King of The Road Read online

  Just as my chest starts pressing up against the steering wheel the engine of the rock truck stalls. The back window is popped out and I’m tilting forward with my chest against the wheel getting ready to die and all movement suddenly ceases. All of this takes place in a couple of seconds, of course. The rock truck moves ahead and this big Irish mechanic and some other guys come running, trying to get me out. Because of the shock I can’t really talk. I can just barely croak. And these guys take hold of me. They have their hands underneath my arms and they start bouncing me, back and forth and up and down, and I’m trying to tell them, “Just lift me straight up! Do it nice and slow! And I’ll slide out from under the steering wheel!”

  But of course I’m just croaking, barely audible, and they can’t hear me. Finally they give up and just leave me draped over the steering wheel. The seat is tilted forward from the collision and the vinyl is slippery, so I keep sliding down and I’m trying to hold myself up with my right leg, which is all the support I have because my left leg is broken and it hurts like heck. So they call the shovel mechanic and he comes roaring up in the service truck and I’m leaning over the steering wheel getting ready to faint from the pain in my leg. One of the guys jumps into the grader and lights the cutting torch. He’s going to cut the steering column. He lights the torch and about two feet of flame pop out of that torch right in front of my eyes and burn off my whiskers. I look through the flame and I can see all that diesel fuel on the floor.

  Right away, I see this vision of myself burning to death, and wow, I jump like a squirrel. I grab the roof of that cab and I’m out of there in a split second. As soon I’m out of the crushed cab it’s like a hundred tons of pressure comes off me. By this time the ambulance has arrived. It backs up to the grader and the door flies open and six or eight men come at me. I’m up on the grader saying, “It’s okay, I’ll jump down!”

  I’m hopping on one leg, climbing down, and those guys grab me and literally throw me into the ambulance. The ambulance is spinning its wheels and throwing gravel, and as we go roaring out of the yard, two guys are running behind it, trying to close its doors. I look up and there’s this beautiful nurse leaning over me. I don’t know where they found her, but anyway she’s a vision of loveliness and for a moment or two I have this uneasy feeling that I’ve actually died in between the wreck and the ambulance and now this angel is taking me up to heaven.

  I didn’t find out until later, but apparently I started taking off my clothes. She says to me, “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t you want me to take my clothes off?”

  She says, “No, you can leave your coveralls on. I can put on the air splint over your pants.”

  I don’t know how my buddies found out about any of this, but weeks later they had a good time bugging me about it—here’s Alex with a broken leg and he’s trying to make time in the ambulance with the nurse.

  So we go roaring down the mountain, heading for the hospital. I guess the drivers figure that if I didn’t get killed in the wreckage they might as well try and kill me on the way down the hill. This is our rough, miserable road and these ambulances have truck suspension, and I’m telling you we’re hitting some of these holes so hard that I swear they almost broke my other leg during that thirty-mile drive. We get to the hospital and they rush me in the door. “We need to give you some Demerol,” says the doctor.

  “Well you better call my wife first,” I say, because I know that as soon as they give me that needle I’m going to be out like a light. Sure enough, right after I talk to Louise they hit me up with Demerol and I can’t remember a single thing for the week that followed.

  My brother Richie had been drinking a little bit, worried about my situation, and he was real upset that the doctor in charge of my case didn’t want to send me to the big hospital down in Edmonton. These little small-town hospitals have to deal with a lot of serious injuries, construction workers and rig hands and so on, so I guess they figured, if he’s going to die he is going to die, that’s nothing unusual. He’s just a coal miner, and there’s lots more where he came from. Richie took a different point of view. He wanted them to pull out all the stops and fly me by air ambulance to a real hospital in Edmonton.

  Finally he decided that if the doctors wouldn’t fly me out, he would. There was a little twin-engine airplane sitting on the grass at the local airstrip and Richie found a pilot who said he knew how to fly it. I guess it’s not that hard to steal an airplane, at least in those days it wasn’t, and Richie’s plan was that he was going to check me out of the hospital, steal this airplane, load me into it, and fly me to Edmonton. Of course, the doctor didn’t want to check me out because I was in such bad shape. Then Richie said he was gonna kill the doctor and that caused a bit of a kerfuffle.

  Richie had this idea in his mind that he and his buddy would steal the plane, then once we arrived in Edmonton, he would give the pilot a chance to get away, and then he would phone the ambulance. If the cops arrived he would tell them that he stole the airplane himself. Richie couldn’t fly a plane, but he figured the cops didn’t have to know that. So this was his master plan, but just when he was ready to set the wheels in motion my medical condition went from bad to worse.

  A little piece of fat traveled up my leg from the site of the injury and ended up in my right lung and gave me an embolism. My lung collapsed. The long and short of it was, I was way too sick to get hijacked out of the hospital, and it was just as well because the trip to Edmonton probably would’ve killed me, and that would have been the end of another one of Richie’s smart ideas.

  Louise came to visit. As per usual, I would start a sentence, doze off from the Demerol, wake up, and try to complete the same sentence. Quite often, I didn’t make a lot of sense. After one particular sentence, I dozed off, but didn’t come back to finish it. As Louise was waiting, she was looking me over and noticed my toes and fingers were turning blue. She called the nurse. I had gotten a case of hospital pneumonia and my temperature was 105 degrees.

  The nurse brought a tub full of crushed ice and water and stuck it beside the bed and she and Louise would dip a blanket in that ice water, get it freezing cold, and then throw it on top of me. Holy smokes, when that ice-cold blanket hit me it was like getting electrocuted. I would let out a big roar, but I was so weak and hoarse that the roar would come out like a squeaky blast of air. When they pulled that icy blanket off me I just felt like I was floating on a cloud. Then they would dip it in the tub and get it all crusted up with ice again and throw it on top of me, and boy, that was like torture.

  Finally, Louise and the nurse managed to get my body temperature down with those ice blankets and I avoided brain damage. Well, some people might argue with that, but the doctors said that I came pretty close to dying or suffering permanent disability. After about ten days I came back from the brink and started feeling better, and of course I then began to disrupt the hospital pretty good.

  Louise was coming to visit me and it occurred to me that we hadn’t had sex for quite a while. The nurse was in the room, and I said to her, “I’d like to have sex with my wife when she comes to visit.”

  The nurse said, “Alex, you can’t do that, it’s against the rules.”

  “Why? We’re adults, we have a marriage certificate. You never know, I could be dead next week. It might be my last chance to make love with my wife. Why can’t you just close the door and leave us alone for a while?”

  I guess the nurse thought I was kidding, because she dropped the subject. When Louise came to visit, I said, “Why don’t you climb up into this bed with me and draw the curtain?”

  You know what it’s like when you’re in the hospital, everybody’s trying to be nice to you, so Louise climbs up into the bed and the next thing you know she’s got her pants off. Well, the nurse hears all the suspicious rustling going on behind the curtain and I can hear her boots squeaking off down the hallway as she heads for the nursing station. Next thing you know it sounds like a flock of chickens are er
upting down the hall. There is an outburst of squawking and clucking and you can just hear the whole works of them coming with the matron at the head of a flock. This old head nurse bursts into the room with all her assistants behind her and she rips back the curtain, pulls back the sheets, and pulls Louise out of my bed.

  There’s Louise with her pants around her ankles, completely embarrassed, and me with a body cast up to my waist and we’re doing our best to make a little whoopee in a hospital bed. I immediately close one eye and pretend to be half dead. It was hilarious, but not for Louise. The head nurse is not impressed.

  “Mrs. Debogorski!” she squawks. “This man is half dead! Have you no common sense?”

  What the heck’s the problem? I thought. We’re in a hospital. If nothing else, I appreciated the entertainment!

  Anyway, we survived it. Got out of the hospital after two weeks, had to go to Edmonton to get rehabilitation for my leg. That led to more adventures. I was limping around the town on my bad leg and decided I might as well go for a drink at the Kingsway bar. If you went to the Kingsway bar you were always pretty sure you would see somebody you knew. There were always about five hundred people in there, and if you didn’t know anyone you could make a friend pretty quickly. That was one rough place. The bikers and the paratroopers would have a few drinks and then go at one another, providing lots of entertainment for the spectators, and people got killed in there on a pretty regular basis.

  So I was sitting in there having a drink with a couple of people I knew, and this kerfuffle started. Some guy was waving a knife around and the hotel staff threw him out. Good riddance. I’ve never had much patience with these chickenshit guys who pull out a knife when trouble starts. If you can’t defend yourself with your fists, then stay home.

  A little while later I left the bar and this troublemaker was standing over on the other side of the street with a knife in his hand. Some people from the bar were yelling at him, but nobody had the nerve to go over and mix it up with him because he had this knife in his hand. I can’t remember if it was a big knife or a little knife, but it doesn’t really matter, because you can poke somebody in the chest with a little butter knife and kill them.

  After everybody lost interest in yelling at this guy and went back into the bar, I propped myself up against a piece of broken concrete to rest my injured leg and yelled at him, “Hey, city boy! Why don’t you come on over here and have a little talk with this country boy?”

  I was baiting him, trying to make him mad enough to cross the street. My plan was, I was going to take that knife away and give him a licking. So I stood there for about ten minutes, teasing him and daring him to walk across the street. But he wouldn’t come, so I lost interest and went into the bar.

  Next thing you know the cops pulled up. I could see the red lights flipping through the window, so I went back outside and crossed the street to see if this guy had pointy ears and sharp teeth or what.

  This cop had him in handcuffs up against the side of the police car. The cop was head and shoulders taller than the kid with a knife, and you could see that the cop was so mad his eyes were practically glowing in the dark. As I walked past, the kid looked at me and said, “What have you got to say for yourself now, asshole?”

  Well, I just had an airlock right there. I couldn’t even move. I wound up and gave that kid such a backhand that his head whipped right around. The cop was so shocked that he lifted the kid up right off the ground by his handcuffed wrists.

  The cop yelled at me, “You’re under arrest for assault and battery! Go and stand over there!”

  “Where?”

  “Over there!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I was all obedient with this cop. Never argue with someone who has a gun, especially if he’s wearing a uniform. The cop threw the kid in the back of the car, and after a few minutes he came over to see me. “The kid doesn’t want to press charges,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  So he let me go. I can just imagine why the kid decided not to press charges—the cop probably told him that he was putting us in the same cell.

  Anyway, that’s the story of my broken leg and my rehabilitation. Once you hurt yourself you’re never a hundred percent afterward, and that lung embolism followed me around my whole life. During the second season of Ice Road Truckers, I was up in Inuvik, on the Arctic coast, when I got short of breath. I would get out of the truck to do my normal chores and right away I would have this tight feeling in my chest, almost like I had eaten too much, and I would feel short of breath. I was coughing blood, too. I went to the hospital and they ran a few tests and said I seemed okay. But this young doctor was concerned and she insisted that I go to Yellowknife and have more tests. So I went over there and had a CT scan, which showed that one lung had a clot and my heart was beating way too fast. They kept me in the hospital and thinned out my blood and put me on medication to prevent more clots. It took months before I felt normal again. While the doctors were treating me they asked me about my health history and I told them about the fatty embolism and the collapsed lung that happened after that guy backed into me. They said once you have a clot in the vicinity of your lung it can happen again at any time.

  So I’m still dealing with that accident over thirty years later. And it never would have happened if that truck driver had looked in his rearview mirror.

  Go North, Young Man

  Like most things in life, I more or less ended up going north by accident—and I mean by accident. In 1975, while I was recovering in the hospital from getting crushed by that rock truck, I met a fellow who was in there being treated for silicosis and he started telling me stories about gold prospecting. Well, that got me excited. If there’s one subject that can get a young man feeling all twitchy, it’s gold.

  I grew up listening to that song “North to Alaska” and dreaming of the gold rush—men driving sled dogs across frozen lakes, panning for gold, and celebrating in some honky-tonk saloon after they’d hit pay dirt. At one point I even went to the geology department at the University of Alberta to see if I could find a geologist who could tell me where to go looking for gold. I ended up getting an interview with this guy named Professor Dalton, who told me, “Son, the place to go looking for gold is Yellowknife. Read some books on the subject. Get a hammer and a magnifying glass. Drive up to Yellowknife. Park your car, walk back into the bush as far as you can walk, start breaking rocks, and you’ll find gold. I did my field studies there during the Second World War, and there is visible gold all over the place.”

  So anyway, now I’m in the hospital and this guy is telling me there’s big money to be made in gold prospecting. And you don’t have to go all the way up north! British Columbia has plenty of gold, and all it takes is some young man with a pair of boots and a sleeping bag who’s got the gumption to hike off into the bush and claim it.

  This fellow is older and more experienced than me. (He must have been forty years old, and I was twenty-two, which made him an old-timer in my eyes.) So I figure I have something to learn from him. He offers to make me his partner and we shake hands on it. As soon as we’re out of the hospital I quit my job and head off to Barkerville, B.C., with my new partner. I’m driving a brand-new four-wheel-drive Ford pickup with a sleek two-tone paint job and nice wheels and deluxe upholstery and I couldn’t be happier. No more slugging it out on some job site. Barkerville is where the Cariboo Gold Rush got started, and it’s like a place from an old movie—rugged country, wild rivers, and lots of stories of men who took the big gamble and made a fortune.

  Well, of course, if gold were easy to find, it wouldn’t be so valuable. After looking the country over, talking to the locals, and doing some research at the government geological office in Quesnel, I staked a claim. My partner, Jean-Guy, didn’t like getting his hands dirty. He liked to do “research.” The claim I staked was the old Starleta claim. It had been part of a stock market play, sometime before.

  We’re camping out, getting dirty, ea
ting bad food, breaking rocks, and finding very little gold. Finally, after two months of this, I’m dead broke and just about starving to death. Ford Motor Credit is looking for me because I’m driving their brandnew pickup and I haven’t made any payments on it for three months. Shell Oil is real interested in finding out where I am so they can get their credit card back. Meanwhile, my wife is very unhappy because I’ve vanished to go off looking for gold and she has no money to feed our children, Shielo and Curtis, who are about four and two at this point. She’s called upon her dad for help, and he’s driven up to Grand Cache in his grain truck and rescued her and taken her back to Fairview, where she’s now living in this little apartment and relying on the support of her family. All in all, it’s a bust, and I’m beginning to learn what thousands of young prospectors have learned before me—the main thing you find when you go gold prospecting is poverty.

  So it’s off to Fairview to rejoin my wife. She’s happy to see me, and we get along fine for a week or two, and then of course the happiness wears off and we both agree that I need to get a real job. Enough of this gold-prospecting bullshit. She’s always been very patient with me, but there’s a time to dream and a time to make money, and we were flat broke. I didn’t have any excuses, either. In those days there were jobs all over the place. Anyone who wanted work could get work in a day or two. So it wasn’t a question of finding any old job as much as figuring out the best job and the best place to go. Some time before that I had met this girl named Teresa Murphy, my sister’s college friend. She said to me, “If you ever need a job and you want to come to a place that’s really great, come to Yellowknife.”

  She was the second person who’d told me about Yellowknife. First it was the professor, who told me it was a great place to look for gold, and now it was this Teresa, telling me there was lots of work and it was a fun place to live. So I call Teresa and tell her the situation. “If you can get me a job I will come up to Yellowknife, otherwise I’m going south, down to Fox Creek, Alberta, to work in the oil fields.”