King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  So we like cold weather up here. Usually when it’s real cold—40 below—the sky is clear, and when the sun finally comes up it’s actually kind of cheerful. We’ll get these sunny mornings with blue skies, white snow, and well-defined shadows on the road so you can see holes and rough spots from a long way off. We’ll get beautiful orange sunsets in the evening, and clear nights with incredible stars and northern lights. Then one day we’ll see this cloudy band in the western sky. Looks like a long gray scarf stretched across the horizon. That means the weather is going to get interesting, and not interesting in a good way.

  On the ice road, falling snow and strong winds can cause a condition we call whiteout. The weather can change in minutes. The wind is coming across the road and we won’t be able to see more than a few yards ahead. It’s like being suspended in nothingness, like being caught inside a snow globe. We can put on yellow sunglasses to create some contrast, and drive slowly so that we’re not coming up on any surprises in the road, but no matter what we do, a whiteout is a dangerous thing to drive in.

  And it’s dangerous no matter how good a driver you are. Rookie drivers come up here and say, “Well, this isn’t so bad. The sky is nice and clear. The road is a hundred and fifty feet wide. There’s no traffic to speak of. What’s the fuss?”

  They forget they’re on a frozen lake, and that the road is basically an ice rink. Doesn’t affect them when they’re rolling along in good weather. But then it starts to snow. The wind picks up, the visibility closes down, and now they’re scared. Holy smokes, I can’t see! A hole appears ahead or a curve comes up, they touch the brakes, and suddenly the truck turns into a fifty-ton curling rock. The trailer is coming up alongside them and they end up all knotted up, piling into a snowbank. A jack-knife on top of Charlie’s Hill caused the roof to pop off the uni-body cab, and the new truck was written off. Ice road trucking is not as easy as it looks.

  It’s not just the rookies who get overconfident. I heard this one old-timer boast, “I’ve been in lots of whiteouts, but I’ve never lost control and put her in the ditch. Been driving thirty years, never hit a snowbank.”

  Wouldn’t you know it, right after he made that announcement he put his truck into a snowbank, and I had to pull him out, and then he put her in the snowbank again, twice in the same day. I don’t like tempting fate. Too many times, I’ve had the trailer skidding on ice, coming up alongside me. I’ve been in the snowbank a few times. A couple of those times there was no one to help me. It took a lot of shoveling and ingenuity to get out. I have pulled a lot of guys and even a girl out of the snowbank.

  Some of these lakes are sixty miles long, and it takes three hours to drive across them. Guys tend to forget that they’re even on the lake. It’s like driving across the Great Plains—this big wide highway going as crooked as a dog’s hind leg toward the horizon. That’s when truckers attempt to make up a little bit of time by pushing their speed. Speeding is a real no-no on the ice road. Excessive speed is dangerous because you might jack-knife on a slippery section or catch up with that wave that’s running ahead of you just under the ice. If you catch up with it, you’re going to break through. Speed is especially dangerous when you approach land. The wave hits the shore and comes back at you. If you’re going too fast, you’ll meet that wave head-on. You’re thinking, Now I’m safe, I can step on it, but that’s when you’re most likely to break through. So you have to go nice and slow. It makes for a long trip. On some of these big lakes, you almost feel like getting out and jogging alongside the truck. It feels like you’re moving that slowly.

  Up here in the north, the days are short in the wintertime. She’s starting to get dusky by three in the afternoon, and you’ll find that most of your driving on the ice road actually takes place in the darkness. If loneliness bothers you, you start to feel like you’re the only person left out there. It’s just you, the soft roar of the diesel, and the headlights probing through the darkness. On a cold winter night the ice never stops talking. You’ll be amazed at the sounds you get from a frozen lake. Sometimes it rumbles like the stomach of the world’s biggest cow. Then it squeals and chirps and moans. When the ice is happy it cracks when you drive a big truck across it. If the lake is cracking the old-timers say it’s “making ice.” Every time it cracks, it’s a little stronger. Maybe the water is seeping into the cracks and freezing again. Whatever the reason, ice is stronger and thicker when you drive big trucks on it. So when I’m driving in a bad spot I’ll sometimes leave the window open and listen for the cracking. It’s not just so I can enjoy the sound of the ice, either—it’s also so I can bail out the window if necessary.

  After all these years I’m still not totally comfortable driving a heavy truck on the ice. And even though those cracking sounds are supposed to be good, it’s still eerie listening to them, especially when it’s your first run of the year and it’s been some time since you heard the ice talking back.

  With the window open you can really hear it. Loud cracks like artillery. The first time the rookies hear it, they think it’s pretty terrifying. I’ve heard it a million times, but it still makes my stomach flinch. I know all that noise is good. It means the lake is making ice. But sometimes you hear that crack go off like thunder underneath the truck, and you can’t help thinking, Oh boy, this is it.

  We learned a lot from old-time guys like John Denison. They put a lot of trucks through the ice before they learned about the dangers.

  That Long and Lonesome Ice Road

  Brief moments of terror separated by long hours of boredom. That’s ice road trucking.

  When you sit in one position for hour after hour you start to feel pieces of your body that you never knew were there. You get this one little muscle on your ass that starts to ache, then your ankle gets stiff, then you start wishing that you could just get out of the truck and stretch your legs and walk for a few minutes. But you can’t. You’re on a timetable and you’ve got to deliver a load. Everything is measured by the estimated time of delivery, and there’s no time for strolling around.

  For me, my right leg gets sore because I’m only going 15 miles an hour and the truck’s cruise controls won’t set that low. You have to be going 20 to 25 for cruise control to work. So you’re riding that gas pedal all the time, making little adjustments, driving your leg crazy.

  You don’t have much choice because cruise control can be a bigger problem than it’s worth. On these 35-mile-an-hour fast lanes, guys will start setting their cruise control at 35 and forget that they’re on ice. Well, guess what? The truck starts going sideways. The truck doesn’t know it’s on ice, and cruise control tells its wheels to keep going 35 while the truck is going into a 360-degree spin into the snowbank. The next thing you know you have fifty tons of freight coming in the window.

  I’ve been driving for a long time, but that doesn’t mean I know all the tricks. One of the things I like about this job is that you’re always learning. Every day you learn something. My old buddy Roman Welna there, he’s made himself his own cruise control device. He’s got a stick with a little notch in it that fits onto the gas pedal and makes the truck go just the right speed in that gear.

  Roman likes to lead so he doesn’t have to worry about running into the back of anybody. He just sets his stick in there and down the road he goes. If he gets into a skid the stick comes off in a second. It’s never been a problem for him yet. The winter road people, they’ve got it all figured out how long it should take you to go between this portage and that portage, from Tibbett Lake to the Meadows and Dome Lake, and from Dome Lake to Lockhart and so on. They’ve got the times sorted out precisely. I’ve followed Roman and we’ve often come in right to the minute. I like driving behind him because it’s like following a big wristwatch.

  I have spent more than a few hours on the radio telling stories to these rookie drivers from the south. I tell them about the strange and exotic animals they are going to meet in the north. We have these special types of Arctic flies, for example. Insects c
an’t survive out here at 40 below unless they grow a coat of hair, so our flies grow a nice thick coat of white fur. If the wind’s blowing really hard the flies come drifting down from the North Pole. I tell the other truckers to watch really closely and they’ll see these fur flies drifting along the ground.

  I get a good chuckle out of imagining some of these guys stopping their trucks and running around in the snow trying to catch one of these furry little flies to take home as a souvenir to show their wives.

  Then we’ve got our rare “fur fish.”

  Our local aboriginal guys know all about fur fish. When they are drilling holes in the ice to pump water up onto the ice road, every once in a while a furry-nosed little trout will stick its head up through the hole to see what’s going on.

  I can hear the truckers yelling at me, “Come on, Debogorski, you think we’re going to believe that?”

  “Use your common sense, man! You think it’s easy for a fish to survive in these waters?

  I also tell them about the new business that I’m starting up. It’s a health food product—chocolate-covered caribou turds. I’m getting the stuff tested to see what it has for vitamin C and antioxidants and all the other good vitamins. It’s perfect for putting on your porridge in the morning. I’ve got five tons of it stored in my machine shop. The government health department is getting involved and I’ve got a big venture capitalist behind the idea and pretty soon I’m putting my caribou turds on the market.

  Now they are roaring in disbelief. “That’s a lot of crap, Debogorski!”

  “Yes, sir, it darn near fills my whole shop.”

  Then of course you’ve got your scary stories. It’s spooky being out there in the middle of the night. The north is a powerful and spiritual place. Sometimes when you’re driving on the ice road late at night, all by yourself, those northern lights start dancing overhead and you’d swear they’re alive. Some people think the lights are the spirits of people who have died in the last little while, swirling around up there in the sky. I’m not saying I believe in spirits and ghosts, but if you live in the north you learn that there’s a lot more to life than science can explain.

  I tease some of the rookie drivers about some of the weird and frightening things they might encounter out on the ice road—snow snakes, sasquatches, ice worms—and they kind of laugh because they think I’m kidding. But I can tell they’re a little bit spooked, and who wouldn’t be? You take any city person and put them out there in the Arctic night all by themselves and they’ll soon be seeing funny things, too.

  You’ve got the snow blowing across the road, two hundred feet of black water under your wheels, all ready to swallow you up in a heartbeat if the ice fails, and it’s no wonder some guys get creeped out.

  I try to reassure the other truckers by telling them what they can do to protect themselves against flying saucers and aliens. The guys who travel with me have heard these stories many times, but that doesn’t make them immune. I’m telling you, put anybody out on MacKay Lake in the middle of the night and they’re gonna start getting nervous. That particular lake is long, so it’s a three-hour drive at sixty miles an hour, and it’s so dark and lonely out there, without a tree or rock or single sign of human life, that you start to feel like you’re cruising along on a foreign planet. I enjoy driving across MacKay Lake in the middle of the night because it gives me a chance to pass on my safety tips to the younger truckers.

  I tell them how the flying saucers come overhead and they go down and they take the drivers out of the trucks, take them up to the flying saucer and probe them.

  That always gets a response from some rookie. “What the hell do you mean, probe them?”

  “Well, people who have survived it say that the aliens have these computerized instruments that they stick in various unmentionable parts of your body. They stick them in there, and suck out everything you know.”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “I’m just telling you what the experts say.”

  “How come we never see an abandoned truck, then?”

  “They put an alien in behind the wheel so he can drive the truck across MacKay Lake. You ever see a truck acting kind of funny? Swerving around and skidding for no reason? That’s a good sign that there’s an alien driving it. The aliens have skinny little arms and they’re not very experienced at driving fifty-ton trucks, especially on ice. Sometimes they’ll lose control and end up in a snowbank.”

  I can tell by the silence at the other end of the radio that I’ve got everybody listening now.

  “When that happens they pull the alien out of the truck and drop the driver back in. That’s why it’s such a shock when you find yourself in a snowbank. You know that feeling? You’re just driving along, everything is fine, and suddenly you’re in a snowbank! How did I get in a snowbank? Well, they were poking and prodding you up in the flying saucer, and then they had to transport you back to the truck when this incompetent buddy of theirs drove into the snowbank.”

  Finally they can’t take it. “Oh, Debogorski, you’re so full of shit. Where do you get these stupid stories? What’s the matter with you?”

  Now I’m real serious and I say, “Well, how many times have you driven across MacKay Lake and got to the north end, portage forty-nine, and think, Holy mackerel, I don’t even remember the trip! Was I asleep the whole time? It’s like a blank!

  It’s quiet on the radio. I say, “Well, the reason you don’t remember the trip is because you’ve been up in a flying saucer getting prodded while an alien’s been driving the truck.”

  I usually don’t get too much comeback because now they’re thinking, Damn, he’s right. I tell that story every year, and somebody always believes it.

  I am like the older boy in the bunkhouse, trying to scare the younger ones with ghost stories. But sometimes the shoe is on the other foot. A strange thing happened one night when I was crossing Gordon Lake. It was the middle of the night, midnight or so, and I was heading home. After many days away I was looking forward to a bath, a hot meal, a visit with my wife, and a few hours of sleep before I headed north with another load. But then at the north end of Gordon, this voice comes over the radio. “I am watching you.”

  What?

  In those days we had CB radios. All the drivers were running with CBs, so I thought the voice on the radio was this other truck driver named Dwayne I was traveling with in a two-truck convoy. But it didn’t sound like him.

  The voice comes on again. “I am watching you.”

  I said, “Dwayne, is that you?”

  Dwayne came back, and said he didn’t know what I was talking about. It wasn’t his voice anyway. His transmission was all broken up with static. This transmission was nice and clear, from somebody real close by.

  “I am watching you.”

  There was no one in sight, just stars and darkness. It was as spooky as hell. Somebody was watching me. That was it.

  Are You Talking to Me?

  I wish I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say something insulting about truck drivers. The stereotype is that your average trucker is some dumb guy with a grade-nine education who can’t do anything else. Well, there’s prejudice of all kinds out there, and that’s just another version. People who talk like that are revealing more about their own ignorance than about the supposed ignorance of your average long-haul truck driver.

  The fact is, driving a truck is a difficult, complicated, and demanding job. You’re in charge of equipment that might be worth two hundred thousand dollars, hauling a load that might be worth well over a million dollars. You have to keep a whole lot of paperwork organized and up to date, and you have to know how to deal with the police, Customs, and truck inspectors. You’re responsible for people’s lives. You make one mistake, you could kill a lot of people. And in my opinion, most truckers are excellent and safety-conscious drivers. Whenever someone does something stupid on the highway, it’s invariably a four-wheeler. If there’s an accident involving a truck, it’s almost
always the four-wheeler’s fault. Don’t take my word for it. Check out the reports. Then ask yourself, When is the last time you saw a trucker do something as stupid as the things that car drivers do every day?

  The bottom line is that it takes a lot of skill to drive a truck properly. You ever watch a guy back a semi-trailer through a crowded parking lot and tuck it into a loading dock just a few inches wider than his wheels? I’d like to see the average person try it sometime. It would change their mind about who they’re considering a low-skilled worker.

  Adele Boucher, co-owner of Boucher Trucking, Peace River

  There was that movie Smokey and the Bandit with Burt Reynolds. That gave trucking this cool look. It moved from cowboys to urban cowboys. Truckers became sexy after Burt Reynolds.

  Bush and highway drivers are two different breeds. The highway drivers come in from the outside and they think they’re going to show us bush apes a lot of things. But when one of those highway fellas has something happen to his truck, even though he knows how to repair it, he’s not used to doing that, so he just sits and waits for someone to come along and fix it. Their first trip up here, these highway drivers don’t even like to cross the Mackenzie River. The ice scares the hell out of them, and it’s like prodding a cow onto an airplane to get them to go out on the ice.

  You’d be surprised in this country how many trucking companies have farmers as employees. Everybody who works for us in the winter season is a farmer in the summer season. You get this upbringing on the farm, learning a little bit about machinery and the value of time. You do what has to be done when the sun shines. And you just apply that to the job. They are the most loyal people in most trucking companies. They know the value of a big piece of equipment.

  Lots of people go through university, get a job at a bank or a big insurance company, and decide they want to drive a truck. It’s good money, and you’ve got the freedom of the open road. You’re not stuck in an office. You’re seeing the world, and you can be your own boss most of the time. When I listen to the radio at night I sometimes feel like I’m attending school. You’re always hearing things you never knew before. Mind you, it’s not always the kind of stuff you’d want your kids listening to!