King of The Road Read online

  So finally she called Dr. Schneider and he got out of bed and came down to the hospital to look at my ankle. He came into the examination room with the nurse. This same nurse was later killed in a plane crash, as a matter of fact, but that’s another story. Dr. Schneider jerked and pulled off my brand-new cowboy boot to see what all my fussing and complaining was about. He took one look at my swollen foot and said, “My goodness, boy, you’ve broken your ankle!”

  “That’s what I keep telling everybody!”

  Dr. Schneider was later murdered, as a matter of fact, but that’s also another story. So he fixed me up with this big cast. Limping around on crutches, I was no good for working on a drill site, so that was the end of my career in the oil patch.

  My Short Career as a Coal Miner

  When the ankle healed after the fight with Dwayne Baker I went back to work. Nowadays it’s hard to find a job, but this was the early 1970s and there were jobs everywhere for a young man who wanted to work. I was still a teenager, and over the next year I held at least seven or eight jobs, each one better than the last.

  I worked for Canuck Construction, a company hooking up wellheads out of Fairview, Alberta, and I worked for Century Geophysical, a seismic surveying company out of Zama City north of High Level, Alberta. I also worked for Seisform Geophysical up in the high Arctic on Richards Island. At that place, by the way, one of the guys was killed by a polar bear. The bear jumped on this fellow with no warning and the crew boss had to use a bulldozer to drive the bear away from the body. The bear wanted to claim his kill and the crew boss had to intimidate the polar bear with the only thing on hand bigger and stronger than a bear and that was a Caterpillar D8.

  One of my jobs was at K & L Tire in Grimshaw, Alberta. In 1971 this fellow came in looking for a truck driver to drive a dump truck in Grande Cache, hauling coal. He was in a panic because they had lost their truck driver and he asked me if I knew how to drive a truck. I told him I had driven a grain truck on the farm and I thought I could drive the dump truck for him. I told him I didn’t have a license to drive a big truck, but they didn’t think I needed a license because it was right on coal mine property.

  I liked driving things, and I wanted that job. I wanted it bad. I was driving a ’67 Coronet 500 with a 383 four-barrel carburetor with a four-speed on the floor. It burned a lot of gas and I needed money. Plus I had a brand-new baby girl named Shielo and a wife. This job would pay three times as much as I was getting at the tire shop, so off I went to Grand Cache to drive a coal truck and make some serious cash.

  When you were a rookie driver on the coal trucks they would test you out first by putting half a load on board and then put you behind the wheel with an experienced driver beside you to see if you could handle the truck. I don’t think I had ever driven a diesel engine before, and I had never used a Jacobs brake. Now, the lead driver was glad to have me in the truck because as it turned out he and his wife had been partying the night before. They had driven home and they had both gone to sleep in the car in front of the house. The bus that was supposed to take him to work had driven up and blown its horn. He had gotten out of the car and jumped on the bus and now that he was at work with me, feeling rather hung over, he had realized that he still had the keys to the house. He was a little worried about that because he had left his wife sleeping in the car with no keys to the house. On top of that, he was feeling rough, so he was happy to sit in the passenger seat and let me do the work. I guess I didn’t scare him that bad and I wound up driving a coal truck there for two years.

  I worked lots of hours in the mine, every bit of overtime I could get. I drove the foreman nuts.

  Here’s me arriving for work in the morning: “Is there any overtime?”

  ‘Yeah, if you want it.”

  Here’s me leaving at the end of the day: “Is there any overtime?”

  “Debogorski, you’re a broken record.”

  We were working ten-hour shifts, two hours between shifts. He just got tired of listening to me, so he’d give me little jobs to fill the time between. “Take the water truck, go up to the water hole. I don’t care what the hell you do. Just sit there and don’t miss the shift change. Make sure you make the bus in two hours.”

  On days off, I’d go and carry on and get drunk and party, but if they gave me work, I wouldn’t go anywhere. I’d just stay there and work myself to death.

  And the work conditions! If you’ve never seen an openpit coal mine you have to imagine a big hole in the side of a mountain where all the soil and all the machinery and all the people are black. My skin was black, my clothes were black, the truck was black, and it was hot, as hot as Las Vegas in the summertime. That black coating of coal dust just soaks up the heat and you’re always filthy, black, and thirsty. You can’t wear goggles because they get steamed over as you’re breathing, so you can’t see a thing. The coal dust is blowing right up into your face. Your nose is plugged up, so you can’t breathe through it, and you’re inhaling coal right into your lungs. The coal gets in your eyes and you’re in such pain that you feel like there’s sand inside your eyes. I’d just push on, almost in tears, and I’d be thinking, Why am I working overtime when I hate this place?

  Oh boy, that open-pit mine was a dirty place. And dangerous, man, I can’t tell you. The drivers are going up and down these steep roads in these enormous Kenworth and Hayes offroad trucks with thirty-yard dump boxes. These are body jobs. Loaded, they can weigh over fifty tons. The drivers are a mixture of all ages, but some of us are young, wild, and think we’re hard to kill, but we get killed anyway, and fairly regularly. You could miss a shift and find yourself riding fifty tons of coal down a mountain going maybe a hundred miles an hour.

  So you have to be a bit of a caveman to tolerate this kind of work. They say a woman has to be twice as good as a man to be accepted as an equal, and maybe there’s some truth in that. One day this brave gal made a mistake, like everybody does sooner or later. She missed a shift or something, and the truck got away on her.

  Maybe the average guy would have bailed out of that runaway truck. But I guess she thought that because she was a woman she had to prove something, and she fought that truck all the way down the hill to her death.

  If You Go Down in the Woods

  So truck driving on the coal pile was tough, dangerous work, and when we had a free night we were ready to blow off some steam.

  One night in 1975 after work about five of us were sitting around having a couple of beers when one of the guys suggested that we go find some bears. We didn’t have any specific idea what we were going to do with them, but usually when you find a bear you’ve found entertainment.

  In those days Grand Cache was full of bears, and probably still is. You’d be sitting in the bar on a hot summer night and the bartender would keep the doors open to let in some cool night air and a bear would walk right into the bar. I’m serious—you’d look and see a bear come in the back door, walk along the back wall, and go out the front door. Oh, it was hilarious. You’d come out of the bar at night and they’d be walking down the sidewalk. It was not unusual to start your truck and pull out of the parking lot and you’d be bumping bears in the rear end so they would get out of your way. One night I was walking home, half cut, and I decided to take a pee against a fence. Well, just as I’m peeing this bear comes running full speed right toward me. These kids had given this bear a fright and it was running like hell and I had to move quickly and get myself zipped up or this bear would have run right over me.

  So on this particular night, as it was getting on to dusk, about eleven o’clock on a nice summer evening, we’re arguing about the best place to find a bear. If we had stayed right where we were, a bear would probably come walking past at any moment. But the best place was the dump. There were always at least a dozen bears at the Grand Cache dump.

  So off to the dump we go. It never really gets dark in the summer, so even though it’s the middle of the night it’s daylight. The dump is a big pile of garbag
e in a pit about forty feet high. People usually drive up to the top and throw their garbage down the hill, and they all stand there for a while and watch the bears. On a typical weekend you’ll see half a dozen vehicles up there, full of kids and the grandparents and everyone else watching the bears. It’s what some folks do at Grand Cache instead of going to the drive-in movie.

  So we pull into the dump, but instead of going up to the top we drive through the woods and come out at the back of the mountain of garbage. Sure enough, there’s about thirty bears there. It looks like a Rotary Club convention. When you just see a couple of bears, they look pretty much the same. But when you get a whole mob of bears all together like that you can see they’re all different. There’s skinny ones, fat ones, old ones, young ones, and they’re all snuffling around in the garbage like they’re at a picnic. Well, by now we’ve drunk a lot of beer and we’re full of bright ideas. Someone suggests that we should bail out of the truck and chase them. We’re all nineteen years old and equally stupid, so we decide that’s a great idea.

  So we bail out and take off after them. The bears don’t want to leave all that nice garbage, so they run in circles, wearing us out. This one 400-pound bear goes climbing up a tree and looks down at us, like it’s a game of tag. The tree is so skinny that it’s flexing like a bow under the weight of the bear. We start pushing the tree, and it goes back and forth like a spring and finally the bear goes sproing, flies out of the tree, and almost lands on top of us.

  It’s hard work, running around in knee-deep garbage chasing bears, so every once in a while we get tuckered out and take a breather, sit on the tailgate, and have a few beers. And the bears take a breather, too, sitting down and puffing and eyeing us like they’re on the opposite football team. This is so entertaining that we keep it up for hours. By now it’s breakfast time, Sunday morning, and we don’t have to work, so we figure we might as well hang around the dump and enjoy ourselves. Every once in a while a truck pulls in and throws down its garbage, but we’re not paying much attention because we’re having too much fun. We keep trying different games with the bears, until I get the idea that one group of us should get the bears running in one direction, and the other group should get them going the other way. If we can coordinate all the bears, maybe we can get something going around in intersecting circles like the Musical Ride, which is this coordinated horseback exhibition our national police force puts on.

  Well, we form up in two groups and charge the bears, waving sticks, but instead of going in different circles, they hit that wall of garbage and go straight up—thirty bears going up the mountain of garbage like a bunch of squirrels. Then, a few seconds later, there’s an outburst of shouting and screaming from the other side of the hill. Slamming doors, honking horns, roaring engines.

  We thought we had the dump all to ourselves. What’s all the noise?

  The next day I’m sitting in the bar having a few beers when in walks this older gentleman who’s kind of a pillar of the community. I don’t know him all that well, but I know him a little bit. He says hello and sits down and after a few minutes of idle banter he starts telling me this story. “You know, Alex, yesterday after church I decided I would take the old folks and the kids to the garbage dump to see the bears. There’s usually quite a variety of them there, and the family enjoys it. Do you ever go to the dump to see the bears, Alex?”

  “Well, yes,” I tell him. “I’ve been there once or twice.”

  “It was kind of odd yesterday, because when we parked the vehicle there wasn’t a bear in sight. We got out and looked around and the kids started asking me, ‘Daddy, where did all the bears go?’ I didn’t know what to tell them, but then suddenly there was all this noise and suddenly, this great galloping herd of bears came storming up over the crest of the hill and charged right for us. It was the most terrifying thing you ever saw. My wife started screaming, the kids were wailing, and the dogs were running for their lives. There were bears everywhere. One bear almost ran me over. I just managed to get the kids and the old folks into the car before a bear jumped right over the hood of the car. Craziest thing I’ve ever seen. Did you ever hear of bears acting that way?”

  “No, sir, I haven’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No, sir, that’s definitely the strangest example of bear behavior I’ve ever heard.”

  If someone were to ask me that question today I would say, “Global warming.”

  “So you don’t have any explanation of why a perfectly normal group of garbage bears would charge a peaceful, church-going family?”

  I kept acting like I’d never heard of such a thing, and finally he satisfied himself and left. I don’t think he had any proof that I was involved in riling up the bears. But Grand Cache was a small community, and I guess he had this idea that if anything strange or disruptive was going on, young Alex Debogorski probably knew something about it.

  Oh, I’ve got so many bear stories, I don’t know where to put them all. One time Fred Doll and I come off a night shift at the McIntyre Porcupine mine and we decide to go for a little drive. I’ve always been a big fan of hitting the road on a moment’s notice—you just gas up the vehicle and go. On more than one occasion I’ve gone for a drive around the block and phoned my wife from eight hundred miles away. She’s pretty patient about that sort of thing. No matter what is going on in your life, it always puts a new perspective on things once you see that big wide-open road.

  So anyway, that’s what Fred and I do. We gas her up and head south. It’s a summer day, 1975, and we pick up a case of beer and head for Banff National Park. Beautiful big mountains, green forests, rushing rivers. We’ve got the windows rolled down and we’re having a great time. Sometimes in the park you will see tourists pulled up at the side of the road, looking at animals, so when we see a car stopped, I say to Fred, “Let’s pull over and see what they’re looking at.”

  It was a big Buick station wagon with California plates, and this elderly couple was looking at a bear. Fred pulls over on the wrong side of the road, stops, rolls down his window, and this mother bear with a little cub comes walking over to the car. The mother bear stands up and puts her paws on the door and sticks her head right inside the window. Fred is just about smelling her armpit she’s so far inside the window, and I decide that this will make an excellent picture if I take it from outside. So I say, “Fred, hold on to the bear so she can’t pull her head out, and I’ll sneak outside and take a photo.”

  I grab the disposable camera off the dashboard and climb out of the car and hurry around the other side to capture this bear half inside the window of Fred’s Torino. Well, I guess Fred didn’t want to grab the bear by the head, because as soon as I come up behind her and the cub she pulls her head out of the window and hisses and comes after me. I had never heard a bear make that sound before, but she hisses just like a cat. I scuttle back around to my side of the car, keeping my rear end toward the bear, figuring at any moment she’s going to bite my behind because that’s where her nose is. But I manage to jump back in the car and slam the door without injury, and Fred doesn’t tease me about being scared of the bear. No matter how big and tough you think you are, the sight of a bear coming at you will get you moving.

  So now the old couple from California are just shaking their heads at the foolishness of what I just did. The mother bear lies down in the ditch with her cub, right next to their big Buick wagon, and they start taking pictures of her. Now I get a new idea. “Fred, go down there and stand beside the bear and I’ll take a picture of you, the momma bear, and the bear cub. You kind of look like a bear anyway, and we could mail it off to people as your family portrait.”

  Fred decides that this is a good idea, so he gets out of the car and saunters down into the ditch and comes up behind the bear. She’s not paying any attention to him, so I go over to the Buick and get the camera all ready, and when he’s right behind her, he’s not sure how to make her stand up for the photo, so he reaches down and taps her on the s
houlder.

  Well, she gives an enormous roar and comes off the ground like she’s been launched by a spring. She wheels around and comes after Fred like she’s going to tear him apart, and even though he’s about twenty-five feet from the old couple’s Buick I swear he makes it to the front hood of their car in one big leap. Boom, he lands butt-first on the hood with his legs cocked back and his boots aimed right at the bear. I snap the photograph just as the bear’s nose is almost touching his boot. In the picture, it looks like the bear is about to sniff his boot heel. One second later, he kicks her hard in the nose, and she thinks better of attacking him, drops to the ground, rounds up her cub, and off she goes.

  We climb into our car and drive away, leaving that poor old couple from California staring at the dent in their hood. They probably went home and told all their friends about these two crazy Canadians who got chased by a bear and ended up on the hood of their car.

  My Number Comes Up

  I knew that sooner or later I was going to get it, but when my number came up I wasn’t even on the mountain.

  One day in 1975 I’m clearing the mud away from the front of the shop at the top of the mountain at Number 9 Mine in Grande Cache with a CAT-12 grader. I’m backing up for another pass when this guy in a sixty-five-ton Terex rock truck backs out of the garage. A driver is supposed to look back and blow the horn twice before you back up and I maintain to this day that he didn’t do that. And here he comes out of the garage and backs right into me. The sloping back on the rock box comes up onto the cab of the grader and starts crushing it on top of me. My left leg snaps. You talk about going into shock—well, it’s just like my head is filling up with foam. I’m holding on to the wheel and the whole cab is crumbling. The interior of the cab has a rollover protection system—a big cage of steel bars—and as that monster truck keeps coming the bars are groaning and the glass is popping out of the windshield. Very slowly the cab starts to fold forward and I’m sitting there holding the wheel, in shock, thinking to myself that I’m probably going to die, and wondering how long it’s going to be before my life starts flashing before my eyes.