HONEST LABOR: Writing and Moving Furniture

Honest Labor is a memoir about Jack Clark's days as a struggling writer, truck driver, and furniture mover. The book--73, 000 words spread over 90 chapters--talks about the rewards of learning difficult trades and doing them well, the problem-solving nature of the jobs, and the allure of the highways, byways, and abundant roadside attractions. There are 3, 500, 000 truck drivers in the U. S. but less than a thousand long-haul furniture movers.
Unlike your average driver, who mostly run regular routes, going back and forth over the same old roads, the long-haul furniture mover goes everywhere and anywhere. But the biggest difference between the two drivers is what they carry. If a freight truck overturns and scatters its contents along the highway, burns to the ground, or goes through a guardrail and into the lake below, somebody makes a phone call and they send another truck loaded with the exact same thing.
Go into that lake with a fully loaded moving van and there go the wedding photographs, grandmother's ashes, your paintings, diaries, all the books that you love, and all the rest of your physical possessions. There's no truck coming that can replace all that.  And you'll probably remember that truck driver for the rest of your life. But it won't be fondly.