I’ll bet you have never thought about what your life would be like without the Port of Los Angeles.

Bill Sharpsteen helps you imagine the worst — empty shelves at Target and Dollar General, an empty floor at Kittle’s Furnitures, an empty lot at your Toyota dealer — in his engrossing book, The Docks.

You know what a shipping container is, don’t you? No doubt you’ve seen them on your local freeway, like a big dumpster riding on an 18-wheeler truck.

Those things came straight off a ship, most likely from Asia. Picture 1300 of them, stacked five high, bobbing over the ocean. And that’s just the small boats.

When they arrive in Los Angeles, somebody needs to guide the boat to the pier. Somebody needs to tie it up. Somebody needs to unload it and fill out the paperwork and re-supply the boat with food for its next trip.

Sharpsteen tells us all about these somebodies.

Who will be your favorite personality?

The wine importer pouring samples for his customers?

The hold men, the beefy dudes who, before the days of shipping containers, descended to the depths of the ship and unloaded the goods, everything from whiskey to rolls of newsprint to bales of rubber?

The first women to work on the docks? (Hey guys, let’s give her the truck with the leaky air hose!)

The retailer in Dallas who sweats over whether the high heels, Crock-Pots and luggage sets advertised in the Labor Day sale will arrive by Labor Day?

The Coast Guard dudes who, behind their dark glasses, scan the harbor for anything that resembles a bomb?

Like a long newspaper feature, Sharpsteen’s book dishes out equal parts local color and factoids, with a significant helping of authorial astonishment:

On climbing a rope ladder into a ship: “The rungs bang against the hull, and I wonder if I’d be able to grab the rope and stop myself from falling into the water. . . . I can hear the mate screaming to keep moving.”

On riding the tugboat that guides the ship in: “We are essentially a chihuahua in charge of a Great Dane.”

Sharpsteen’s book is an eye-opening peek under the hood of modern commerce. If you like to know how things work,  pick it up and hang out at the docks.

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I doubt any of the food on this plate rode on Sharpsteen’s big boats. But most likely, the peas or beans came from across the continent. (You can see that I’m not a die-hard eat-local gal.)

Smoky Macaroni is my second most favorite mac ‘n cheese (the first is here). I like it enough to eat it for half a week, which is how we have to do things around here these days. Mr. Read-Fast is on a special, anti-everything diet. He can’t eat my goodies and I refuse to eat his because, believe me, they are not goodies. I try not to be smug or say things like “Mmmm-mmm-mmm!” when I gaze across the table at him, forking up my mac ‘n cheese. But it is hard.

As for the Skillet Green Beans, I’ll just say that adding onions to the veggies is magic. Almost as good as adding bacon.  The original recipe calls for a dollop of sour cream on top, but I really don’t see the point of that.