King of The Road

by Alex Deborgorski

  KING OF

  THE ROAD

  TRUE TALES FROM

  A LEGENDARY

  ICE ROAD TRUCKER

  ALEX DEBOGORSKI

  To my dear wife Louise, for putting up with my shenanigans in the past and future.

  To all my children, grandchildren, and onward: I do expect each one of you to put more into life than you take out.

  To all those who have made the world a better place, but no one has ever heard of, including Charlie Eddy, Ernie Running Bear, and Francis “Fats” Newton.

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published in Viking hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2010.

  Published simultaneously in the United States by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Copyright © Alex Debogorski, 2010

  The quotations from John Denison, Jim Chapman, and Adele Boucher in chapter 6 are taken from Trucking North: On Canada’s MacKenzie Highway by Roberta Hursey and reprinted with permission of Detselig Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Debogorski, Alex

  King of the road : true tales from a legendary ice road trucker / Alex

  Debogorski.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06514-1

  1. Debogorski, Alex. 2. Truck drivers—Canada, Northern—Biography. 3. Ice crossings—Canada, Northern—Anecdotes. 4. Canada, Northern— Biography. I. Title.

  HD8039.M7952C3 2010 388.3’24092 C2010-903086-9

  American Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data available

  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477 or 2474

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  1 Early Days

  2 The Open Road Beckons

  3 Time to Grow Up

  4 Life Is a Cabaret

  5 A Driven Man

  6 Into the Kingdom of Ice

  7 Hollywood Comes to Town

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My acknowledgments first go to God, who with infinite wisdom knew me before the firmament and according to His plan put me in the Peace River country of Alberta, Canada, on August 4, 1953. I especially appreciate His patience and pray that I may continue my earthly trip, loaded or empty, sometimes receiving pay and sometimes making my donation.

  I must salute all those of the Northwest Territories of Canada, where I make my home. Really, they are responsible for most of my character and humor. Having laughed at my jokes, breathed the same air, and given me heck as often as not over thirty-five years, my northern people have helped make me who I am.

  All those who I worked with, travelled with, and sometimes only ran into, impacted me—and I them—not always in a positive fashion. It’s been a slice.

  Thanks to Jake MacDonald, the writer who helped me turn these stories into a finished book.

  Thanks to my literary agent, Rick Broadhead, for helping to make this book happen and for introducing me to my publishers.

  PROLOGUE

  I‘m six-three, 250 pounds.

  Fifty-seven years old. Busted up from one end to the other. Too many accidents to recall, and plenty of fights. Some of which I won, but some of which I lost, and I mean lost. Lost them bad enough to end up on crutches. I’ve been hit by a train and run over by a truck the size of a house. Broke my nose eight times. Been stabbed and burned and almost frozen to death. If I took off my clothes and stood in front of a doctor, he might laugh. “Well, Mr. Debogorski, you’re quite a sight. You look like a big old dump truck—beat up and battered all over, with some creaky joints and a lot of miles on the odometer—but I still wouldn’t want to get in your way.”

  When you get to my age, you start realizing that you’ve got more road in your rearview mirror than ahead of you. I’ve got a big family, a tribe of grandkids, and more bills than a man could pay by working around the clock. So I’ve got lots to think about. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll lie there in the dark with my eyes wide open. That’s when I try to think of something peaceful.

  I’ve got a memory where I’m about three or four years old, maybe younger. It’s a warm summer afternoon and I’m lying in my crib. We are living in a little log cabin out in the woods and the crib is right beneath an open window. I’m looking up into the branches of a big poplar tree, and the leaves are rustling and the warm summer wind is coming in through the screen. My mother is in the kitchen baking, and the house is full of the nice smell of fresh bread. I’m supposed to be napping, but I’m too happy to go to sleep. I’ve got clean sheets in my crib and I’m looking up at those silvery leaves rustling in the wind and the whole world is right.

  When I got a little older life got more complicated. We were poor, but we were clothed and fed, so it wasn’t like we were hurting for the basic necessities of life. But the kids at school made fun of me because of where I grew up. People who spend a lot of time alone out in nature tend to be different from others. They think their own thoughts and they come up with their own ideas about things. I learned how to imitate all the different birds and animals, and they were my main friends. I could make bird calls and yip like a coyote. The kids thought I was pretty comical. But most of the time they weren’t laughing with me, they were laughing at me.

  They also made fun of me because I was big. You wouldn’t think that being big would be a handicap in school, but I was clumsy. I was always running around tripping over things. When we took phys ed class in school all the other kids had proper running shoes, but I just had the felt liners of boots. As you can imagine, the gym floor was slippery, and I was always skidding into kids and knocking them over. One poor kid would be crawling around like he’d been hit by a truck and the other kids would be laughing like hell. I didn’t exactly wear fashionable clothes, either. My parents were recent immigrants, and they gave us clothes that were meant to keep you warm and dry—not to make you look good. And you were expected to wear those same clothes for years! I had one fur hat that was so old it was turning orange. So you can imagine how the kids had fun commenting on my unfashionable appearance.

  I was good-natured, so it was safe to make fun of me. But kids can be mean and vicious. One time we
were going out into the yard for recess and as soon as I came out the door this kid spat in my face. I tried to catch him, but he was too fast. Every time I walked up to another kid, he would spit in my face. They were all too fast to catch, and by the end of recess I was just seething with frustration. I hadn’t done anything, so I guess they were just tormenting me. Kids will get some mean idea and then right away they just do it.

  Because we were raised in Canada, I joined the Canadian Air Cadets when I was a young teenager and won a bush survival course. Having grown up in the bush, I already had a jump on the other guys, and I did pretty well. I could use an axe and I could build a fire and I could skin a muskrat just like that. They only chose three kids from each province, and I got the best marks they’d seen in ten years, so that encouraged me. One time we went survival camping, and I was sitting on the bank of the Smoky River on the night that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was looking up at the sky, looking at that big full moon, thinking of those spacemen up there and wondering if I was ever going to make something of myself.

  1

  EARLY DAYS

  “Born in a cave—what a way to improve a résumé.”

  I guess that kid that I used to be would be surprised if he could see me now, forty years later, driving a huge Kenworth truck through the early darkness of a February morning. It’s minus 42 degrees outside, and a hell of a lot nastier if you count the wind chill and the blowing snow. That kid would probably be a lot more surprised if I told him we’re driving over water—deep water.

  We’ve got almost three hundred feet of water under our tires, and if the ice fractures it will probably “hinge”—swing open like a trapdoor and then swing back shut after us, leaving no more sign of what happened than a set of tire tracks. Then we’d sink like a crowbar to the bottom. It would be so dark and spooky down at the bottom of this lake that I don’t want to think about what would happen to us after we settled—probably upside-down, the windows smashed and maybe our heads caved in from the water pressure, the little creepy-crawlies and ice worms nosing into the cab to see if we’re good to eat.

  I know it’s a little hard to believe we’re on a lake, so I would roll down the window and tell him to have a listen—did you hear that sound a minute ago? That muffled sound like a rifle shot? That’s the ice cracking under the weight of the truck. It doesn’t mean the ice is going to give way. It’s actually a good sound—it means we’ve got good ice beneath us, stiff thick ice that creaks when the weight of the truck crosses it. When it cracks it refreezes, and it’s stronger than before. At least, that’s what the road engineers tell us, and they’re supposed to know what they’re doing. They tell us bad ice is soft and flexible and doesn’t make a sound if it’s getting ready to fail. But other guys say the opposite. Some of the experienced old road builders argue that brittle ice breaks easier, and that cold weather is a dangerous time to be ice road trucking. In my experience, ice gets stiffer as it gets colder. All ice is flexible, and it sags when you drive a truck across it. But it definitely gets more rigid in cold weather, and that can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how thick it is.

  I could tell him all those things, but I don’t want to scare the little guy.

  Heck, I don’t want to scare myself, either. There are trucks ahead of us and trucks behind us. The trucks usually travel in groups of four, spread a third of a mile apart. You keep separated because you don’t want to put too much weight on one piece of ice road at the same time, but we keep in touch by radio, and if one guy has a serious problem he can usually rely on the other truckers to help him. Nighttime is the easiest time on the ice road. You can see the shadows, and it’s less of a strain on your eyes. The highway patrol’s at home having a beer, so you don’t have to worry about them bothering you. Radio reception is good, and you can tune up the satellite radio and get caught up on world news. I like to spend an intensive period of time listening to politics from around the world. After I come off the ice road I don’t have to read a newspaper for a couple of months because it takes that long for the fundamental changes to happen.

  Nighttime is also the time when the truckers get talkative. It’s lonely out here. Guys get on the radio and start telling each other stories. They’re like little kids in a bunkhouse after the adults have put out the lights. Everybody is keeping each other company. I’m one of the most devoted storytellers on the ice road, and I’ll keep the other truckers entertained for hours. I used to think that I should write down my life story one day—because I’ve had so many scrapes and almost been killed so many times that I can’t believe I’m still here. I’m sure the other truckers would enjoy hearing about some of my hairraising adventures. And all the good times, too. There are so many stories that I hardly know where to begin. But I guess the best way is to just imagine that it’s nighttime and we’re rolling along on the ice road. The headlights are poking through the darkness. The heater is purring away. I’ve got a hot cup of coffee in my hand, and I’m going to start where all stories start—at the beginning.

  Escape from the Nazis

  Let me tell you how lucky I am just to be here.

  My parents and grandparents came from Poland, a beautiful country, with rolling hills and lots of good agricultural land, with such natural riches that for countless centuries, all kinds of warlords and aggressive nations fought over it like wolves fighting over a bone. When you think about what my family went through it’s unbelievable that we survived.

  In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a secret agreement that they would invade Poland and split it up between themselves. But they were both lying to each other. Russia had no intention of giving Poland to the Germans and vice versa. Throughout the war, the Polish people were savaged by both invading nations. The Russians told the Poles they would back them up if they formed an underground army and fought against the Germans. It was a trick. When the Polish underground fought it out with the Germans in Warsaw, the Russians stood by with their arms folded and watched their two enemies bleed each other—figuring that it was making their own lives easier with each guy that was killed. Finally, the Germans slaughtered the Polish resistance fighters and set about destroying Warsaw. As punishment for the uprising, Hitler said, “Don’t leave a single brick standing.”

  The death toll was incredible. Every day was like a World Trade Center attack, only it went on month after month. Millions of people died. Meanwhile, the Russians wanted their own piece of Poland for themselves, and the best way to control any country is to get rid of its capable people. As I understand it, in April 1940 the Russians rounded up about 20,000 military officers, teachers, journalists, police officers, and other people of influence and executed them in a secret facility in the Katyn Forest. Each guy got one bullet in the back of the head. They’d throw the body on a truck and do the next guy. It was an assembly line, with an execution every three minutes. They would do this all night long, night after night. That’s how they murdered 22,000 of the smartest people in Poland. In my opinion they probably did it because they figured it was the only way our country would be dumb enough to fall for communism.

  My family on my mother’s side was in the Polish underground, fighting the Nazis. My mother was beautiful. Bluegreen eyes, six feet tall, and a swimmer and runner. All the women in my family were beautiful—tall and strong, long legs, and stacked. They looked like movie stars.

  Sometimes there would be a knock on the door and it would be a little six-year-old kid bringing a message from the underground. For some reason, not even the Nazis suspected little kids that age. The kid would say, “The Gestapo is coming!”

  Minutes later the Gestapo would pound on the door, looking for Jews or weapons or whatever incriminating evidence they could find. My family was always in danger because they often kept contraband in the house. I remember my mother telling me about the time the Nazis came and the piano was stuffed with hand grenades, so she and her sister, Auntie Lala (her nickname meant “doll” because she was so cute)
, sat down to play marching songs to distract them.

  Imagine two beautiful teenage girls playing a piano full of high explosives. The Gestapo officers came in and listened and gave the women a pinch and then they left. My mother said they cried for twenty minutes afterward. They were just girls, and the whole time they were playing they had to keep calm because they thought that the German marching music played at top volume would set off the hand grenades and blow them all to smithereens. Another time they were hiding a Jewish man in the house and the Gestapo came. The Jewish fugitive was in the fold-down couch, and everybody sat on him while the Gestapo searched the house.

  My dad and his family were shipped by the Bolsheviks to Siberia. At that time he was a teenager on the family farm in Poland. After Stalin turned on his partner, Hitler, and joined the Allied war effort, 100,000 political prisoners were released from the Siberian gulags as a sign of good faith. Grandpa and Grandma Debogorski and boys, minus two children who had died from starvation and disease in the gulag, made their way from Tehran, Iran, to Tanganyika, Africa, which is now Tanzania. There the British took those willing and able to fight. Grandpa went to the Africa campaign, and Dad went to Glasgow, Scotland, where he trained as a paratrooper. He jumped on Arnhem and Nijmegen in Holland as part of Operation Market Garden, made famous by the movie A Bridge Too Far.

  My mother’s father was a high-ranking military man. He was friends with some of the biggest statesmen in Europe at the time, especially in Eastern Europe, but they finally caught him smuggling Jews and his connections didn’t help him. The Nazis sent him to Auschwitz and shot him with a firing squad. They told him they didn’t want to put him in the oven and make him into soap because the soap would smell like garlic.

  My grandmother, by then a widow, married a German officer. I never did get an explanation for that. They moved to Germany, and my mother went to work for a German SS lieutenant as a secretary. Mum told me she carried a briefcase with a handgun in the false bottom and continued with the work of the underground, smuggling Jews out of Germany. It’s part of our history and I’d like to know more about it. I’ve been so busy all my life, working at one job or another, that I haven’t been able to go back to the old country and research my family’s history the way it deserves. After the war Mum moved to England, where she studied music and math at Cambridge University and met my dad in London.