WRITER - Truck Logger -
King of the Road
Trailer for sale or rent, rooms to let, 50 cents;
No phone, no pool, no pets, Ain’t got no cigarettes.
Ah, but 2 hours of pushing broom, buys an 8 X 12 4-bit room.
I’m a man of means by no means, King of the Road.
Of course, Roger Miller’s never been logging. If he had, we’d be singing a very different song. You see, the Kings of the logging roads are personally insured for a million bucks a piece, they drive custom-made rigs worth half their insurance policy, and many of them will end their day by flying their own Cessna home for the night.
And why not? When you’re driving 16 foot wide trucks down 30% grades (30% grades!!! Try that in your Isuzu, Bunky!) several times a day, the risks and the rewards should be great.
Wayne Fontaine will tell you about the time he wouldn’t take his clothes off in front of his own wife for a month, and it wasn’t for being shy or being newly wed. This was early in his logging life up in the Seward Valley. He’s sitting up front when the driver, approaching one of those relentless mountain switchbacks, finds that those 25 gears are of no help whatsoever. This baby’s running and nothing good is going to stop it. Driver yells, “Get the F--- out!”
English translation: Jump. The only problem is logging roads are typically narrow slivers of potential slicing through the impossible. Precipitous 150-foot drops loom a few feet from the cab door. Now we’re dealing with the calculus of terror. Do I want to stay in this runaway monster? No way. If I jump, will I probably scrape and hurt a lot? Way. If I jump, will I roll over the embankment and engage in a major lesson in free-falling, leading to an early encounter with My Maker? Strong likelihood. What to do, what to do? Hamlets need not apply. JUMP!
And that explains Wayne’s reluctance to let even those closest to him see his entirely black-and-blue sides and back for the next little while.
But the truly amazing thing about this, and so many other, logging stories is how they end. Sure, the rig is smashed up against some rock wall or Douglas fir. But, invariably, lines are hooked up, the truck is freed, transmissions or brakes are repaired, and the truck does three more trouble-free runs before the day has ended.
Hey, we’re trying to make a living here. If there’s a problem, fix it. Three feet of snow? Nothing that a couple cans of gas can’t clear. Poof! We’re driving, pal.
Third boxcar, midnight trains, destination: Bangor, Maine.
Old worn out suit and shoes, don’t pay no union dues.
I smoke old stogies I have found, short but not too big and round.
I’m a man of means by no means, King of the Road.
Question: What’s the driving test for a trucklogger?
Answer: You don’t get killed on the first load.
Jack McKay graduated from gravel trucks to logging trucks. He speaks in thousands: Sixty thousand to change an engine. Five hundred thousand for an 850 Kenworth or one of his beloved Euclids. Jack speaks about Euclids the way some guys speak about sex or home runs at the bottom of the ninth. Today, Jack will assure you, the trucks are beautiful and the brakes are mystically empowered to work. But in the old days, that is, before 1980, when it was still possible to get a job in the forest, in the old days, safety meant “you hung your jacket out the window and hoped the wind’ll slow you down.”
Irv Olsen, now retired, remembers the incident so many years ago at Buckley Bay when he was a youngster with Victoria Lumber. A fully loaded logging truck went out of control, jack-knifed and slid into the grease bay at Jack Bevin’s shop. A pickup with several young carpenters was sitting up front. The gas tank exploded and burst into flames. Three guys were killed.
Another time he watched a full load hit a stump at the turn of a switchback. How severe was the impact? The end of the frame went clear through the cab and continued through the bumper and stopped, imbedded in the stump.
And yes, it was Tom Olsen, Irv’s son, who famously dumped his bride out of the cab when his airbrakes failed. Which parts of her body were scraped black and blue you really don’t want to know.
Some of these stories may seem to be of the order of Rural Legends, but maybe not. There’s the one about the truck that stops, the log that flies over the cab, hits the ground and is ultimately driven back through the radiator and into the cab missing the driver by the width of a cold ham sandwich.
Of course, Irv has seen it all. Born in Comox Hospital, he milked cows and fed chickens when he was a tad. Got his first job driving a Cat for the Baxter Pole Company and, at eighteen, he was working the John Hart Dam. In ’56, he bought his first Spar.
After a lifetime of riding 20 and 30 degree grades, Irv is happy to fly his float plane and help his wife run their fish camp for wealthy anglers from Chicago and Dallas and Berlin.
Lesson’s learned? Well, there’s one thing Irvin Olsen and Jack McKay and Wayne Fontaine will agree on: Never Put Your Thumbs in the Wheel. Think about it. You’re turning your steering wheel through great circumferences. Your thumbs are hooked inside. You hit a rock.. Whoosh! That steering wheel takes off spinning to correct itself at the speed of a bicycle wheel in the Tour de France. Slice-arama! No thumbs.
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