King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  “Well, I was driving down the highway and this mouse ran up my leg and I lost control of the vehicle.”

  The cop bursts out laughing. He can’t stop laughing. Everybody in the police station is looking at him. You can see that everyone is wondering what’s so funny. My sister is trying to get the situation under control by maintaining a dead serious face and telling him more details of the story—like how she felt something on her leg and looked down and the mouse was sitting on her knee—but every time she adds another detail to the story, he laughs even harder. Finally he gets control of himself. “Then what happened?”

  “Well, I lost control, and the car flipped over and rolled into the ditch and ended up half-submerged in deep water.”

  Now he’s laughing so hard he’s got tears rolling down his face. “Sorry about that,” he finally says after he gets control of himself. “Sign it right at the bottom with the date and the time.”

  The cop went down and told everyone else in the police detachment, and within an hour anybody who had anything to do with the Northwest Territories government heard about it. For the next two weeks, everywhere she went, people burst out laughing. “A mouse ran up your leg and you lost control of the vehicle?”

  “Yes, that’s the truth.”

  She didn’t tell them the mouse was white. And she didn’t tell them that when she climbed out of the wreck she had the little bugger in her hand. That would have really got them howling.

  The Diamond Mine

  So these stories help to pass the miles.

  And eventually, after hauling a massive load of fuel, power-generating equipment, or prefabricated buildings, we’ll get to the end of the road and the diamond mine will come into sight.

  At the mine site, this is what you see—gigantic earth movers about the size of an apartment building going eight hundred feet down into the mine to scoop up tons of this broken rock. It’s pretty shocking if you’ve never seen it before, and these mines are located in some of the most beautiful wilderness areas you’ve ever seen. Environmentalists are always complaining about mining development in the north, and if you stood there looking at an open-pit mine you might understandably feel a bit pissed off.

  But it’s all temporary. I’ve lived up here now for most of my life, and I’ve seen a lot of these mining operations come and go. The fact is, today’s mining camp is about the cleanest form of development you are ever going to find anywhere. It’s much cleaner than your average farm or golf course. A mine is temporary. It’s only going to be here for twenty or thirty years, which adds up to about two or three seconds in the history of this land. Even the ice road is temporary. Spring comes along and you would never even know that big trucks were rolling along these lakes. They are very strict about ensuring that we don’t leave any lasting marks on the landscape. We are not allowed to spill a single drop of oil from our trucks or there is hell to pay. Mining is a much cleaner activity than almost anything they do in the urbanized south.

  When a drilling camp is finished, the company has to clean up everything and put that site back into pristine condition. I worked on these sites, and I can tell you that when they are gone you wouldn’t even know there was ever any activity there. If they wanted to really protect the environment they would get rid of some towns and cities and make all these armchair environmentalists go out and work in mining camps in the bush. That would be good for a few chuckles.

  So you’ve got this enormous hole in the ground and these giant trucks getting loaded with granite and kimberlite, which they haul to the top where it is taken to a processing plant and run through crushing machines to separate the diamonds. The processing machines are all automated, and security is real tight. It’s like a James Bond movie, cameras and guards and heavy surveillance. You work in there, you’re not even allowed to pick something up off the floor. In fact, the average person can’t go anywhere near the diamond processing plant. It’s all locked down and seriously out of bounds.

  When you’re making truck runs in and out of these mines the security can be pretty heavy-handed. I guess you might think it’s comical if you have a sense of humor. I’m a fairly good-natured guy and I’ll put up with a lot of things, but at times I do find that the security gets to be a little ridiculous. So we’ll do things to tease the security guards and get each other in trouble. Like we’ll tell the security guard that Jay Westgard is actually only fifteen and doesn’t have a driver’s license. And he looks so young and they’ll make him show his driver’s license sometimes, and that’s always good for a laugh.

  You will get these security guards crawling through our trucks, looking to see if we’re stealing diamonds, and that can be irritating, too. We live in the trucks for two months of the year, and they get in there with snow on their feet and get slush all over everything. They’ll get in the bunk and they’ll start lifting up pillows, digging through your personal stuff. We sign a release form that allows them to search your truck. And they do it.

  So you have to get used to that. I don’t have anything to hide, but it’s the principle. I remember this one security lady who would climb into my truck and go through everything. Makes you feel like you’re ten years old again, getting in trouble with the teacher. One day I was walking past the front of my truck and I saw her searching through my private stuff, opening my thermos even. She stuck her nose in my thermos, smelled it, and gave it a shake to see if I had hidden any diamonds in it.

  So I’m outside thinking, Hey, it’s cold and everybody’s got a runny nose and this is kind of bad, you know? Some stranger’s sticking her runny nose in my thermos. I don’t know if she’s checking for booze or whatever, but I saw her do that to a few guys.

  This one day, we were in the dispatch shack, and I was talking to the other guys. This security officer was back there doing all her paperwork and listening in, so I said, “My wife won’t allow me to pee outside when it’s twenty below. She doesn’t want me to damage the family jewels. So I’ve got to pee in my thermos.”

  A couple years later I ran into this lady.

  She said, “Do you remember me?”

  “You were security on the mine up there, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, I was. And I just want to tell you that I heard you that day.”

  “Which day was that?”

  “The day that you said you peed in your thermos.”

  I laughed and told her I was just having some fun with her.

  She said, “I never stuck my nose in a thermos again.”

  It’s Never Safe to Relax

  Mining camps are like small towns. They’ve got nice lunchrooms, showers, movies, and places to sleep. But you know me, always chasing a buck. When I married my wife I swore I would work myself to death for her and the kids. But Polacks are so tough that it takes forty or fifty years’ worth of hard labor to kill one of us.

  So I don’t dawdle at the mining camp. I just refill my thermos and my fuel tanks and head south—I’ve got cats to kill and contracts to fill. But nothing is easy in this business, and sometimes the weather can turn nasty in five minutes. The landscape is so flat up here that if it starts to snow and the wind starts to blow, the visibility can drop down to zero during that time it takes you to zip up your fly and wash your hands. Sometimes you’re all excited about turning her around and heading home, and then the weather closes down on top of the mining camp and you realize you’re not going anywhere. Pretty soon the yard is full of idling trucks and everybody is suddenly pissed off because they’re sitting around doing nothing and they have no idea when the dispatcher is going to give them the clearance to go.

  We’ve got this dispatcher named Grumpy Old Alec. It seems like he’s always peeved off, and he has a memory like an elephant. When he’s dispatching he’s basically God. Let’s say that we get weathered in at the Lochart Lake Camp along with two hundred other trucks. By the time we get parked there’s a hundred trucks in front of us, and when the weather clears enough Alec starts letting four trucks go every half-ho
ur, which adds up to eight per hour. So we are looking at twelve to twenty hours before we’re getting out of here. There’s nothing to do, you’re burning time, you can’t really go and hang around in the lunchroom or you might lose your place, so you just sit there waiting and waiting, and everybody is cranky as hell.

  Sometimes Alec will send them out in bigger groups, depending on how early it is in the season and what kind of shape the ice is in. They can’t have too many trucks going out onto the ice at the same time. It’s just asking for a disaster. So of course everybody’s trying to jockey for position, find some kind of excuse why they should get out first. Everybody is bugging Alec and he’s getting pretty irritated. “Don’t bother me! I’ll let you know when you can go.”

  Me and Roman aren’t saying a thing. Alec knows we’re out here, and he knows we’re keeping our mouths shut. So the weather starts to clear and the wind dies down. The storm is blowing itself out—but even with the wind dying down, you’ve got to wait for the plows to open the road, which takes another five or six hours. The odd guy is still in the camp eating, drinking, shooting the breeze, but the rest of us serious guys are in our trucks, fidgeting, jockeying for position, trying to figure out how we’re going to squeeze our way out ahead of the rest of the pack.

  Pretty soon Alec calls me and Roman. “Okay, go.”

  He’s put us right in the front of the list! So we jump in our trucks and take off. “Thank you, sir.”

  Well, right away there’s a whole big kerfuffle from the other drivers. All kinds of other guys in their trucks are yelling at Alec on the two-way radio: “Why’d you let them go?”

  As we hit the road, a couple of other trucks pull right in behind us. And Alec’s watching this whole performance and he comes on the radio: “You guys turn around and come back or you’re fired.”

  “Well, what about them?”

  “Never mind about them. You guys line up and wait your turn. Security will lead you out.”

  So off we go. The other trucks have to go back, line up behind the security pickup. Maybe half an hour later security will let them go. These truckers are like a bunch of bulls. One of the truckers will jockey in front of the other one and then the whole herd gets worked up and the next thing you know you’ve got a stampede. A hundred trucks racing out onto the ice all at the same time. Can you imagine the potential for disaster? Can you imagine that lake suddenly breaking like a big piece of plate glass with all those trucks on it?

  Man, it would make front-page news all around the world.

  So that is Alec for you. He will use me and Roman to get back at all these other guys who had been bugging him for a day. The lesson is, Don’t mess with the dispatcher. It might be annoying to sit and wait for the dispatcher to call your name, but it’s better to be waiting inside the cab of an idling truck than to be lying upside-down on the bottom of the lake.

  So eventually the dispatcher will give us clearance to go and we head south, the truck riding a little rougher now because we’re empty. The trucks always ride a little smoother when they are fully loaded. When they’re empty, they just bounce like a paint shaker. I remember about eight years ago, the ice road was really bad. The north end of MacKay Lake had holes a foot deep everywhere. It was just like it had been bombed. You’d get a little snow blowing across the road and you couldn’t see and you’d be hitting those holes and pounding the snot right out of your truck.

  Oh, it was terrible. We would slow down, but I mean MacKay Lake at 20 miles an hour is already over three hours long. Slow down to 15 or less and it’s four hours long and you’d be holding up the trucks behind you and making them angry, so you’d try to swerve in and out of these holes and you couldn’t see anything. You’re hitting potholes and banging your head on the ceiling and scaring yourself half to death.

  When the road gets that bad, the maintenance crews can’t keep up with it by flooding and filling all the holes. So they were building a new lane. They plowed the snow off it to let the cold air get at the ice so that it would thicken up enough to hold loaded trucks. The road’s got to be overbuilt so there’s no chance somebody’s going to go through.

  So everybody has to be patient, and you know truckers—they’re not the most patient type. Their attitude is, to hell with all that, let’s just give her. Along comes this guy named Dog. He’s right fed up with bashing his truck on this road and he pulls over into this new road, which is nice and smooth, but still closed. As soon as Dog starts roaring down this nice new road, one of the top superintendents starts following right behind him.

  Dog has been around the block a few times. He’s kind of ragged. He’s a bit of a rabblerouser. If he could start a union, he would. And he was telling everybody, the hell with it, and he was going to use this new road and if they didn’t like it they could, rah, rah, and so on.

  All of a sudden this supervisor starts laying into him. “What are you doing on this road?”

  Well, the battle was on. Dog said what he was going to do and now he was doing it. Dog wasn’t just talk. And you should have heard him lay into the supervisor.

  The supervisor says, “Don’t you know this road is not ready? You’re going to put your truck through the ice.”

  Dog says, “I don’t give a damn if I go through the ice. At least I’ll be taking a nice smooth trip to the bottom of the lake.”

  They argued and yelled at each other right to the end of the lake. Supervisor said he was going to fire him and Dog said, Go ahead and fire me. No matter how much he threatened and shouted, the supervisor simply could not put the fear of the Lord in this character. It was quite entertaining for the rest of us. When they got to the other end of the lake, they both got out and did some more screaming and hollering and cursing. But it all ended in a tie. Dog didn’t get fired, and I guess he made his point, because pretty soon that new stretch of road was cleared and we had a nice smooth ride across MacKay Lake.

  On the return trip, the other problem is that everybody wants to speed. They’re driving empty trucks. They’re not stressing the road so much. What’s the problem with giving her a little juice? The temptation to speed is especially bad when the trucks are coming up to the shore. The ice road across the lake is nice and flat, but when you come off the lake the portage road is often pretty steep. That’s when things get interesting.

  A lot of the drivers speed up before they hit the portage because they’re afraid of losing their momentum and getting stuck halfway up the hill. They’ll get bogged down and they’ll put chains on their drive wheels, then they’ll spin the wheels so hard they’ll dig a hole a foot deep and even throw the chains off. It makes an awful pothole and the only way to fix it is to fill it with sand and water or snow and water. Then when the thaw starts in the springtime, those holes will melt and you get to find out how strong your suspension is when you hit one of those deep holes with your front wheels. Sometimes you hit them so hard that you can knock your head on the roof of the cab. That’s usually when some young driver spins his rig out and blocks the road for two or three hours. Now a winch truck has to come from Timbuktu and meanwhile all the other drivers have to sit and wait. And of course that’s when they get on the radio and start cussing out the driver. “Where did you get your license, in a popcorn box?”

  I feel like saying, It’s an accident, you guys, take a deep breath and relax because there’s not a darn thing you can do about it. It never occurs to them that next week it could be them in the same situation.

  One time I was crossing Portage 13, which is a stretch of bulldozed road going through some low hills and spruce forest. On the other side of the portage I drove down toward the lake. If you weren’t an experienced driver you would have been shocked because the lake looked wide open—bright sun glittering on blue water. But I knew it was actually just a sheet of melted water sitting on top of the ice. We call it “overflow.” Sometimes these passages of overflow can make you a little nervous, especially if no one else has driven across them. I’ve been out on Great Sl
ave Lake, driving a truck all by myself, and come to a long stretch of water that you’re pretty sure is just overflow sitting on top of the ice, but of course you can never be a hundred percent certain there’s good hard ice sitting under that water if no one else has been crossing it. It’s psychological more than anything. It just doesn’t feel too good, driving a truck into a patch of open water. But most of the time, you don’t worry too much because other trucks are going through the water and you know it’s okay. So I just gave her, and hit the ice and drove through the water. When I got to the other side I could see some trucks up ahead. They were sitting crooked on the portage road, maybe a hundred feet up from the lake shore, and right away I get that uneasy feeling—Okay, we’ve got trouble.

  I’m leading a pack of trucks and I tell the guys behind me, Hold off, we’ve got an accident. They’re only a mile or two behind me, so I immediately get on the radio and tell them to hold off and stay on the portage, on dry land. The last thing we need is a bunch of trucks conglomerating in the middle of the lake. In times like this I sometimes take my seatbelt off—if this truck breaks through I don’t want to be strapped to it! Sometimes I’ll even drive with my door cracked open, ready to bail out if I have to.

  I jump out of the truck in my shirt sleeves. One truck has slammed into another. The culprit was the southbound truck. It was going too fast. He had to make a right turn coming to the portage. He was sliding, and hit the loaded northbound truck that had stopped to let the southbound truck on to the portage. Since the accident, the portage has been rerouted to make it straighter onto the ice. The northbound truck is a big tanker loaded with diesel fuel, and that fuel is pouring out of a hole in the tank. The tractor of the southbound truck is jammed up against the ruptured tank and the trucker is trapped inside. This looks bad.

  The windshield is smashed, the door is jammed shut, and the guy inside the cab tells me he’s too injured up to climb out. My biggest concern is fire, but he’s hauling a full load, so at least that’s better than an empty tank, which is more dangerous because vapor is explosive. I climb up on the rig and tell the driver to relax. “Don’t worry, partner, I’m gonna get you out.”