I’ve been in this situation myself—trapped inside a crushed machine, all busted up, with well-meaning but half-crazed rescuers yanking and pulling at me from every direction. I don’t want to make it worse for this fella than it already is, so I take a good look at the situation and tell him that I’m going to get him out of the cab and he’s going to be okay.
I run back to my truck and grab a big pry bar and some blankets. I climb up on his truck, rip the door off with the pry bar, and start pulling the fella out of the cab. He’s a big guy, bigger than me—I’m guessing he’s six-six and close to three hundred pounds—so he’s a little hard to handle. But I manage to ease him down onto the ice and pull him a safe distance away from the truck. I wrap him in a sleeping bag and get a few pillows under his head. First I don’t want him to burn to death, and now I don’t want him to freeze!
Ice road security arrives, and they call for a Medevac helicopter from Yellowknife. Good luck. That’s going to take a while. They have to go through all this red tape before the helicopter can take off—they need to load up the medical equipment and put together the rescue team, so the poor guy lying on the ice is going to have to wait two and a half hours for the chopper. The main concern, after I drag him a safe distance from the truck, is the fuel tanker. It’s a got a hole in it about an inch across and diesel fuel is streaming out of it like from a hose. If all that fuel pooling up on the ground catches fire, it’s going to set off the tanker and we’re going to have a blaze that’ll roast everything within a quarter mile.
So I run to my truck and get a sledgehammer, run back to the tanker, and start hammering on that hole, trying to close it up. You wouldn’t want to be doing this with gasoline, of course—one spark and you’re going to cause a fuel air explosion that’ll throw a fireball a hundred feet into the sky—but it’s 20 below zero and it’s diesel fuel, so I’m hoping I can get away with it. The tanker is only thirty feet from the lake shore, and once the diesel fuel gets onto the ice we’re looking at a major environmental cleanup. Once I get the hole closed up with the sledgehammer I get to work building a makeshift boom around the pool of diesel fuel. The chopper finally arrives, we load the man, and off he goes to the hospital. An empty tanker truck arrives and pumps out the leaky tanker. After that’s all done with, they let us proceed with our trip. So I summon the other boys in the convoy and we carry on.
At the end of the year they go over the trucking season and figure out what went right and what went wrong, and they give out cash prizes to truckers for safety awards. For my part in the rescue I got five hundred dollars in Canadian Tire money.
I kind of laughed at that. You don’t do these things for a reward. And if you did, you’d be saying, Wait a minute, that’s all I get for saving a guy’s life and preventing an environmental cleanup that would have cost a million dollars?
7
HOLLYWOOD COMES TO TOWN
“Throw yourself into it and do the best job possible.”
I guess some of these stories about the drama and danger of driving heavy trucks on thin ice caught the attention of the TV people in Hollywood. The U.S. cable channel History decided they wanted to find out more about these crazy truck drivers who wrestle trucks over frozen lakes through some of the harshest conditions on the planet. So the network sent a TV crew up to Yellowknife to see what they could find out about the ice road trucking business.
It wasn’t the first time that TV producers wanted to film the ice roads. It seemed like every year we had a Japanese or German or English crew come up here to shoot footage, and I enjoyed telling them about the stuff we have to deal with on the ice roads.
Dawn Fitzgerald
I’m a television producer.
Most television shows start off with an idea. Whether it’s a drama or a documentary, the creator of the show will come up with some characters and a situation and then try to sell the concept to a network. In this case, it worked backward—the History channel said, “We want to do a show about ice road trucking. Go out and find the characters.”
So we were under a certain amount of pressure to find some good storylines and interesting people. We went up to Yellowknife knowing absolutely nothing about the north and even less about ice road trucking. It was Halloween, cold and stormy, and we turned Yellowknife upside-down, talking to people and trying to find characters who might be effective on a television show. No matter where we went we heard the same story: “You have to meet Alex Debogorski.”
The trouble was, we couldn’t find him. He was out on Great Slave Lake somewhere. It was hard to believe that anyone would be out on that lake at that time of year. It’s like an ocean, giant waves, blowing snow. But we didn’t have any choice but to wait. It’s expensive being on the road. We were going through a lot of money for meals and hotel rooms, but it was pretty obvious that we couldn’t leave without talking to him. At the tail end, that was mainly what we were doing in Yellowknife—killing time and waiting for Alex.
One time, for example, I walked into the dispatch office and there was this big camera set up in there and these rather small Japanese people behind it. Their English wasn’t very good, but they pointed the camera at me and made me understand that they wanted me to say something about the different dangers you face up here in the wilderness of the north. Well, I told them that one of the things that I was most concerned about was GMOs—genetically modified organisms.
I said, “I’m sure you’ve heard about genetically modified grain and livestock and other controversial stuff, but we have weird stuff affecting our environment up here in the north you probably haven’t heard about.”
Oh, they liked the sound of that. Controversy! The environment! They were smiling now and nodding for me to continue.
“Well, one of the big problems we have up here is with alien species like zebra mussels. They latch on to the bottom of a ship and it’s very difficult and expensive to remove them.”
I was making up this story as I went along, and having some fun with it. As I have mentioned, my mother was an artistic woman, and thanks to her I’ve got a poetic streak in me—nothing I like more than telling a good story. You just point a camera at me and I’m right at home. So I’m hamming it up, telling them this story about how our Liberal government in Ottawa developed a plan to get rid of these zebra mussels. They cross-bred a northern pike with a piranha and created this exotic fish that chews the zebra mussels off the bottom of ships. They started to raise these fish in big open-water pens in Great Slave Lake, but one autumn they didn’t get the pens out of the lake in good enough time and a big storm came along and broke open the pens and all these creatures escaped. They like eating zebra mussels, which is a good thing, but when there’s no zebra mussels they have to eat something else. And it turns out that they love to eat aluminum. I told the Japanese film crew that one of the biggest dangers on Great Slave Lake is running into a school of these things when you’re out in an aluminum fishing boat, because they’ll go into a frenzy and starting eating your boat right out from under you.
I was about three-quarters of the way through this story when the other truckers started snickering. The gal who was working at the dispatch desk slapped her hand over her mouth and ran out of the room. And the Japanese director must have realized that I was having fun with him, because he told the guy to turn the camera off, and I never quite managed to finish telling the folks in Japan about this terrible threat to public safety created by Canada’s Liberal government and their genetically modified predatory fish.
Anyway, these Los Angeles filmmakers came to Yellowknife looking for some characters to put in their show. They asked around Yellowknife, asking if there were any real characters they should meet, and just about everybody they met said, “You have to talk to Alex Debogorski.”
I guess I’ve been around Yellowknife long enough that I’m a “local character.” I’m loud, and some people think I’m funny. I know how to tell a pretty good yarn, and I tend to do things a little differently than everyon
e else. For example, when I ran for the office of mayor of Yellowknife, I used old car hoods and doors from my junkyard for election signs. I’ve been a bouncer, a coal miner, a union organizer, and a lay minister doing volunteer work in prisons. I have had eleven kids, all by the same wife. I’ve been married thirty-eight years (that’s forty-five with the wind chill), and I don’t watch television because it’s not good for you. I write controversial columns about politics in the local newspaper and there’s nothing I enjoy more than driving around Yellowknife a few hours after one of my columns comes out in the paper and seeing that people are all pissed off.
That’s what I like—everybody up on their feet and yelling at one another. It’s democracy in action. I guess that’s what TV likes, right? They like people with loud mouths and strong opinions, so these TV people from Hollywood were out looking for this Debogorski guy, but I was in the middle of a panic trying to get heavy equipment out to a diamond exploration property I was looking after. It was located on Great Slave Lake, the three-hundred-mile-long lake that Yellowknife is located on. My buddy Dave Smith has this big barge, and we were trying to haul this heavy equipment out to their mining property at the other end of the lake. Most people quit going out on the lake at the end of September since it’s too stormy and too dangerous after that. But this was October 25 and we had to deliver this stuff. There was no choice. It needed to be done. We made the delivery and a big storm came up on the way back. Waves crashed over our steel-hulled boat and we had the barge on a tow line. Ice formed on our decks. We finally had to turn around, finding shelter in Moose Bay, and there we bobbed up and down for five days.
I like reading. That’s my favorite thing, but I hadn’t brought any books. It was a work trip. All we had to pass the time was a DVD collection of The Beverly Hillbillies. So day after day, while the TV crew was waiting for us in Yellowknife, we had nothing to do but try and stay warm and watch these corny old reruns. I bet I could tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Jed Clampett.
Dawn Fitzgerald
We kept calling Louise to see if she had heard anything from Alex. She would just laugh, “No, he’ll be home when he gets home.”
Finally the boat arrived back in Yellowknife. It was about eleven o’clock at night, and we pulled down into the harbor with the headlights of our vehicle pointing at the boat. I don’t think he knew we had been waiting for him, but that didn’t throw him off. For the first twenty minutes we couldn’t get a word in edgewise.
He succeeded in shocking or insulting everyone in the crew and anyone else who was standing around. You could see that he enjoyed offending people. I think of Alex as the original shock jock. It’s quite hilarious, if you don’t happen to be the person he’s insulting. I remember saying to one of the crew, “I think we have a television show on our hands.”
A Camera Followed Me Everywhere
They asked me if I wanted to consider being on the television show. I thought, Well, my grandfather died before I was born and no one remembers what he looked like. I have all these children and eight grandchildren, and if this show succeeds, they can all watch me on television after I’m dead.
Of course, there were no guarantees they were going to use me. The TV crew said they needed to film an interview and take it back to Hollywood and show it to their bosses.
We went to my friend Garth’s wrecking yard. The only room we could find was on top of a thirty-five-foot flatbed trailer in his shop. So they set up their lights and cameras and prepared to film me. I remembered the time I was at the Klondike Festival down in Edmonton, entertaining those reporters with rude stories. That’s when I learned that there’s no point in pretending to be something you’re not. So I just let ’er rip and gave them a piece of my mind. I had fun. I teased the pants off all of them, especially this good-looking blonde named Dawn Fitzgerald who was in charge.
They took the film and went back to Hollywood. Well, to make a long story short, the bosses liked what they saw and they told me I had the job. So there I was, all of a sudden, a TV character. It was about the last thing on earth I ever expected would happen to me—a guy who lives about as far as you can go on this continent from Hollywood and doesn’t even own a television. The makers of the show, Original Productions, said they were going to call it Ice Road Truckers, and they wanted to film us doing our day-to-day work. So I did my regular job loading, driving, and unloading my truck and they filmed all of it. They put cameras in the truck, one pointing at me and one pointing at the road. Occasionally a camera person would ride with me. Once in a while the camera people would get in the way and we would have a tiff. A bit of yelling, they would mend their ways, and we would be off again.
Having cameras in the truck and a camera crew following me turned out to be a lot of work. First, I lost my privacy. As a truck driver I enjoy my own company immensely. I am the funniest guy I know and the discussions I have with myself are both entertaining and mentally challenging, plus I rarely argue. With cameras present I often find myself wishing for some time alone.
Next, I am responsible for a cameraman in the passenger seat. He often asks dumb questions at the most inopportune moments. Sometimes there is a chase vehicle with cameras, so I have to make sure it doesn’t get under foot. Of course, the helicopter is a little distracting, too. Quite often in my off hours they want to film me sitting in a chair talking. This cuts into my time kissing my wife.
Having run for political office, presented speeches in city council, and worked as a union rep, I was kind of accustomed to being in the public eye, and having been a breastfed baby who was taken off the boob too soon predisposes me to liking attention! So I didn’t mind being on camera. Of course, there are hundreds of hours of film taken during the typical ice road trucking season, so I always wonder what part of all these hours is going to be on the show, considering that eleven episodes only need less than eleven hours. Am I going to look like a hero, or am I going to look like an ass? They film so much that they can make me look either way. Oh well. I usually end up looking a little bit like a hero and a little bit like an ass. I guess that’s why they call it reality television!
The Cast of Ice Road Truckers
During the first year of the show, the film crew showed up and started filming us and establishing the main characters— guys like Drew Sherwood. Drew is not dangerous, but he can invent some interesting problems. He got his job driving with Hugh Rowland’s team after answering an ad in a newspaper. Drew had experience highway driving, but no experience ice road trucking. Right off the bat, Drew was of the opinion that he would have no trouble adjusting to the ice road. His famous comment was, “I have no intention of going into a ditch, bro.” Hugh considered Drew an arrogant rookie, and that was the tension between them. Of course, Drew ended up with all kinds of problems—a flat tire, a malfunctioning onboard computer—and Lee Parkinson, Hugh’s mechanic, felt that Drew had caused many of these problems himself. It all gave Drew a lesson in humility. Then he ended up going in the ditch, quitting the ice road, and going home.
We also met Rick Yemm, who, unlike Drew, can be downright dangerous without working at it. It comes to him naturally! He likes to push his equipment hard, and he is notoriously hard on his trucks. I think Hugh Rowland might have trained him. If you looked under the throttle pedal in Hugh’s truck I bet you would find the floor dented from him pressing his foot down!
It’s hard for me to comment on T.J. Tilcox because he was around for only one season. He was definitely very new in the ice road environment and had a rather wide-eyed, amazed approach to it all. And he didn’t do too badly if you overlook a bashed fender, bruised ribs, and the fact he wasn’t paid all his wages.
I felt sorry for poor Todd White, the long-haired, guitar-playing driver who got fired for speeding at the beginning of season one. He just didn’t have it together and couldn’t seem to get it together. Maybe some meditation and a lemon juice fast would fix him up.
Rick Fitch, the Tli Cho truck push in season one
, was a big help to all of us. He got us our loads, gave us advice, patted us on the bum when we would get frustrated, and generally did a heck of a job getting us out of the yard and down the road. What he did was very important because if we didn’t get a quick turnaround we could lose a pisspot full of money in a short two-month season. He turned us around fast, listened to all our BS, and put us in a better mood. They should have given him a medal.
And who can forget baby-face Jay Westgard? He always worked his butt off—like his dad and Uncle Dwayne—and was always available to help another driver out.
One trip I had to haul a load of fuel on a forty-five-foot flat deck. It was made up of forty-five-gallon drums stacked three high. I would have to go to the fuel bulk plant and they would bring them to the truck with a fork lift. I would have to roll, stand up, and place each drum. They are close to 450 pounds each. Pallets are then put over all of them, and another layer of drums is placed on the pallets. This is really hard work, takes all afternoon, and I was sicker than a dog. I had a headache and was pooping my pants. Hell or high water, I was going to get the job done. I didn’t want to miss a trip. I figured if I just kept putting one foot in front of another, whatever sickness I had would go away, but I was dying.
Dwayne Westgard happened to stop by. “How are things going, Alex?” And I answered, “The shits, and I am not feeling very well.” Dwayne says, “Are you serious?” I say, “I sure am.” Dwayne tells me to “Go home and lay down, I will load this and tie it down and call you when it’s ready to go. It’s going to take a while.”
Sure enough, five hours later he calls me. I jumped out of bed and down the road I went. I felt a hundred times better than when I laid down. You know, I never gave Dwayne anything for helping me and I can’t say we are really friends. But that is the kind of stuff that drivers do once in a while that makes the world a better place.
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