July 27 - August 2, 1995

B y  G r e g o r y  M c N a m e e

AMERICAN LITERATURE, WALLACE Stegner once observed, is not so much about place as motion: You have only to think of the Pequod and Huck Finn's raft, of Francis Parkman's horse and Neal Casady's convertible, of Ken Kesey's magic bus and Tom Wolfe's chrome Spam-in-a-can rocket ship, even of John Muir's buniony feet, to see his point.

It's strange that in that catalog of contraptions and creatures that have propelled our literature, the semi truck should not figure more prominently than it does. Why do we have no great novels about Macks and Roadmasters and Peterbilts, no epic poems about balling the jack doing double nickels on the dime? Transcontinental trucks have left scarcely a dent in our writing, although the image of them rolling down the endless highways of America is a readymade metaphor if ever there was one.

That it should take a British writer to introduce the diesel-belching rig to us as an object of literary investigation is another curiosity. But that is just what novelist Graham Coster--the author, fittingly, of a book called Train, Train--does with A Thousand Miles from Nowhere (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22).

Coster has an open humor and a pleasant way, as when he explains that in his own country his interest in trucks is not widely shared: "In Britain we like trains. We invented them. Therefore we don't like trucks. Trains keep to their own neat ribbons of rail and stop at stations a mile out of town; trucks barge through half-timbered high streets and vibrate our Victorian sewage systems to pieces. A railway track says 'within limits'; the tidal wave of spray that smacks you sideways on a rainswept M4 says 'free for all.' "

A free-for-all it is. When Coster undertakes learning something of how a big rig--"artics" they're called in Britain, misspelling and all--is driven, he enters a world of power and terror. An instructor tells him, "You will be in charge of a very large killing machine"; and he learns that to guide 11 tons that stretch 50 feet behind the driver's seat, "you're an ocean-liner captain looking through your telescope for icebergs," icebergs that include Volkswagens, horse-drawn carts, and just about every other vehicle Europe can toss out on the highways.

Coster is generous with details, remarking that truckers are obsessed with the cleanliness of their vehicles not only as a mark of pride but also as a matter of economics; he is told dark cautionary tales of one driver "whose dedication to squalor had managed to knock a good thousand (pounds) off the resale price of his truck."

As a travel writer must, he instructs in local custom, especially the ubiquity of Snickers chocolate bars as the ultimate road food--"they are as nutritious and healthy as a plate of egg and bacon," he writes without irony. He is less forthcoming with other elements of the trucker's diet--as Bruce Chatwin said in The Songlines, the interior of Australia and other vast inland empires were settled by big trucks and amphetamines.

Longtime English haulers, Coster writes, dream of trucking America, piloting an "indestructible Kenilworth, the Harley-Davidson of trucks, with a wide road and a distant horizon to itself." The second half of A Thousand Miles from Nowhere takes Coster from the Eurasian plain to the interior of America, and here he can only marvel at the differences. "Continental truckers in Europe had the border queues for Russia and Hungary," he writes. "In America you had Texas." In Europe truckers keep their trailers spotless; in America Coster finds them festooned with slogans like "If You Can't Run with the Big Dogs Stay on the Porch," "Intellect Is Invisible to the Man Who Has None," and "Nothing Needs Reforming So Much as Other People's Habits," leading him to remark brightly, "If Schopenhauer had had the chance to visit Truckworld...he'd have seen that the Road Kill Café T-shirts said it better."

A Thousand Miles from Nowhere works at every level, but it leaves a few things unsaid. Coster might have given us a bit more "thick description"--or even a heavier dose of gonzo--on why truckers find it necessary to dog the tails of small cars at great rates of speed in the most inclement of weather, why they eat like Elvis, why so many people are lured to an observably hard life of hemorrhoids and bad coffee on the road.

But what Coster does give is just fine: a good antiromantic look at the world of trucking, a glimpse inside the cab. "Travel writers may still essay transnavigation of the globe by antique steam-engine or renovated sail-boat, but trade doesn't," he remarks. His devotion to the real world is welcome.

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