Last week, Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Finn Murphy, whose memoir, The Long Haul, was published last year. The interview was so entertaining that I immediately downloaded the book, and I was not disappointed. From its title and cover, one might think that the book would be a celebration of the open road and the life of the long-haul truck driver. In fact, it only begins there, because Murphy fits few preconceived notions of what has become an archetype of American individualist myth.
Unlike many drivers, Murphy did not start his career from a lack of better options. His father was John Cullen Murphy, who drew the long-running comic strip Prince Valiant, and his brother is Cullen Murphy, best known as a long-time editor of The Atlantic. For reasons that are explained in the book, Finn Murphy cast aside his college education to embark upon his career behind the wheel and yet retained enough of his literary upbringing to observe his world with much greater acuity that your average truck-school graduate. Also, the type of driving that he has done, high-end residential moving, allowed much greater opportunity to see the hidden details of people’s lives than, for example, hauling store inventory from one Walmart distribution center to another. When you pack up families from scratch to move them thousands of miles, the vibrator in the nightstand and the half-empty vodka bottle behind the washing machine are just a tiny sample of what you see on a daily basis.
The stories he tells are entertainment enough to justify the book’s cover price, but the ultimate value of the book is the perspective it offers on material wealth and its limitations. When, as he writes with considerable experience, virtually all of what we acquire, regardless of its sentimental value, is going to end up in a landfill or gather dust in an antique store in one of hundreds of decaying American downtowns, it’s worth thinking carefully about what we want in life, or at least whether we truly need the things that catch our eye while shopping online. For those seeking the basis of a more meaningful aesthetic, The Long Haul is a good place to start.
