Door to Door: The Magnificent, Maddening, Mysterious World of Transportation by Edward Humes Read Free Book Online

Leaf–branded napkins, cups, lids, and all the other paraphernalia of the modern coffee shop are amassed as well, sourced globally and sold to franchise holders along with the coffee and tea. Once a day, five days a week, a semitruck brings a trailer-load of raw beans, tea, and other materials to the Camarillo plant, drops off the trailer at the loading dock, and takes out a different trailer that has been loaded with the previous day’s roasted coffee, bagged and boxed teas, and other finished coffee products. This truck goes back to the LA warehouse and the process repeats the next day.
    From LA, short-haul trucks take supplies out for delivery to regional Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf company stores and franchises, nearly half of which are in Southern California. Long-haul trucks depart for more distant distribution points for stores across thenation, and to the port for international franchises and customers. Many of those coffees are returning to areas close to where they were grown, coming full circle over tens of thousands of miles, with Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf outposts in such far-flung locations as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Bahrain, Germany, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, and Mongolia. Espresso-based lattes and mocha concoctions are the big sellers abroad, even more so than in the U.S., as the coffeehouse has become a social magnet worldwide, particularly for the young.
    All this is empowered by modern technology and logistics that can ship coffee beans from a distant country to California for roasting, preparation, and packaging, then send them back to the same part of the world for sale as finished product. This transportation-immersed meandering somehow makes economic sense—the magic and the curse of our door-to-door system—and in the process, provides jobs for an estimated 100 million people worldwide engaged in some aspect of the ever-growing coffee business.
    The irony isn’t lost on Isais that technology almost killed coffee and now is saving it and helping it spread. And yet coffee has in some ways come full circle, he says, returning to that purer experience that hooked all those Civil War veterans so long ago. He points to the training store attached to the roasting plant, a full-fledged coffeehouse to train baristas, open to the public if they can find the obscure location, perhaps by following the aroma that not even the emissions-control afterburners can completely purge. Here you can have that Civil War–era experience of drinking coffee brewed from newly roasted beans, with the scent of roasting still in the air.
    â€œThat’s the taste that started it all,” he says. “Without the battlefields.”

Chapter 5
    FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH
    F riday, Febuary 13, 2015, was a normal day on America’s roads, all 4,071,000 miles of them, 1 a web of asphalt, concrete, and unpaved dirt that binds our nation and neighborhoods, linking Wall Street to Main Street, port to warehouse, shopper to store—and driver to doom.
    A young entertainer walked home rather than drive drunk, only to be run down by a drunken driver. A graphic artist drove oh-so-carefully in the snowy darkness, only to collide head-on with a car barreling down the wrong side of the interstate. And there was the crazy mundanity of a mattress dropped on a freeway, a soft object, a thing that cushions—except when a car strikes it at high speed. Then it sets off a fatal chain reaction, a deadly game of pinball in which the balls weigh two tons and the bumpers are concrete medians.
    America’s roads that day, like every day, bore casualties around the clock: 2
    A death every 15 minutes.
    A trip to the emergency room every 12.6 seconds.
    An injury serious enough for a medical consult every 7.3 seconds.
    And there was a crash of some kind, somewhere—involvingdeath, injury, or property damage, or a mix of all three—every 2.8 seconds. It’s happening right now: in the time it takes to read this