Since the completion of the interstate highway system, we have paid for transportation—and paid a lot: 40,200 deaths last year, up 6 percent from the 37,757 automotive fatalities of the year before. By a huge margin, car wrecks are the leading accidental cause of death in America. Year after year, we hurtle down the road in multi-ton machines and smear our blood across the asphalt.
It's a brutal price to pay for ... well, what, exactly? The ability to commute to work? The transportation network that allows suburban supermarkets to sell iceberg lettuce in the middle of February?
The answer is yes, of course. All that—but something more, as well. Along the way, almost incidentally, the highway also had the effect of setting us free. After the closing of the frontier, only automobiles released us from the trap of the cities. Only cars broke through the narrow bounds of geographical region. Only our Fords and our Chevys let us be by ourselves on the way to somewhere else.
However much Americans say they are willing to pay for freedom, I'm not sure that the country would have agreed to suffer tens of thousands of deaths every year just to maintain so abstract and nebulous a freedom. Without the clear economic advantage of gas-powered transportation, we would not have built the highway system, the automotive industries, the roadside diners, and all the rest. Still, in the interstices of that economic system, a chance for individuality found places to flourish. We were free, because we could always drive away.
All that will change over the next 20 or 30 years, as driverless, computerized transportation settles into a mature technology. From the initial stages of allowing driverless vehicles on our roads, we will eventually begin passing laws that only driverless vehicles should be allowed on the road. The fatality rate will fall, and our cars will take us from place to place in joyless safety—carefully recording everywhere we’ve gone for the databases of the businesses that want to sell us stuff and the governments that may want to investigate us. The system of driverless cars will be safer and duller, a more controlled, constrained, and constricted world.
Along the way, it will also be a world that will have lost a few million of the blue-collar, immigrant, and entry-level jobs we currently have. Once the technology reaches a sufficient level, the driverless taxi, the driverless delivery van, and the driverless semi-trailer truck will overtake the old chauffeured system of transportation, putting enormous pressure on state governments to outlaw human-driven professional vehicles.
And then, all too soon, the culture of driving will fade from the experience of all but a few anachronistic hobbyists. As alien as the whaling in Moby-Dick now seems—as alien as the sailing ships in Two Years Before the Mast—so will seem the central narrative feature of On the Road. And so will seem the life of a trucker that Finn Murphy describes in his recent memoir, The Long Haul.
Murphy came by his career in trucking through the backdoor of adolescent rebellion. The son of upper-middle-class parents in Connecticut, he decided as a junior at Colby College that he just didn't want the world at which his parents had aimed him. He wanted, he thought, "tough work for tough men," as an escape from expectation.
So off he drove, working as a mover—a bedbugger, in the jargon Murphy insists that truckers use, as distinct from parking-lot attendants (who haul cars), chicken chokers (who drive animal carriers), suicide jockeys (who carry hazardous material), and reefers (with trucks full of refrigerated food). A bedbugger, in Murphy’s description, experiences the road that all real haulers know: "There's the whistle of the supercharger as I shift into the thirteenth gear," he writes, "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."
But as he moves people's possessions across the country, Murphy also gets to see something more: the households, the interiors, of Americans' lives. A "former investment banker from a former investment bank who apparently escaped the toppled citadel with his personal loot intact," for example. A rocket scientist who complains that Murphy is unwilling to drive his semi up an impossibly steep and rain-soaked driveway in Colorado. A doctor from Bangladesh who moved his family to Arizona to build a Muslim refuge. To a mover, all clients appear vulnerable in a strange way, as they are forced to watch a stranger "carrying your sacred marriage bed into the master bedroom suite."
The Long Haul is a well-written but odd book. For the rebel who turned his back on the upper-middle class to embrace a blue-collar aesthetic, Murphy is oddly concerned to let us know that he is not, in fact, blue collar. He may say he likes "low company and hard work," but he also wants to be sure we know that he reads Jane Austen when he pulls over at a truck stop, settling to sleep in the cab of his truck. A brief affair ends with the admission that he has a crush on Terry Gross, regularly listening to her on NPR, just like those in Connecticut he drove away from.
There's a hole, too, in The Long Haul. About halfway through the book, he stops driving, tired of life on the road. Of course, in the next chapter, he's back at it, making $250,000 in a good year as he drives back and forth with people's possessions. The odd thing is that, between the chapters, 20 years have passed. Murphy writes that he found himself "washed ashore," with "no job, no plans, no nothing." And so he decided to return to long-hauling, remembering his old experience as a time when his life had precision, direction, and happiness. Murphy never explains what he was during his 20-year hiatus. Instead, The Long Haul, leaps back to its author's efforts to explain the job of a mover as a kind of a freelance philosopher, peering deeply into both the public façade of the nation and the hidden rooms of it citizens.
Murphy is dour about America. He sees the "muddy, filth-strewn, windblown end of the American cesspit," filling and loading boxes with a half-assed crew he recruited at a nearby employment center or local bar. Driving on the nation’s highways is "breezing through one dead or dying town after another," where the landscape "looks like an episode from The Walking Dead." Or, as he puts it, "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."
He should be more dour about the job, for the long-hauler will be one of the first to be swept away by the driverless revolution. The structured freedom Finn Murphy found on the road—the in-the-zone precision of driving he describes—will disappear all too soon. And then how will the disgruntled, rebellious college student escape? When the frontier closed, we found the road. What remains for us to find, when the road closes?