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    The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
    The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
    The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road
    Audiobook8 hours

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

    Written by Finn Murphy

    Narrated by Danny Campbell

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    More than thirty years ago, Finn Murphy dropped out of college to become a trucker. Since then he's covered hundreds of thousands of miles packing, loading, and hauling people's belongings all over America. Murphy whisks listeners down the I-95 Powerlane, across the Florida Everglades, in and out of the truck stops of the Midwest, and through the steep grades of the Rocky Mountains. He tells funny, poignant, and haunting stories of the people he moves: a hoarder in New Hampshire; a Virginia homeowner raging when Murphy's truck accidentally runs down a stand of trees; a widow rushing her archaeologist husband's remains and relics to a Navajo burial ceremony in New Mexico. Brimming with personality and great characters, The Long Haul explores the appeal of manual labor and shows what happens behind the scenes when we call the movers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJun 6, 2017
    ISBN9781681686523
    The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road

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    Reviews for The Long Haul

    4/5

    123 ratings19 reviews

    What did you think?

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    • 3/5
      I have an affinity for memoirs that tell unusual stories. The Long Haul is one. Guy from upper middle class quits college to move furniture. So the stories he tells are from that young age into his 60's. He leaves out an unknown number of years when he quit the business but what he writes is entertaining and shows his evolution as a human being. You learn about the quirks of what he calls the "shippers" and their general attitude of superiority over the movers. I have moved 18 times in my life, 6 of them were long haul. I had one bad experience (my first) and have to say I enjoyed 90% of the men and women who moved me; however, Finn's book did make me reassess all of my moves. Quirky story worth reading.
    • 5/5
      There are too few books that “bring you there”. This is a great one. Within minutes you’re there with this trucker.
    • 5/5
      Recollection, memories, and experiences of a college student who dropped out because he wanted to be a truck driver. He eventually became a mover but his memories encompass his beginnings at a gas station as a teenager. I enjoyed hearing about the culture and life of the truck drivers. Very informative and readable.
    • 4/5
      Interesting little stories about life as a trucker. Fast read.
    • 5/5
      Honest, revealing, funny and sad. Loved it! Loved it. Read it in 2017, just listened to the audio book. Have bought for my mover taking me to new home. I wanted him to know I appreciate him.
    • 5/5
      The author is a hard working minimalist who expresses his narrative with philisophical perspective that only a rolling stone can really grasp. There were sad stories and ones that made laugh out loud. This book was a pleasure and if a sequal came out I would love to go on another long haul move across America beside Finn in my imagination. My only regret is finishing the book. What a gem.
    • 3/5
      it was good never thing of trucker lives good book
    • 5/5
      Murphy tells a satisfying set of stories from a lifetime on the road with wrtiting that is both simple and elegant. Murphy is a specific type of trrucker--a long haul mover who has several lifetimes of observations of people, landscape, and society to share. His stories about moving are especially poignent and how we become attached to things that are really no different from everyone else. The stories cover the underside of long - haul movers, control-freak shippers (the customers), immigrants and ends with a near mystical move of a widow and her Native American artifacts into the desert of New Mexico. Murphy's personal story is compelling having dropped out of Colby College with one year to go and became estranged from his family, he pursues his desire to drive a truck as a long haul mover. The stories are all different and the reader can almost feel the motion of riding along in the truck with Murphy. Read this book--you'll enjoy it and feel you've seen another side of America.
    • 3/5
      This book gave me what I wanted, which was an assortment of stories about driving a large vehicle and details about said trucks, lingo, and the places frequented by drivers. It didn’t surprise with extra details or brilliance, but maybe I was asking too much.
      We come into books with different expectations at different times, and it occurs to me that now, when I have little going on otherwise in my life, I can invest too much energy in hoping during the process of buying a book, carrying it home, admiring it for several weeks, and building a pleasant anticipation in the pit of my stomach before actually opening and reading it. In many ways, books are the only companion which I see every day; the stacks and shelves in my apartment are a physical embodiment of what hopes I have for my tangible future. Other hopes and dreams are not corporeal the way anticipated books can be.
      The list of hopes for this book was high after reading the Longreads excerpt. A poster for a talk by the author came and went in my local library, another in a string of events which I always aim to attend. It’s a kind of unfulfilled optimism, the tracking of author readings, because they are not always as good as we hope they will be. In fact, I would say readings are uniquely poised to disappoint, because the nature of a reading and the experience of reading are so far removed, and there is much more an author’s voice and personality can take away from later enjoyment of the text than they could contribute with the best reading. And so in a certain way, there is a pleasant sensation that comes with the gentle hope and the gentle disappointment of imagining going to a reading and then not going to the reading—a risk has not been taken, a disappointment avoided.
      After reading this book, though, I’m very curious what Finn himself is like. His characterization of himself plays into a myth similar to the “truckers as nomadic cowboys” myth that he speaks several times of wanting to dispel. He dropped out of college to become a mover against the will of his parents, championing his values of hard work and independence above tradition, and worked his way up the ladder of trucking not once, but twice, due to an extended break in his career. His rugged individualism is clearly demonstrated in his pride in being a “bedbugger” rather than another kind of trucker—he is an unseen hero, doing work that is harder and more unrecognized than others in the profession.
      But this kind of personality is exactly why one would want to read a book like this. A person who is knowledgeable and proud of an unusual job is one of the best narrators, because their confidence gives them a compelling voice that we can trust.
      The clarity of self he achieves, however, is countered by a simplistic sight of other characters. Dialogue reads as if it’s been filtered through one man’s memory time and time again, possessing a uniformity of style between all speakers that makes it read as if scripted. The way he describes other characters is often one-sided, deep in his own personal perceptions of them. Perhaps the burr stuck in my side about this is the affair he has with one of his shippers, Alice. The narrative of that chapter is a traditional sex savior one, where the ghost-like housewife ignored and stifled by her husband and child comes alive when she encounters the romance of the open road (and, not coincidentally, the rugged competence of Finn himself). Perhaps it could be seen as feminist in that she is the one who decides to bear up under her husband’s decisions, and that she is the person who comes to Finn in the dead of night for some action. And maybe the lackluster ending of the whole episode is a reflection of realism more than anything. And perhaps she really did say the words he wrote in the order he wrote them. All of our society is shaped by the entertainment narratives we absorb, and I have a couple friends who really do talk like they’re movie characters, so it’s not impossible that a woman would frame her liberation experience in those terms. The letdown, though, was that the rest of the book feels authentic in a way that Finn’s exchanges with Alice do not.
      The final chapter was a fitting end, though, and his characterization of Mrs. McMahon is the best in the entire book. The hero-style narration fits perfectly with this indomitable woman, and provides her with dignity. The chapter is rewarding, honest, and a little mystical: all of the virtues of Murphy’s writing coming together.
    • 3/5
      I like to read about different career paths that people have chosen and I like to read about people that like to read. Finn Murphy covers both.


      My helpers are almost all Hispanic, and I don’t see any profound cultural chasm between an immigrant from Mexico and a middle-class white American. Your standard-issue Mexican or Brazilian is a hardworking Christian who shares a Western historical experience, speaks a Romance language, uses the same alphabet and numbering system, and has similar aspirations. Just because someone doesn’t have a grasp of English doesn’t mean they don’t have a grasp on disparagement.

      "though it would be incorrect to think that truckers constitute some harmonized bloc of redneck atavism."

      Heard about it from Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Great title. Downloaded it on Audible. I’ve got an Audible habit that needs a twelve-step program.”


      But my favorite story told is about the archeologist and and his wife.
    • 4/5
      Read This Book Before You Move

      Finn Murphy is a bedbugger, a moving van driver, and if you think that defines him, or anybody else out on the road hauling whatever you need, you’re a candidate for his book. Murphy’s a full-time contract driver, a man who moves lives from one part of the country to the other, and a part-time philosopher, an observer of the peripatetic American. He attended college, a very fine one, too, Colby (ranked up there with some of the best liberal arts schools in America), but decided life on the road held more appeal, not to mention more earning potential.

      The Long Haul is a mash up of memoir, trucking tutorial, and opinion piece. Murphy paces the thing well, gliding from memories to stories of customers and drivers (some funny, others heart touching, a few infuriating, one, well, mythical) to descriptions of places (among them truck stops and highways) to observations about American attitudes toward working people, those providing services to them and to whom they entrust their most precious possessions. On this last score, some are nice respectful folks who regard drivers as fellow human beings deserving of respect and dignity, while many aren’t. Being in the latter group, as Murphy illustrates, can have consequences (though nothing very dire).

      So, what can you expect when you open Murphy’s book? Here’s a sample on the state of America from the driver’s seat.

      On the bucolic American town: “As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can boast of vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking. You might think it’s only your town that’s been ruined by sprawl, but it’s happened everywhere.”

      On bootstrapping to success in America: “They say anybody can grow up and be president of the United States, and Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are bootstrapping examples that poor folks are supposed to emulate….Those guys are monumental exceptions used to bolster the myth that anybody can be a success. For every one of them, there are tens of millions of Americans who can see no way out of the pattern [of poverty]. This cuts across race, and it cuts across class. The myth of the trucker as a latter-day cowboy is the same narrative that the urban rapper or the southern rebel adopts to accept his place at the bottom of the American Dream.”

      Oh, and if you wonder why moving costs as much as it does, and why you always seem to get hit with surprise charges at delivery, Murphy devotes considerable illuminative attention to the economics of moving. If you’re planning a move, you might just want to add his book to your search for a mover.

      All in all, a well done education for those who have ever wondered when seeing a big rig while driving the Interstate, what’s it like?

    • 4/5
      nonfiction (work as a long-distance mover). An entertaining and informative peek into the working life of a trucker, and into some of the complexities of trucker culture.
    • 4/5
      A small window into what it is like to be a trucker. It is both funny and thoughtful. Trucker has changed over the years ad the author has documented some of these changes. This is a real eye opener and worth the read.
    • 4/5
      An interesting read of an industry not usually highlighted in memoir. It's about a trucker who moved household goods. The book is a series of vignettes about moving people around the country. Each story is engaging and an interesting read. Murphy is straightforward and personable; his memoir is one that the average American can relate to in many ways.
    • 3/5
      A enjoyable book that started slowly but picked up speed as it rolled along. I learned a lot about trucking and enjoyed Murphy's stories about movers and shippers, as well as his acerbic comments about the current state of the country.
    • 5/5
      I thought this book was just going to be about truck driving. It had a lot of that in there, but it was more of life lessons learned while truck driving. I met the author too, and he was really great!
    • 5/5
      Excellent book. Many home trues and interesting facts. Looking forward to next book
    • 4/5
      The Long Haul got off to kind of a slow start, but it finished strong and the last one-third or so of the book is really engaging work. Folks curious about a trucker's life on the road will want to read this one as part of their research because Murphy offers some interesting insights about the state of the industry and both its short-term and long-term futures.
    • 3/5
      An interesting read of an industry not usually highlighted in memoir. It's being compared to Michael Perry's Truck but it doesn't quite have the heart of Perry's work.