King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  Season one was pretty popular, and we got the green light for another season of shooting, which took me to Inuvik, Northwest Territories, located on the Mackenzie River delta as it flows into the Arctic Ocean. We lost Jay, T.J., Lee, and Rick Fitch as characters, but we met a whole lot of new people. We got Eric Dufresne, who felt “convertible“ at 40 below in a blue jean jacket, his French accent shining through. Bear Swensen and his friend Charlie helped me immensely. They made sure I knew every nook and cranny of the Peterbilt winch truck that I was driving. They were low-key and made excellent friends. Thanks to those two, I had no problem with any of the winch work I did that winter.

  Shaun Lundrigan, the Gruben’s mechanic, never got excited and kept my truck running like a top. When I watched the show I was surprised to see that Rick Yemm got under his hide. It seemed to me that it would take a lot to make that man angry, so I guess Rick had what it took.

  Rick and I generally worked for Gruben’s transport and it was a good outfit. The equipment was definitely not new, but it all worked well for me. That Peterbilt I drove was a ’95, but it pulled its heart out and never sputtered once. I passed a couple of new trucks sitting on the side of the road. We did our jobs, got paid well, and the superintendent, bosses, and owners left us alone.

  I know Hugh “The Polar Bear” Rowland was tickled pink with Kirk and his company, Northwinds. He said the company and the owner were great.

  Then there was Jerry Dusdal, the truck push from Mullen Transport. I am sure he and Rick Fitch from the first season of Ice Road Truckers had the same parents. He was excellent, always there to help, get us a load, baby us along, and always with a stupid grin. I guess he was a little bit funnier than Rick Fitch.

  Season three brought Hugh and me to Alaska. Over the years I had heard about the Dalton Highway, Alyeska Pipeline, and the North Slope, but I never really thought I’d be blessed to work there. It took some time to get the American government to let us up there to work. Just in time we got our visas and the show went on.

  I operated a truck simulator and took a number of road tests. I almost panicked. I really did get my license out of a popcorn box about thirty-five years ago and never had a road test. Here in Alaska I had numerous road tests and had to drive with different trainers for thousands of miles. I was thinking, What if I really don’t know how to drive? Do I use the clutch or not?

  The various trainers said, “Don’t worry about it, and drive like you usually do. We’ve watched the first two seasons of Ice Road Truckers and think there’s a very good chance you know how to drive.”

  Tony Molesky and Phil Kromm took “The Polar Bear” and me on our first trip up to Prudhoe Bay and back. Carlile, the company we worked for, teamed us up with experienced drivers who had similar driving styles. I got Jack McCahar, who was an absolute riot. There’s probably nobody funnier and more politically incorrect in Alaska than Jack. If he goes down to the southern forty-eight I’m worried someone will shoot him. He’s the guy in season three who said “Rookie Shit” and left as I was chaining up for Atigan. Heck, I’d never hold that against him.

  Then I got my good buddy George Spears. I had to watch my rearview mirrors really closely because even the groundhogs were passing me. You couldn’t ask for a better man. After Vietnam he needed a job that would give him that occasional adrenaline rush. The Dalton Highway was it. So, thirty to forty years later, there he was with me following him. At the end of the season he retired back to his home in Illinois. I visited him there. He lives in the house where his grandparents raised him. He has a sister next door and spends time with his mum almost every day. She is in the old folks’ home and isn’t doing very well. He is happy and in his spare time he hauls corn for his neighbor.

  Lisa Kelly drives a Kenworth Conventional. I think the smokestack is bigger round than she is and heightwise she can just see over a 100-24.5 tire. She is small, cute, and that big truck and her go round and round. Some of the guys get grumpy with her—especially behind her back. She has been threatened and some guys have said dirty stuff to her on the radio. But most drivers support her and are happy to see her. Being a woman in a man’s world is a hard job.

  Ron Dubbs, truck-driving man, traveled a couple of trips with me. He had to wait for parts to patch up his truck on one trip. He can actually sing. Well, almost. He would break into song on the CB radio once in a while. His singing wasn’t good enough to make the show, I guess.

  Little Tim Freeman (his dad is “Big Tim”) traveled under George Spears’s wing for his baptism up the Dalton. He and I had a minor run-in at the pub one night. Hugh and I had a beer and a burger there just before we all went home. Tim was also there. It turned out that after the camera guys stopped filming we decided to have a few too many double tequilas. While I was playing pool Tim said something really crude to me and I cracked him in the jaw. It felt good. I could not remember the last time I dented my knuckles. I called Tim next day to apologize and he said, “No problem. It happens all the time when I am drinking. I take a little and I give a little.”

  Lane Keator is Carlile’s terminal manager in Fairbanks. Everything we did went through him. He was a good guy to work for, treated me well, and occasionally was funny, but not as funny as the dispatcher, Tim Rickards. Tim’s the guy who made sure that both our eyes were open and gave us a load. He was usually fair.

  Jack Jessee has been on the Dalton a while. He’s a very strong and competent trucker even though he can sometimes be uptight. The first year there I had little contact with him. The second year he presented himself as a father figure to me. I think he meant well. I asked him how old he was. He said he was thirty-eight. I thought, That’s my daughter Shielo’s age. I now have a dad the same age as my daughter.

  Season four in Alaska put Ray Vellieux and Greg Boadwine in the show. Greg loves to talk. I think he wears out two sets of CB antennae per year because he is always broadcasting. I think he needs to work on the quality and cut back on the quantity when it comes to being an on-air comedian.

  When I met Ray he felt I insulted him. I am not sure what I said. But most of the season he felt I was a bona fide ass and treated me as such. As God and luck would have it, he augered his truck in the snowbank. I came along and offered to help. I am sure he thought, Oh, yeah, that will be a good photo opportunity to make Alex look good for the show and me look like an idiot.

  I shoveled for three and a half hours. I was soaking wet under my jacket. That was the hardest I worked in years. Digging Ray out of the ditch was the best example of teamwork. We had five Carlile drivers and three shovels. I have never seen five happier guys working in my life. The shovels were never idle. When I got tired I laid it down and someone else would pick it up. It was 25 degrees below zero and a sunny day. Ray had picked an excellent spot to hit the ditch. We dug the truck and trailer out and then chained up the drive axles of two loaded trucks. We attached two lengths of three-eighths chain and it all came out slick as a whistle. I hope Carlile paid all the fellows three and a half hours’ pay because we saved the company a hefty tow bill. We were at the top of the ice cut pretty well in the middle of the North Slope of Alaska.

  As truckers we compete for jobs and the few tasty scraps the dispatcher may throw our way. It may be a light load or it may be a backhaul. There is always some element of competition. Usually it is low-key until a guy like me runs into a fellow like Hugh Rowland. On the one hand, we get along and drink the odd beer or bottle of wine together. We have shared stories and spent hours visiting. On the other hand, he rubs me like sandpaper and turpentine. It is a paradox. I ignore him but at the same time try to keep close track of him so he doesn’t pull one over on me. It’s been this way for years.

  Years ago I made a trip north on the ice road with Hugh and this fellow named Reg, who owns a Western Star truck and has been trucking on ice roads forever. On this particular trip he had said he hadn’t been in a snowbank for longer than he can remember. It was a hard trip. We loaded and off we went again. We were tired. I
pulled Hugh out of the snowbank twice. I pulled Reg out twice. On the way back, as fortune would have it, I left Hugh behind when we stopped to sleep. Next trip he was twenty minutes behind. I hit the snowbank. My traveling partner pulled me out. It wasn’t soon enough. Hugh caught up and realized the situation. For the next hour he is on the big radio. “Security, you should check this driver. He’s having problems. A nurse should check him out. I don’t think he’s well!” I got to Lockhart and the nurse asked me if I was okay. I told her I was fine but I thought the handicapped bear needed a psychiatrist! I think he is still pissed that I left him in the snow dust.

  I am always leery about someone touching my truck. I take it as a personal affront when someone plays with my truck. Every time I get in my truck I try to check my airline hookup, make sure the fifth wheel hasn’t been pulled and my fuel caps are tight and that nothing goofy has been hung off the back. I do this in addition to the normal local check. I have had my air lines reversed, fuel caps come off, and found something dumb like a broken delineator stack on the back of the trailer. I have enough trouble keeping my crate going down the road without someone else actually causing me problems.

  Not All the Good Trips End Up on TV

  During season two of Ice Road Truckers, my most challenging trip was not filmed. It lasted about ten days. I traveled with a driver from Edmonton, Alberta, called Diesel. One could see the miles in the creases around his eyes. He had a mop of gray hair to his shoulders and a beard that a family of mice probably lived in.

  We started out on February 28, 2008, at Atkinson Point, a Cold War American/Canadian radar site, which we were cleaning up. The trucks were reloaded on the ice at Tuktoyaktuk. We had two twenty-foot sea cans each, filled with contaminated soil, which we were taking to Swan Hills in Alberta. There, the plant would make this stuff environmentally friendly.

  Diesel would lead and guide me, since I truck mostly in the bush and not through “civilization.” We go to Inuvik. The temperature is 42 below zero Celsius. I had trouble making the hill in town, going to the tire shop. Our shop thought I was having a fuel problem and gave me some additive. As we left Inuvik, to go south down the Dempster Highway to Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, we rolled through the closed weight scale. I couldn’t figure out where the weights would be on the scale window, so I didn’t know my axle weights.

  As sometimes happens, even though I didn’t know the trail, I ended up in the lead. We made it to Fort McPherson, where we crossed over the Mackenzie River on the ice. On we drove and we crossed the frozen Peel River. My problems started on the Peel River south hill, on which I spun out. Fortunately I was on my side of the road and Diesel had enough room to roar by. Otherwise, I would have spun him out, too. In that case, I would have gotten a reaming.

  I put chains on all four drives and got going. I wore the jewelry all the way to Eagle Plains. Still, I had some trouble on the bigger hills. The truck seemed underpowered and had a problem with traction.

  Traveling in the daylight, we covered some fine-looking country. Much of this area, south of Eagle Plains, was never covered with glaciers. It is prehistoric in every way. There are huge, rounded hills bordering large rolling valleys. I could picture mammoths and sabre-toothed cats. Biologists find plants and insects from pre-Ice Age times here. There is a butterfly species in which the female flies and the male walks (does this sound familiar?). The bones of mammoths and other Ice Age creatures are found in the permafrost by miners. There is still untold wealth in gold and other minerals back there, guarded by the bones of the prospectors who died looking for it.

  We arrived at Klondike Corner, Yukon Territory, at one in the morning. After some sleep, we continued on to Whitehorse and arrived there late the next afternoon. I crossed the scale with an air leak and 17,000 pounds overweight on the three trailer axles. I was parked. The next day, Sunday, a crane came out and a light sea can on Diesel’s truck was switched for my heavy one. My load became legal and now it was a lot easier for me to keep up. Diesel stopped giving me a hard time about my driving abilities and the company I drove for got a ticket in the mail.

  On March 5 we arrived in Swan Hills, Alberta. So far we’d come across one tanker in the ditch near Fort St. John and one collision at Taylor Flats, in which a log truck missed a shift on a hill and almost stopped me. And I got cut off by a four-wheeler at least three different times. Now at Swan Hills, Diesel unloaded both trailers by sucking our four sea cans off with his winch truck. We then proceeded to Devon, just outside of Edmonton. There we waited a couple of days for loads to go back to Tuktoyaktuk, on the Arctic Ocean.

  After having my truck gone over in the company shop in Devon, I got a load of lumber and headed north. The trip north was not quite as eventful as going south. A couple of hills on the Dempster put me and the truck to the test. There’s one hill called “Shit House” that you climb in steps of seven percent grades. The old Peterbilt would spin and I’d slack off. I’d step on it and the CAT engine would pick up the slack. This happened a number of times. I was actually surprised that I never once had to chain up.

  The trip took me through the Northwest Territories, Yukon Territory, part of British Columbia, part of Alberta, and back again. I saw a lot of great scenery, from the Arctic Ocean to mountains, lakes, and farmland. We went from 40 below in the north to 10 degrees above zero in the south. We got everything from northern lights to streetlights. We had driven more than four thousand miles. It was a great trip with lots of adventure, but it never ended up on TV.

  Fame and Fortune—Well, Fame, Anyway…

  We’ve completed four seasons of Ice Road Truckers, and the show has actually gotten to be way bigger than even the producers hoped it would be. Ice Road Truckers has 3.5 million viewers in the United States and another 3.5 million viewers in Britain, give or take a few hundred thousand, and there are millions of other viewers in at least twenty-two other countries around the world. I don’t really get involved in that part of the show, so I’m just throwing out rough numbers. What impresses me is not so much the size of the audience, which actually doesn’t mean that much to me one way or another, but the stories that I hear from people—stories that show you how this show has really touched a nerve with people around the world.

  A Mounted Police buddy of mine went down to Manila, the Philippines. He was driving down the highway from the airport, heaving this great sigh of relief that he was gonna see absolutely no one he knew for the next couple of weeks. And suddenly there I was, on this eighty-foot billboard, looking down at him. He said, “Is there nowhere I can go in this world to escape you, Debogorski?”

  Another group of people from Yellowknife went on a wine tour of southern France. Apparently they went into this fancy vineyard to have a lunch and all the sophisticated French people were sitting around watching Ice Road Truckers on television. Richard Cadieux, an aboriginal buddy of mine, calls it “Creeping Debogorskism.” He says, “Now that you’re a television star there’s gonna be no shutting you up.” It’s kind of odd being famous all of a sudden. Millions of people know who I am, but I don’t know them. People magazine decided I’m one of “the sexiest men alive.” (Louise always knew that.) If I pull up to a gas station in Chicago or Salt Lake City or Calgary, all I have to do is walk in to pay my bill and somebody will come up and slap me on the back. “Hey, Alex, how are you doing?”

  I’m still in the habit of thinking, Hey, this must be an old friend of mine! So I’m standing there looking at his face, trying to figure out where I’ve met him before, and he’ll say, “You don’t know me, but I always watch your show!”

  The funny thing is, they know more about the show than I do, because I don’t watch television. I don’t even allow one in the house. I guess the TV producers are going to want to kill me for saying this, but I think television is bad for you. I don’t even watch movies. They’re full of crime and ugliness, people scheming and lying and committing adultery and shooting each other. TV gives me a bad feeling about life. When you come fro
m Eastern Europe, a land soaked in centuries of blood, there’s nothing entertaining about watching people indulge their lower instincts. It’s a short walk from civilization to savagery, and some people may enjoy watching it but I don’t.

  When I’m on the road, which is a lot of the time, the family will sometimes sneak a TV into the house. I can imagine them scrambling around upstairs when I arrive. “He’s home! Hide the television!”

  But they can’t fool me. I’m like that giant in the fairy tale. “Fee, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of a television!”

  I’ll hunt for that television until I find it in a closet or under a bed, then I’ll walk out onto the balcony and chuck it over the railing. There’s no sound I enjoy more than a television exploding as it hits the driveway. So Alex Debogorski as a TV star, that’s a joke for you.

  I get to travel a lot in the off season. I go to truck shows all over the United States, and there is always a big lineup of people who want to meet Alex the ice road trucker. Sometimes I’ll take off and wander through the crowd, kissing hands and shaking babies. I will tickle people just to make them laugh. Nobody tickles strangers anymore. I guess it’s considered politically incorrect. I’ll tickle anybody—kids, women, old folks. I will tickle them and say, “There, that’s your Alex Debogorski stimulus package.”

  One time I was at a truck show and there was the biggest, meanest-looking truck driver you ever saw. He was about 275 pounds, with black whiskers and busted-up knuckles and a scowl that would frighten a grizzly bear. Well, I sneaked up from behind and tickled him in the short ribs and he burst out laughing like a little kid.

  I bet he hadn’t laughed like that in forty years.

  I do a fair amount of laughing myself. In fact, I’ve got this loud laugh that’s kind of distinctive. Some people have even downloaded it as a ring tone on their cell phones. In any coffee shop in any city I will sometimes go unrecognized until I laugh. Then you see heads pop up over the restaurant, people looking around the room with these startled looks on their faces—Hey, wait a minute! That sounds like Alex the ice road trucker! Then they come up to me and shake my hand and tell me how much they enjoy the television show. Sometimes I barely have time to eat my lunch because I’m too busy talking to people. I don’t mind it. In fact, it’s enjoyable meeting all kinds of folks from different walks of life. Whether it’s the kid who works at a gas pump or some famous star like Merle Haggard (he’s a great guy, by the way), I try to speak to everyone man-to-man. Millions of people know me, but I have never met them. I get phone calls, letters, and presents. People call me for jobs. I travel to shows, sign autographs, sell T-shirts, visit and call sick people. I can make thousands of people’s days just by showing up, calling, signing a picture, or just spending a few minutes with them. I guess the good Lord decided that Alex being a movie star at thirty would cause too much damage so I’ll be one at sixty instead.