King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  In 1981 I also started competing in the spring carnival. There were all kinds of competitions—log sawing, muskrat skinning, arm wrestling, you name it. In one competition, the tea boiling, you had to start from scratch with nothing but a match and a kettle and a bunch of wood. Right off the start you had to make some kindling, start a fire, and get that teapot boiling. It sounds easy but let me tell you, when it’s 30 below zero, getting a campfire started and boiling tea is a bit of a challenge.

  They would also get you to carry heavy weights. They’d fill these backpacks with rocks and you were supposed to run around this obstacle course. All those skills I picked up as a boy came in handy, and it felt pretty good to be better than everybody else. Quite a few times I was crowned King Caribou—the champion of the Yellowknife Spring Carnival— and they sent me down to Edmonton to compete in the King of the Klondike.

  That involved the same kind of stuff—lumberjack competitions, canoe racing, and so on, but with real serious competitors. It drew big crowds and you could win four thousand dollars. Well, I was up against guys who literally practiced every day all year. Strong, tough guys with big shoulders and six-pack waists. They looked like they were on steroids or something. And here’s big clumsy Alex the Polack from Yellowknife. In one race, you had to throw a canoe on your head, run down a hill, and paddle it half a mile across a lake and back. I was competing against fifteen other canoeists who’d been practicing for months. I wasn’t thinking that I was going to beat these guys—I was just thinking, I don’t want to come in last.

  When I came in third I felt like I’d won.

  I liked the prize money, and I liked the feeling of showing these guys that I wasn’t the class clown. But most of all, I liked entertaining the crowd. When you were a competitor they made a big fuss over you. They put you in a fancy hotel room and interviewed you. They put a camera on you and asked you questions. A lot of people got nervous, but I just figured, why not go for it? I would say a lot of things that were pretty outrageous.

  The TV people would laugh, and afterward they would slap me on the back and say, “That was great. How do you spell that name again?”

  I guess that’s when I first started to think of myself as a character.

  Andrew Debogorski

  When I was a little boy my dad always told us not to complain about the little nicks and bruises you get while you work.

  One time we were doing a cleanup job at this mine. The spill was contained by a line of straw bales and Dad was scooping them up with a front-end loader. He gave me a razor knife and told me to cut the bales so he could scoop them up. But about every third or fourth straw bale had a wasp’s nest in it. As soon as I would cut open the bale, the wasps would come boiling out and attack me. I was getting stung pretty regularly, but Dad didn’t seem to care. He thought it was hilarious.

  He was way harder on himself than he was on us. Another time we were working in the shop, stripping copper with a disk grinder. He was getting me to help him, but he didn’t like the way I was doing it. “Put on some thick gloves,” he said. “You’re going to cut yourself.”

  He gave me his gloves and then he kept working with his bare hands. A few minutes later I heard him say, “Ouch.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I just cut myself.”

  I walked over to look at his cut and screamed in alarm. There was blood all over the place and his hand was cut right down to the bone. I grabbed his arm. “You have to go to the hospital!”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I’ll go later.”

  He kept working on the job. When he was finished, he j went to the Emergency Ward and got his hand stitched up.

  My Short Career as a Househusband

  So this one time Louise went off to Edmonton on an errand and left the kids with my sister. I carried on with my normal life, working all day and fussing around with this and that, until one day my sister comes over with a car full of kids. I guess she’s a little peeved that she’s stuck with the babysitting just because she’s a woman and I’m free as a bird just because I’m a man.

  So I tell her, “Fine, leave the kids with me. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of the little varmints.”

  I’m thinking, How hard can it be? Compared to real work, babysitting is a breeze. So I plunge into the household chores. I’m cooking, I’m cleaning. I’m sweeping the floors. In my opinion the house looks pretty darn good, maybe even better than it usually does. It’s a school night, so I get them all tucked into bed on time, and in the morning I get them out of bed and make sure they’re dressed properly, feed them their breakfast, make their lunches, find their boots, find their mitts, get their coats on, get them off to the bus on time, and then I’m left with the three-year-old and the five-year-old, who apparently are both too young to be in school.

  So I tell them to go off and amuse themselves and stop bugging me, and I start cleaning the breakfast dishes. Man, these kids make an awful mess, but that’s okay. I’m doing a heck of a good job washing the dishes and I’m just getting ready to dry them when the five-year-old comes into the kitchen and says, “Daddy, Daddy, there’s smoke!!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Daddy, there’s smoke!”

  He points at the doorway into the bedroom, and sure enough, there’s smoke pouring out of the door.

  What the hell have they done now?

  I rush into the bedroom and the bed is on fire. There’s a disposable lighter lying on the floor and the bottom bunk is all in flames. So I run into the kitchen. Where’s the fire extinguisher? I can’t find the damn fire extinguisher. I grab a pot and start filling it with water. Do you know how slowly that sink pours water when your house is on fire?

  Fill the pot, run into the bedroom, throw it on the fire. Doesn’t do a damn bit of good. I make the kids stand by the front door while I keep throwing pots of water on the fire. But after a minute or two I can see that it’s not going to be enough to put the fire out. If I was by myself, I’d open the window and start throwing the burning stuff outside, but I’m nervous with the kids there, so I just say to hell with it, and off we go outside.

  I run down to the shop and call the fire department and they get there pretty quick, but by then the trailer is burning from end to end and it’s too late to save it. Then I call Louise and tell her we’ve lost the house. “It’s gone,” I tell her. “There was no time to save a thing.”

  “How did it start?”

  I tell her that the kids were playing with a lighter.

  She thinks I’m joking. This is the part that kind of annoys me. I mean, how many times in our marriage have I joked with her about something so serious? I guess she can’t believe that I can’t keep an eye on the kids for more than twenty-four hours without one of them burning the house down.

  My First Truck

  I always wanted to own a big truck.

  After my successes in the real estate business, I was ready to diversify. So I went down to an auction in Hay River, on the south side of Great Slave Lake, where the department of highways was getting rid of a lot of surplus equipment. I sat in on the auction and bought some good stuff—a dump truck, a track loader, a Bobcat, and a few other items. When the auction was over they wouldn’t take my check, because they didn’t know me, and told me I would have to go back to Yellowknife and get my check certified. That was a big hassle because by road the bank was over three hundred miles away. So I was kind of pissed off, feeling like I had come all this way, and now nobody trusted me to even pay for the stuff. You have to spend quite a bit of time in the north before they stop thinking of you as an outsider.

  I went down to the coffee shop and there were some oldtimers in the trucking business sitting there. I sat down, we started talking, and I told them my story. Merv Townsend said, “Where’s your check?”

  I took it out of my pocket and gave it to him.

  Merv Townsend was a big player in the fuel-hauling business and everybody re
spected him. He scribbled his name on the back and gave it back to me. “Show them that.”

  That was quite a vote of confidence, because Merv Townsend didn’t know me from a hole in the ground, but I guess he sized me up and figured I was worth trusting. I took the check back to the auctioneer and gave it to him. He turned it over and looked at the back and said, “Thank you very much, Mr. Debogorski, you can take your equipment now.”

  So off I went, with that old dump truck. It ran like a clock, even though it didn’t have power steering. I hauled asphalt with it, and gravel and mine muck, and boy, I started building some upper-body strength handling that thing.

  Eventually that old truck started burning oil really bad, so I loaded it up with an engine additive that seals up the engine pretty good but smells so bad that I would take one street when I was hauling a load out and take another street coming back just so that people wouldn’t get mad at me. One time I was working through the supper hour, driving through this neighborhood, and this one fellow came out and said, “You know, that truck of yours smells so bad that I just tried to eat a hamburger and it tasted like shit.”

  Not too much later I had my first experience driving that heavily loaded truck onto a frozen lake. There were some guys who needed gravel out on Prelude Lake. I guess they wanted to build some driveways and I told them I would haul it out across the lake for them. I had never crossed unknown ice in a big truck and I was pretty nervous about it. If that truck broke through, I knew it was very unlikely that I’d be able to jump free in time.

  I talked to some local boys about it. They said, “You should be fine.” It’s sort of a macho thing. Guys always say, “You’ll be fine.” People die every winter going through the ice, but everybody keeps slapping each other on the back and saying, “You’ll be fine.”

  It was easy for them to talk because they’d only been driving across the lake in light pickup trucks. I didn’t have much choice at this point because I’d agreed to do the job. I needed the money. So I loaded up the truck and eased it down onto the lake. I could hear the ice cracking under the wheels as I started out across that lake, trying not to think about all that water right underneath me. It was my first experience with ice road trucking. And I don’t mind telling you, it scared the pants off me.

  6

  INTO THE KINGDOM OF ICE

  “It’s man and iron against the elements out here: either fix ’er or hold the light.”

  Driving a big truck across a frozen lake might seem like a dumb idea, but nobody does it because they enjoy risking their lives. It’s pretty much a necessity. If there was no such thing as ice roads, there would be no such thing as economic development in the far north. And if there was no economic development in the north, we would never get access to all the oil and natural gas and minerals that are buried up here.

  Let me give you a quick geography lesson. The Northwest Territories are about twice as big as Texas, but have only about 42,000 residents and about 550 miles of paved road. The terrain is all but impassable for much of the year, a vast wilderness of lakes, forest, and spongy tundra, devoid of trees.

  John Denison, December 1946

  After the war was over I bought this old four-wheel-drive army truck in Yellowknife. That was when there was no highway yet. We met these people who were in the freight forwarding business and they used to hire CATs to haul stuff across Great Slave Lake.

  We decided to try and do it by truck. It was faster than crawling along on an old CAT. We didn’t have any windows in that old army truck. We were ten days on Great Slave Lake—went straight across to Outpost Island as quick as we could. All we had to cook with was a frying pan and some frozen eggs, and we used a blowtorch to cook the eggs.

  In 1959 we put in a winter road to Fort Simpson, and in the winter of 1963 we built an ice road into Discovery Mine, sixty miles north of Yellowknife. It was mostly just me and two Natives that did it. We hauled up some houses all the way through the bush from Rayrock Mine to Discovery Mine. The houses were twenty-four feet wide and forty feet long. In the years after I built more ice roads, including a three-hundred-mile-long ice road up into Great Bear Lake.

  I sometimes wonder now how the hell I did it. If I knew then what I know now there was no way I would do it. Everybody else told me I couldn’t do it, but if you take no for an answer, how are you going to know you can or can’t do it?

  It’s incredibly expensive to do any kind of construction up here, and even if governments and resource companies can afford to build roads, you could only go for a few miles in any direction without running into water. That’s because the ground is always frozen and the water has nowhere to go. If you get up in an airplane you can see that the terrain is pretty much splattered with water—lakes and rivers as far as you can see—so it’s no wonder that the aboriginal people who lived here for thousands of years never bothered inventing the wheel. About the only thing you could do with a wheel in these parts is sit on it so you won’t get your ass wet.

  The Indians and Eskimos used canoes and kayaks for getting around in the summer, and they used snowshoes and dog teams for getting around in the winter. By the way, before we go any further, I have to say a word or two here about my redneck terminology. I’m not trying to piss anybody off, but I’ve done a lot of reading, a lot of research, and when I use a word like Eskimo, it’s not because I don’t know any better. A few years ago, somebody in Canada decided that the word Eskimo was insulting. I don’t know exactly where they got that idea. Maybe someone at the CBC got upset because the word Eskimo is supposed to mean “eaters of raw meat.” Well, that’s exactly what they do eat, and it’s a darn good diet. I wonder if people in Toronto would be insulted if we called them “eaters of raw sushi.”

  The point is, Eskimo is a perfectly good word that describes all the aboriginal people who live in the high Arctic. They are “Eskimoan” peoples. Words like “Inuit” refer to their language groups. So if you are an Inuit you are an Eskimo. But if you are an Eskimo you are not necessarily an Inuit. You might be an Inupiaq if you live in Alaska, a Yupik if you live in Siberia, or an Aleut if you live in the Aleutian Islands. But they’re all Eskimos, and they are proud to call themselves that. If any of you politically correct types think that the word Eskimo is an insult, I know a few tough Eskimo guys from Alaska who would like to have a word or two with you.

  Anyway, there’s no shortage of know-it-alls in any period of history, and when the Europeans first started showing up in North America, they brought with them the same kind of smug assumptions about their own sophistication and superiority. The smart explorers learned from the Natives and adapted their clothing, diet, and methods of transportation. The stubborn ones stuck to their own ways of doing things, and most of the time they paid for their ignorance with their lives.

  That’s what happened to the Sir John Franklin expedition, which took off from England in the spring of 1845 with 134 men. Franklin was looking for the Northwest Passage—a sea route through the treacherous icy waters of northern Canada. The Northwest Passage would shorten the distance between Britain and Asia, and any man who found it would be rich and famous for all time. Franklin’s two ships were state-of-the-art for the time—they had heated floors, reinforced hulls, and were stocked with all the technology of modern British civilization. The officers had charts, telescopes, watches, compasses, uniforms, cutlasses, and all kinds of other crap that wouldn’t do them a bit of good once they were a few weeks’ sailing distance away from home. They imagined their ships to be floating versions of English society. The British officers didn’t bother consulting with the Eskimo hunters they met when they arrived in the Arctic waters. They couldn’t imagine that these dirty, illiterate people had anything to teach them about survival in the north. This was a big mistake.

  The Englishmen spent several years blundering around in the ice-choked waters of the northern Arctic, and then the ships were crushed by ice and the sailors wandered off to find other white men who might help them. Of cours
e, there were no white men for thousands of miles. At different times they ran into aboriginal hunting parties who could’ve saved them. The Eskimos have of course lived in the Arctic for thousands of years. They were perfectly comfortable there and still are. They know how to stay warm and hunt the abundant wildlife and fish that live right under the ice.

  The Englishmen walked for hundreds of miles, slowly starving to death, not realizing that food was right underfoot. Different groups of hunters offered the Englishmen seal meat and shelter, but the Englishmen wanted nothing to do with the “huskies,” as they called them and ended up dying in horrible conditions, finally eating one another in a desperate effort to stay alive—I guess it turned out that they weren’t that fussy in their eating habits after all. I guess you could also say they didn’t die of starvation, they died of stupidity.

  So the key to surviving up here in the north has always been adaptability. The Indians and Eskimos knew that the easiest way to travel in this country is over water. So they adapted to that, and invented technologies that would allow them to travel over the water in the summertime by canoe and kayak, and in the wintertime by snowshoe and dog team. They never used horses or livestock in the north because there’s nothing to feed them. They used dogs, and fed them with the cast-off meat scraps of the animals they hunted. About a hundred years ago, when gold prospectors flooded into Alaska and the Yukon, they learned from the Natives and used a lot of their same methods for staying alive. During World War II, the surveyors of the Alaska Highway didn’t have a clue where they were going. They used Indian guides to take them along traditional trails through the wilderness. These old Indian trails followed the land contours and valleys and showed the surveyors the easiest routes through some very rugged and difficult country, and the route became one of the most famous highway-building projects in history.

  When prospectors and mining companies began opening up the north they were faced with a major problem—how could they move their heavy supplies in and out of country that had no roads? People down south might say, What’s the matter with airplanes or helicopters?