Finn Murphy, The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road

Finn Murphy is the author of the New York Times best-selling book The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road (W.W. Norton, 2017).  Murphy offers a fascinating and unparalleled look at the life and times of big rig drivers including their independence and entrepreneurial spirit.  It is this attitude that sets many truckers a breed apart from the rest of us, a type that is vanishing from the American landscape along with the true individualism being buried beneath the weight of a conformist society where regardless of our rhetoric about diversity and difference we are being told what to think, say and do.  If we violate the PC norms, then the forces of an Orwellian 1984 police state descend with threats, sanctions, boycotts, ostracism and other forms of intimidation and punishment.  

Murphy describes the diverse culture of the long haul trucker, one that is often raucous and crude but that operates according to its own conventions.  By itself Murphy’s perspective is worth a deep read.  But the culture of the long haul trucker is complex with conflicting levels of status that seem stunning to those of us who have considered the nature of the job even though we have no actual knowledge of its dynamics.  Murphy provides all this as he describes a life in which truckers who move heavy duty commodities such as steel consider themselves “better” than truckers like Murphy who spent much of his life packing, loading and then transporting 30,000 pound loads of commercial and residential furniture and possessions throughout the country.  Such messages about the inevitable discrimination that emerges in all areas of human activity provide useful insights about humans.  But even more important is Murphy’s message that at the heart of the long haul truck driver is the need to be independent from the control of bosses and a rebellion against being trapped in corporate cubicles like rats in a maze.