and again and spent miles
pondering the hollowing of cities, the "silence and vastness" of the Everglades' Alligator Alley, the mythos
of the cowboy trucker, and trucking's changing racial makeup. VERDICT For fans of thought-provoking
road trip tales.--Jennifer Rothschild, Arlington Public Library, Arlington, VA
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Rothschild, Jennifer. "MURPHY, Finn. The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road." School
Library Journal, Nov. 2017, p. 98. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513759705/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0c68706e.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513759705
A Slangy Tour of Life Behind the Wheel
Jennifer Senior
The New York Times. (June 1, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC1(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
THE LONG HAULA Trucker's Tales of Life on the RoadBy Finn Murphy229 pages. W.W Norton & Company. $26.95.

Truck driving may be dangerous, and truck driving may be stressful, but Finn Murphy is here to tell you that of all species of truckers driving all species of trucks, it's the long-distance drivers of moving vans who have it worst. You think easing a 53-foot rig through snowy Loveland Pass high in the Rockies requires steel-reinforced nerves? Ha! Here's what requires a cast-iron stomach and the imperturbability of a Navy SEAL: Backing that rig into the twisting driveway of some starter castle in Aspen, Colo., or Greenwich, Conn., without getting stuck or crushing the new owners' geraniums.

O.K. Perhaps that's not fair. But Murphy, the author of ''The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road,'' is not here to make friends. His point is that these long-distance movers need superb navigational skills and spatial sense in addition to the usual trucking expertise. They need to be able to drive on both the cobblestone streets of Manhattan and the back roads of rural Virginia; they need to drive gracefully in reverse; they need to know how to do U-turns in spaces the size of a teacup.

Having a keen spatial sense is also required for loading furniture, obviously. Murphy likens organizing his rig to a three-dimensional game of Tetris. The problem pieces -- often lightweight and irregularly shaped -- are called ''chowder.''

Other terms that will prove catnip for lovers of professional slang: bobtailing, deadheading, lollipops. (Driving a tractor without a trailer; driving an empty truck; those tiny green mile markers freckling the interstate.) Hitting a low bridge is ''getting a haircut.'' ''Chicken chokers'' are truckers who move animals, ''parking lot attendants'' are truckers who move cars, and ''suicide jockeys'' are truckers who move hazardous materials. Fellows like Murphy are called bedbuggers; and their trucks, roach coaches.

I will try not to think about either of those last terms the next time I relocate. Nor will I think about the fact that movers sometimes inspect the contents of your boudoir. Murphy's recommendation: ''Salt the lingerie drawer with plastic snakes or a loaded mousetrap.'' (Who says the vagina dentata is a myth?)

''The Long Haul'' can be almost shamefully enjoyable, allowing readers to have their fix of ''fabulous-life-of'' porn and class outrage, too. You wouldn't believe the downpour of indignities and diminishments Murphy has weathered over the years -- being videotaped from one room to the next, being banished to distant porta-potties when functional bathrooms were steps away. One client -- an ex-banker from an ex-bank -- was so awful that Murphy ordered his crew to install the guy's eight gravestones of Qing dynasty emperors upside down.

How Murphy came to read Chinese is another story, and it's inseparable from the strengths and weaknesses of this memoir.

As he himself says, Murphy does not meet your average trucker profile. He was raised in Cos Cob, a comfortable suburb of Connecticut and spent three years at Colby College before dropping out to drive a truck. (Hence the elementary Chinese. He studied it for a semester.) He's an amateur sociologist and a philosopher, opining on such topics as the origins of the ''anti-urban, anti-statist'' trucker culture and the transcendent pointlessness of material possessions.

Yet there's a huge question at the heart of Murphy's memoir, and it's one he never answers: How did a guy like him -- who falls asleep reading Jane Austen, who has a crush on Terry Gross -- become a long-haul mover?

Murphy gives us a partial explanation. He was a restless adolescent. ''Many young male neurotics find out early that hard labor is salve for an overactive mind,'' he writes. Moving furniture gave him a measure of self-determination he badly craved. A whole subset of truckers, he notes, are tumbleweeds, preferring to ''go through life on an anonymous surface.'' They're ghosts in snakeskin boots.

What the reader doesn't realize, at least for a long while, is that Murphy is a member of that subset. Midway through ''The Long Haul,'' he does something disconcerting and entirely unexpected: He gives up driving. For more than 20 years, if I'm calculating correctly. And he never says why.

Now, I'm not saying this omission is on par with the 18' missing minutes of conversation between Richard Nixon and H. R. Haldeman. But it does seem like a literary crime of some sort. It makes you wonder, at any rate, whether those years contain the real story about this man. He alludes to ''an avalanche of poor decisions,'' though we never learn what they were. We simply know that at 51, Murphy found himself in a city out West where he knew no one and had ''no job, no plans, no nothing,'' and wanted back in his truck.

At just the moment our engagement with Murphy should deepen, it shallows. He gets his second act. But we never learn what went wrong in Act I.

This jagged hole -- which flutters in the middle of the memoir where decades of experience should be woven through -- isn't the only thing that compromises Murphy as a narrator. There's something occasionally mannered and artificial about his dialogue, which tends toward the screwball or the Socratic, depending on the moment. (Though at its best, it's kind of great, as if Hepburn and Tracy were handed their own CBs.)

And Murphy is clearly conflicted about class, justifiably furious at the rich executives who condescend to him but equally condescending to his trucker brethren who earn far less than he does. (Which, in a good year, can be as much as $250,000.) Murphy senses, probably correctly, that their preoccupation with the status of their vehicles is a kind of anxious compensation for low wages.

'''Whatcha drivin'?' is a standard first question at truckstop coffee counters,'' he writes. '''Got a bank account?' would be my first question.''

That's pretty harsh.

What redeems this book, time and time again, are the stories Murphy tells. My goodness, how astonishing they are, and how moving, and how funny, and how just plain weird. Wait until you get to the one about the unlikely polygamist. Or the client who dies, mid-move. The next time you think of your movers as invisible, remember: They see all of your secrets. They know exactly who you are.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: PHOTO (C1); PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN SNYDER) (C4)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Senior, Jennifer. "A Slangy Tour of Life Behind the Wheel." New York Times, 1 June 2017, p. C1(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493770515/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6cb356d. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A493770515

"Murphy, Finn: THE LONG HAUL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A489268435/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018. Sexton, Kathy. "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road." Booklist, 1 May 2017, p. 44. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495034989/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018. "The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road." Publishers Weekly, 4 Sept. 2017, p. 89. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505468150/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018. Rothschild, Jennifer. "MURPHY, Finn. The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road." School Library Journal, Nov. 2017, p. 98. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513759705/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018. Senior, Jennifer. "A Slangy Tour of Life Behind the Wheel." New York Times, 1 June 2017, p. C1(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493770515/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b6cb356d. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.

• New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/trucking-as-a-state-of-mind
  Word count: 1883

  Trucking as a State of Mind
  By Joshua RothmanJuly 11, 2017

  Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road” is an occupational memoir with a previously untold human story at its center.Photograph Courtesy W. W. Norton & Company / Vimeo
  Finn Murphy arrived for his first day of work at Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage on May 22, 1976. He had just turned eighteen. In the fall, he would be starting at Colby College; his parents were churchgoing golfers from Cos Cob, Connecticut, who imagined a professional career for their son. Murphy had different ideas. He liked the cardboard-box smell of the Callahan office and admired the movers, who wore T-shirts brined with sweat. Later that day, he helped carry a four-hundred-pound lateral file down a set of winding stairs. When it slipped, he writes, in “The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road,” its “metal edge carved a crimson serpent down the inside of my forearm.” Inspecting the cut, Murphy thought, “First blood.” He was angry with his parents and with society in general; he wanted “tough work for tough men.” At Colby, he smoked a lot of pot and conducted an independent study about the economics of the long-haul-moving industry. After his junior year, he dropped out to become a mover full time. “From now on, I’ll be the captain of my ship and the master of my soul,” he recalls thinking. “To put it another way: Screw you, everybody.”

  A mood of mystery surrounds movers and truckers. Like priests, movers shepherd us through life’s transitions; like cowboys, truckers drive the roads we’ll never know. Both see America in ways the rest of us don’t. In “The Long Haul,” Murphy, who specializes in long-distance moves and drives an eighteen-wheeler, promises to bring us into his semi-mythic world. And yet Murphy himself is the book’s real mystery. In the 1970 film “Five Easy Pieces,” Jack Nicholson played Bobby Dupea, a classical pianist who gives up music to work on an oil rig. By turns, Bobby was charming and contemptuous, contemplative and enraged, wise and impulsive, truculent and loose. Murphy, another prepster gone rogue, is all of these things, too, and one spends much of the book wondering what drives him. Like Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” and Henry Marsh’s “Do No Harm,” “The Long Haul” is an occupational memoir with an untold human story at its center. In crushingly hard work, Murphy seems to be escaping from himself.

  Much of “The Long Haul” focusses on the mechanics of long-haul moving. It’s cyclical work that begins and ends with a trailer resembling “an operating room scrubbed for the next surgery.” In between, there’s a lot of packing, lifting, loading, and hauling. The furniture is always heavy; the driving is often terrifying; the combination darkly absurd. Early in the book, on a journey from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Aspen, Colorado, Murphy, in the Rockies, descends the twelve-thousand-foot Loveland Pass. The hairpins are covered in ice and slush. His fifty-three-foot trailer weighs twenty thousand pounds and contains furniture belonging to “a former investment banker from a former investment bank who apparently escaped the toppled citadel with his personal loot intact”—including eight six-hundred-pound Qing-dynasty tombstones. “I downshift my thirteen-speed transmission to fifth gear, slow to 23 mph, and set my Jake brake to all eight cylinders,” Murphy writes. As the brakes struggle to resist the truck’s momentum, the whole cab shudders and Murphy’s arms shake. A jackknife seems imminent. At such moments Murphy’s life resembles “Mad Max” and “Antiques Roadshow” combined.

  Murphy likes “low company and hard work,” but also has a crush on Terry Gross and reads “Mansfield Park” in the sleeper of his cab. Is trucking really the right life for him? Midway through “The Long Haul,” he gets fed up with life on the road and quits. Two decades later—after he’s “washed ashore in a city out West” with “no job, no plans, no nothing”—he returns to it, determined “to approach the work with serious intellectual intention toward performing even the smallest tasks properly.” Earlier this year, in a book called “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy,” the sociologist Richard Ocejo investigated why certain blue-collar jobs—butcher, barber, bartender, distiller—have become suddenly prestigious while others have not. “Why are there no ‘cool’ plumbers, electricians, or maintenance workers?” Ocejo asks. He finds that only certain kinds of work are seen as having the “philosophical underpinnings” that—once they are enacted theatrically—give manual laborers the intellectual aura of knowledge workers. At times, Murphy seems determined to unearth a philosophy of long-haul moving. His goal is to practice moving and trucking in an elevated way.

  To articulate this philosophy, Murphy devotes much of “The Long Haul” to the nuances of moving. He compares loading boxes into the truck to an athletic version of Tetris. (A well-loaded trailer contains many “tiers” of furniture, with heavy items on the bottom and smaller, odd-shaped items, called “chowder,” on top; a good mover can walk around a house and build tiers in his head.) As a “boutique” mover specializing in high-end relocations, Murphy—like Don Ainsworth, the dangerous-goods trucker in John McPhee’s “A Fleet of One”—owns and operates his own truck. He hires his own moving teams, and, in partnership with a dispatcher, sets his own schedule—a never-ending sprint of packing, driving, and unpacking. He stays awake with the help of “Dr Cola”—a combination of Coke and Dr Pepper—and saves time and money by sleeping in his cab. Regular truckers, called “freighthaulers,” are “gearheads” who boast about their powerful trucks and look down on movers as “bedbuggers.” They are also employees of big shippingcompanies who often live hand to mouth. Murphy may be knee-deep in the “muddy, filth-strewn, windblown end of the American cesspit”—packing boxes in the attic of an elderly hoarder, say, with a crew of probable felons he recruited at a local bar—but he makes around two hundred thousand dollars a year. (He looks down, too, on the clichéd freighthauler aesthetic: country music, big belt buckles, tattoos.)

  Out on “the big slab”—the highway—truckers are responsible for checking the connectors and couplings that link their cabs to their trailers, and for monitoring tire pressure (a big job when there are eighteen tires). In a similar way, they must maintain psychological equilibrium. Drivers find solace in loose, anonymous fellowship. In a coin-operated truckstop shower in Kittery, Maine, another trucker approaches Murphy (“Now don’t get all edgy there, driver”), introduces himself as “Lone Ranger” (his C.B. handle; Murphy’s is “U-Turn”), and shares his life story. On the road, drivers use the radio to warn each other about hazards—natural and man-made (“Kojak with a Kodak 201 sunset” means “a state trooper has a radar gun at mile-marker 201 on the westbound side”). One night in South Carolina, Murphy finds himself “running convoy” with nine other trucks. For a hundred and thirty miles, the convoy, carrying fresh flowers, steel, and hot tubs, drives sixty-five, undisturbed by “four-wheelers” (that is, by regular cars). “There was a plane of consciousness that we had together,” Murphy writes. “It’s the closest thing to a Zen experience I know except when I’m in my loading trance.”

  Murphy understands himself as a chronicler of American decline. He reports that quality American furniture has disappeared—it’s been replaced by ikea—and that no one owns books anymore. Hauling cross-country means “breezing through one dead or dying town after another” in a landscape that “looks like an episode from ‘The Walking Dead’ ”; everywhere, rings of chain stores and pawnshops surround decaying post-industrial downtowns. Murphy concludes that, outside of the big cities, university towns are the only good places left. Ruminating on American tourism posters—apple orchards in New England, porch swings down South, cowboys out West—he writes, “If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an under-paid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads anything helps.”

  Out of this windblown hellscape, Murphy emerges to move your stuff. One customer, or “shipper,” is a colonel in the Army; he tells Murphy that, in his opinion, movers are “a bunch of undisciplined vagabonds.” Murphy agrees, but, all the same, is a calming force. He helps “snowbirds” settle into retirement and, when a shipper dies, facilitates his Native American burial ceremony. Murphy laments the “wall of suspicion and enmity” that exists between shippers and movers, and notes that it often has a racial component. One suspicious couple videotapes Murphy and his Latino crew while they work; another prohibits them from using the bathrooms in the house, insisting that they use a porta-potty. The men bristle but get the job done. The best movers, he suggests, bear the weight of their shippers’ weaknesses.

  Murphy takes pride in helping his shippers, but you sense that his heart is elsewhere. At the right speed, on the right stretch of highway, his truck becomes a time machine; Murphy’s flux capacitors engage and he’s transported back to a vanished, vigorous, manly America. He recalls a moment—on the New Jersey Turnpike, near Exit 12—when his “universe was firing on all cylinders”:

  Yellow sodium arc lights from the factories, refineries, and warehouses discharged a murky stagelit glow onto the gantry towers at Port Elizabeth. The horizon was broken by steel girders, steel cranes, steel storage tanks, steel trains, steel bridges, and steel ships. I had “Born to Run” blasting out from the oversize speakers . . . . I’ve got a hard-muscled body, a big, comfortable, new tractor hauling a 53-foot moving trailer, grooving with my killer sound system, a 30-ounce Dr Cola in the holder. There’s the whistle of the supercharger as I shift into 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 on my way up to home plate in Connecticut.

  “Me and the monster truck are hurtling through sixteen lanes of the most intense, dangerous, and exhilarating piece of roadway ever devised by man,” Murphy concludes, “and I’m the king of it all with my truck, my tunes, and my big independence.” In triumphant solitude, he feels like a trucker should. Then again, “Born to Run” isn’t about being “the king of it all”—it’s a sad, desperate, revved-up love song about longing to escape at any cost. What stays in your mind at the end of “The Long Haul” is that feeling of flight. Philosophically, emotionally, practically, Murphy has found ways to feel at home while on the run. He’s made moving a way of life.

  Joshua Rothman is The New Yorker’s archive editor. He is also a frequent contributor to newyorker.com, where he writes about books and ideas.

• Denver Post
  https://www.denverpost.com/2017/06/07/long-haul-finn-murphy/
  Word count: 1141

  Finn Murphy’s “Long Haul” a glimpse into life as a long-haul trucker
  By JASON BLEVINS | jblevins@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
  June 7, 2017 at 5:22 pm

  Readers of Boulder author Finn Murphy’s first book, “The Long Haul,” are hitchhikers. As we climb aboard his Freightliner 18-wheeler, Murphy delivers an intimate view of a long-haul mover’s life on the road, captaining people’s overly treasured stuff across lonely highways.

  Murphy, a scholar of life after packing, loading and shuttling more than 3,000 homes from here to there, provides a rare, fascinating glimpse into the lives of big-rig pilots and the people they move, a community of more than 40 million Americans a year. Considering the historical role truckers have played in American folklore, it’s surprising there aren’t any more road-weary nomads scribbling captivating stories from their cabs. In that vein, Murphy is a literary pioneer.

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  With a gallon of Dr. Cola — his favored blend of truckstop energy drink — Murphy churns from New England to Florida, California to Washington, through the streets of New York and across the dreaded Rocky Mountains, beguiling readers with wit, wisdom and observations born from decades in transit.

  The characters he works with are colorfully painted. There’s the “genial circus dwarf” and the “very intense elf.” The shippers — the clients he moves — are equally vibrant, yet not often portrayed in a good light. “Mr. Big,” the wealthy financier, is exceptionally rude to Murphy as he moved everything into his mega mansion in Aspen so Murphy purposely mounts his artwork — eight $85,000 granite gravestones of Chinese emperors — upside down. A rocket scientist irked that Murphy can’t drive his big rig up a rain-soaked, steep dirt driveway on a Colorado mountainside, films his every move when unloading, criticizing every step. But just when he’s about to lose faith in humanity and descend into a cycle of cynicism, a heartwarming client arrives, saving the reader from the same infected fate.

  There’s the grateful Bangladesh doctor who drove a New York taxi for five years to pay for medical school and saved to move his family to a rural mansion in Arizona Mormon country with a plan to grow a Muslim compound. There’s the family down on their luck who lose an heirloom Baby Grand piano over their deck in Evergreen — with a sound “like a whale groaning in its final flurry” — collapsing in a tearful embrace with their sobbing movers. And the ailing wife of a recently departed archeologist racing their belongings back to New Mexico in time for a Native American burial ceremony.

  "The Long Haul" by Finn MurphyW. W. Norton & Company“The Long Haul” by Finn Murphy
  Murphy sent his book with two cards: one for Finn the author and one for Finn the mover with Joyce Van Lines. He relishes the unequivocal purpose of his career: move everything, without damage, as quickly as possible. He takes a broader approach to new career as an author, condensing apparently years of audio tapes recorded while driving into sizzling tales and astute scrutiny of American culture. For a first-time novelist, he excels at the show-don’t-tell technique.

  After fleeing “a callow existence” at Colby College after three years, Murphy embraced life on the road. He made mad loot, easily clearing six figures a year. “Long Haul” in many ways celebrates the working man, taking a Mike Rowe-esque position that not everyone needs to follow the collegiate path and the world could use thoughtful craftsmen and tradesmen.

  Finding hard labor as a “salve for the overactive mind,” Murphy embraces moving homes. He doesn’t dig just driving. He cherishes the moving: wrapping, carrying, loading and Tetris-like stacking his trailer in a Zen flow. Those in-the-moment zones of “tremendously satisfying task saturation” are what keeps him hauling, he writes.

  The owner-operator long-haul mover, it turns out, is a “bedbugger,” the lowest on the trucker hierarchy. Murphy could not care less where he fit on some mythical pecking order established by clock-punching cowboys in company-owned Peterbilts. He scoffs at freight haulers who boast on rigs they don’t own.

  “Whatcha drivin?” is a standard first question at truckstop coffee counters, he says.

  “‘Got a bank account?’ would be my first question,” he writes. “The myth of the trucker as a latter-day cowboy is the same narrative the urban rapper or the southern rebel adopts to accept his place at the bottom of the American Dream.”

  Murphy’s front-seat view of the storied American Main Street is not pretty. The sprawl on the fringe and decay in the center “is firmly established everywhere,” he writes. Americans deserve it for choosing $8 Walmart sneakers made overseas instead of paying $20 for U.S.-made kicks at a neighbor’s shop. He laughs at the tourist posters showing a quaint church in New England, the peach stand in Georgia and the handsome farmer on his John Deere in the midwest. Those scenes only exist for the marketing.

  “If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude,” Murphy writes, “it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience store gas station with an underpaid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.”

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  Movers have an unavoidably voyeuristic view of the people they pack and ferry. There’s no hiding anything when strangers handle everything.

  “The intimacy is immediate and merciless,” Murphy writes.

  The people try to avoid the invasion by reducing the movers into “a nebulous group of anonymous wraiths.” But it doesn’t work. The movers know their clients too well after a move. Murphy finds an emptiness in people adamantly embracing their belongings.

  “Sentimental value of stuff is a graven image and a mug’s game,” he writes, noting that the best way to move was set in the early 1900s, when people sold everything and packed a suitcase. “The only beneficiary is the self-storage guy. What my customers need to know is that it’s not the stuff but the connection with people and family and friends that matter. Practically everyone I move gets this wrong.”

• Cape Cod Times
  http://www.capecodtimes.com/entertainmentlife/20170702/book-review-finn-murphy-swaps-nantucket-life-for-open-road
  Word count: 976

  Book review: Finn Murphy swaps Nantucket life for the open road
  By Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll
  Posted Jul 2, 2017 at 2:00 AM
  Updated Jul 2, 2017 at 6:29 AM

  NANTUCKET — Finn Murphy changed his life from chairing the Nantucket board of selectmen and selling cashmere in his island store to moving wealthy customers’ belongings around the country and sometimes sleeping in a 53-foot 18-wheeler he calls Cassidy.

  Along the way, he picked up a lot of stories.

  Murphy turned his on-the-road tales into “The Long Haul,” a look at the America he’s seen from a truck and numerous truck stops, and the people he’s met on his travels. The book went on sale last month, just before Murphy made a stop at the Nantucket Book Festival on the island where he still owns a home.

  In July and August, Murphy will be on a book tour hauling copies to independent stores around the country in a truck wrapped in a giant cover of his book.

  Through Murphy’s descriptions at the festival, it was clear that “The Long Haul,” which has a subtitle of “A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road,” is in part a description of life crisscrossing the country, in part a window into a trucking world few outsiders know about or understand, and in part a look at the economic and class divide of the country.

  Murphy now lives in Colorado, where he teaches adaptive skiing to people with disabilities at Eldora Mountain Resort near Boulder. Murphy typically works in trucking from April to October because, he said, half of interstate moving is in summer. He noted that his work for a small van line pays very well — over $200,000 — and he’s packing up and moving “very, very wealthy” customers, usually for corporations, in “very pretty” areas of the country.

  But most truckers in other businesses make less than a quarter of his salary, he said. His crews in different parts of the country are “very much on the lower end of the American dream,” and it’s a “100 percent underground economy.”

  “It’s all being done by immigrant laborers now,” he said. “My nickname is The Great White Mover. They think I’m going to be the last one.”

  That’s the serious undercurrent, though, to the on-the-road tales, many of which are slices of Americana unfamiliar to most of us that are set up to be entertaining. Murphy’s festival interviewer, Nantucket filmmaker and writer John Stanton, said the book “has the tone of sitting down with Finn in a bar.” New York Times reviewer Jennifer Senior noted: “What redeems this book, time and time again, are the stories Murphy tells. My goodness, how astonishing they are, and how moving, and how funny, and how just plain weird.”

  In a phone interview last week, Murphy said he was “shocked and pleased at the reception” his book has gotten, including reviews from major newspapers and even the Paris Review. When asked if he was surprised “The Long Haul” has gotten so much attention, he said, “I thought it would hit a nerve” because it “hits two pressure points” of American curiosity — the universal experience of moving, considering 40 million people move every year, and “the cultural ethos of the long-haul truck driver.”

  Murphy described himself at the festival as a restless sort, a man who grew up in Connecticut, went through three years of college, then dropped out when he got to ride in an 18-wheeler during his summer off and just loved it. He drove a truck for a decade before relocating to Nantucket from 1990 to 2008, where he was a selectman from 2000 to 2003 and owned a few stores, including Johnston’s of Elgin cashmere shop. In 2008, he went back to trucking.

  The stories in “The Long Haul” come from “dozens and dozens and dozens” of recordings he made, first to remember happenings when he got back from a job; then while he was driving; then from surreptitiously recording co-workers and people he met.

  At one point, he sent them all to a transcription service, and the workers’ competition to be able to transcribe his tapes convinced him that turning the stories into a book might be a good idea.

  “The Long Haul” also decodes a lifestyle that the average person might observe and wonder about but never have an in. In his truck, Murphy has a bed, an ergonomic chair, and a small kitchen, and he comfortably sleeps there at truck stops or where he needs to. There’s a “hierarchy” among truckers, he explains, depending on what you haul and how much you make. There are nicknames: “Suicide jockers” are truckers who carry hazardous materials. “Chicken chokers” carry live animals. Movers like him are “bed buggers.”

  “We think we’re the best because we routinely put trucks where they’re not supposed to go,” he said, like a tiny cul de sac in a wealthy neighborhood.

  His fellow truckers are diverse: people who travel with pets; couples who travel together, often because they were hit by an economic downturn earlier in their lives; a small, but growing, number of female truckers.

  Almost every trucker, he says, listens to National Public Radio because you can travel from one station to the next and hear the same shows.

  But the CB radio? In response to an audience member’s question, he said he has a CB handle (U-Turn) but that the CB culture is gone. If you think about it, though, he said, CB radio for truckers “was probably the first social media, where strangers would connect when there was no one else around.”

• LA Times
  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-long-haul-20170609-story.html
  Word count: 872

  Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-long-haul-20170609-story.html (June 9, 2017), review of .

  'The Long Haul' is a trucker's take on America, measured in millions of miles
  By NATHAN DEUEL
  JUN 09, 2017 | 10:00 AM

  We've all done it: The exit's up ahead, but there's a tractor-trailer in the way, lumbering along, blocking the turn. 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.
  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.
  "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...."
  As a young man in Connecticut, Murphy first encounters road warriors while pumping gas for an angry station owner: "Dan," he observes, "had ended up on the wrong treadmill, and he hated that." Across the lot, meanwhile, there was a shipping agent who employed a bevy of strong and proud men who didn't seem nearly as dissatisfied.
  ________________________________________
  After a brief apprenticeship, Murphy tells his parents he's dropping out of Colby College for the open road — and in response his dad promptly hands over a bill for three years tuition and rent for three previous summers.
  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. "When you hired movers," he writes, "they moved it. Execution was the imperative. This unequivocation was very attractive to me then, as it is now."
  There are all kinds of truckers. 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.
  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. 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. 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.
  But it's his rich perspective as a mover that makes this story of trucking life so insightful, given how many times life choices are tested with each family he helps relocate. "When you move people and pack their stuff," he writes, "you see how people really live, not how they want the neighbors to think they live."
  The lessons Murphy offers are not without some sharpness. Most of us, Murphy explains, should simply throw everything away when we relocate. Moreover, in everywhere but the richest homes, there's simply nothing worth stealing; only cheap electronics and disposable furniture. While in the wealthiest homes, Murphy says, a move is especially poignant: it's that brief and chilling moment of vulnerability, when an echelon of America that can usually ignore anyone else suddenly needs strangers "carrying your sacred marriage bed into the master bedroom suite."
  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. 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.
  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.
  For what seems like forever, John McPhee and professional nonfiction writers like him have been the ones to explain things like trucking to us. For now, in a well-written story that rarely slows down, the driver can go it alone.
  Deuel is the author of "Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East."

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