Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

That was weird. I thought as I slowly opened my eyes and looked into the darkness of the night. I was feeling very defeated and I didn't want to get up. I was somehow immune to the cold at this point or maybe only numb to it. I was at least comfortable in some strange way; I couldn’t tell hot from cold or pain from pleasure; I felt nothing. I feared that if I moved my senses would wake up and be overcome by the discomfort of my predicament. I don’t know how much time had passed by and all I wanted was to sleep a comfortable and peaceful sleep. I decided to give in to its will and closed my eyes and determined to let myself fall into a deep sleep, the possible consequence of not ever waking up from it seemed without its usual sting.
But when I did this, something from deep in my subconscious triggered, like an imbedded line of code written into a computer program, waiting for a matching circumstance to reactivate it to begin its function. I have since named this program; "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!” it had been imbedded in my mind from many years earlier, and it had kept me from death then. Now, it had rebooted it self and would not let me fall asleep even though I thought I did not care if I lived or died at this point. Perhaps that was true; at this point I think I most likely did not care if I died.
Actually to be honest I was beckoning death to rescue me; such was my miserable predicament that death seemed preferable. But this written code imbedded in my mind was to supersede all other desires or schemes of my mind. Somehow it anticipated the possibility that when I was at the point of extreme exhaustion and sleep depravation I might be able to convince myself that that death was my only hope. So even if I wanted to fall asleep so that I could die peacefully, I could not, for this code or what hypnotists my call suggestion, took the rest from my eyes.
I still did not want to move, for fear of experiencing my predicament too deeply. But I wanted so desperately to sleep and all though I had reached the point of not caring if I ever would wake up, this pre determined response mechanism would not allow me to. I had to somehow convince my self that it was safe to sleep. I could not just fool myself; that would not work. I would have to come up with a real solution. I had to believe it truly was safe before this program called "If you sleep you die" would release me so that I could rest.
I had developed this deeply imbedded command many years ago, I was a young man in my twenties, the twenties are a great age to be, but like your childhood and your teens before that, you don't know it yet. It was a time when I thought my youth was my only fault, now time has long since remedied that fault. As a young man I believed everything was for experience, and I knew that, no mater how hard or how bad something got, the privilege of the experience was always well worth it. But time has also remedied that belief.
I guess it all began the day I met Danny Rumen, I had never met any one like him before, not that he was different, although he was, it was how I met him that was different, not how he was. I knew his younger brother Dennis, not real well, but well enough that he asked me to ride along with him across the frozen Great Slave Lake one cold February day. We headed out about eighty miles or so across the ice till we came to this island where Danny was staying, tending the fishing nets he and Dennis were partners in.
Upon leaving the safety of Yellowknife and venturing out on the ice heading off across unmarked territory, I quickly realized that Dennis was not the savvy bush man or four by four operator I had assumed he must be to head across the ice like we had. As a teenager I had owned a four by four and spent a lot of time four wheeling and was quite good at it. I had mistakenly assumed Dennis would be of equivalent talent. But after we got stuck a couple of times I realized that he neither had any concept of the capabilities or the limits of his machine, or the necessary driving skills to be able to get his truck unstuck once it had become stuck.
After about the third time we got stuck I was able to diplomatically take over the driving duties. Dennis had stuck us pretty good into the axle deep crusty hard snow on the ice. He was spinning his tires wildly but to no use. I convinced him to let me try. I waited for the tires to cool and let the wet ice he had spun up to refreeze. At minus thirty-five this did not take too long. I was careful not to spin a wheel and make wet ice under the tires. I crept ahead about four inches, sensing that it did not easily want to go any farther in that direction I stopped. I held the brake, selected reverse and again careful not to spin the tires I rocked her back about a foot, then forward about sixteen inches, slowly lengthening our track.
But we were in pretty deep and the snow was wind driven packed hard. I would need to do a charge out of there to get clear. The problem was that if this charge failed we would be stuck worse than we already are. I shut the engine down and told Dennis that we should wait for the differential oil to stiffen up in the cold; this would have the effect of posi-traction. Provided he didn’t use synthetic oil in his diff's, which he did not know if he had or not.
Posi-traction is when both left and right wheels receive equal or near equal torque from the drive-line, most vehicles are equipped with an open differential where only one or the other wheels receive the torque, so in slippery conditions the easiest wheel to spin gets all the torque. The wheel with the most traction then just sits still, and provides no motive assistance.
By allowing the oil to get cold and stiffen up, my hope was that the oil trapped in the spider gear cage would resist the spider gears from rotating around the side gears. This resistance would be translated into torque being more evenly distributed between the left and right wheels. I described all this to Dennis, but he still did not under stand what I was talking about. "Just trust me…okay?" I reassured him.
After some time I restarted the engine and tried to get us moving again. I could feel the increased traction the stiff oil was providing, it was a very subtle amount extra, but with finesse and a soft touch we began to move and build up to speed again. At times I could feel the stiff snow we were driving through become deeper and begin to slow us down. Again it seemed that we might be stuck again, applying the gas and increasing the power supplied to the wheels would not stop us from slowing down; the snowdrifts were just too deep.
I had learned as a teenager driving my four by in tight and slippery circumstances how to get the last bit of motion out of my failing traction. With my foot adequately deep into the accelerator I would "side step" the clutch very rapidly. Side stepping the clutch is when you quickly disengage the clutch for an instant, and let your foot slide of the pedal sideways so that the clutch re-engages very rapidly. The shock of the rapid engagement of the clutch momentarily overcomes the action of the differential spider and side gears and momentarily both wheels get equal torque. Not enough to make even one sixteenth of a revolution, but enough to jerk the tire patch, exchanging the wheels that had the least traction with the wheels that had the most.
For a moment or two we would gain another foot of travel beyond where it seemed we should have stopped and been stuck. I telegraphed the clutch pedal very rapidly, and with each jolt to the drive-line we would move another foot or so, until we were through the worst of it and on our way again. Dennis was not real happy with how I was driving his truck, he was sure that I was hurting it the way I was driving. But we were already forty miles from nowhere, and it may as well have been a thousand, because if we had gotten stuck I did not want to walk that far either. As far as hurting his truck, it was a chance I was willing to take.
After more than an hour Dennis spotted the profile of an island on the frozen horizon. "Over there!" he pointed, "That’s the island were looking for!" It was a small island, very well treed, perhaps a eighth of a mile long and less than a couple of hundred yards across. As we approached the island signs of human activity became more and more evident. Holes chopped in the ice, footpaths beaten down into the snow disappearing into the trees of the island. There was a large pile of frozen fish about a hundred yards from the shore. I drove past it up to where the beaten snow path led into the brush of the island.
We got out of the truck, the contrast of the overheated cab of the truck and the minus thirty-five-degree weather gave us a moment's pause, but we quickly shook it off. Dennis led me up the path and about fifty yards into the island we came upon two four foot by eight foot sheets of half inch plywood leaned against each other forming a pup tent type shelter at the end of the trail.
One end of the shelter had a four-foot by four-foot piece of plywood nailed over the end to form the back wall of the shelter. There was a tattered and dirty old piece of tent canvas forming a flap door at the other end. Just outside the flap were the remains of a fire that had obviously been burning the night before. Inside the shelter were a sleeping bag, and a small amount of dry firewood that must have been left over from the night before as well.
Danny was nowhere to be seen so we walked back to the truck. We loaded the pile of fish into the truck. Before we were done Danny walked up from the east side of the island. He was very excited to see us, as he had been alone out here and it had been three weeks since the last time Dennis had come to pick up the fish. Danny helped us load the last of the fish into the truck. But there was so much fish that we could not fit all the fish into the box of the truck. We piled it as high as we could, but it would just slip off the top of the pile as we tried to load it higher.
As Happy as Danny was to see us, he was just as upset that Dennis had neglected him for so long that we could not carry to market all the fish he had caught in that time. He also had never met me before and as it turned out he was very suspicious of strangers. His outward joy of having company dwindled to uneasiness; he looked at me very suspiciously and continually asked “Why had I come out all this way with Dennis?”
Danny was a big guy of twenty-four years of age, but with a boyish grin that hid how intelligent he really was. I can’t recall what all he asked me at our first meeting and during our visit, but I knew he was asking me testing questions, as subtle as he could, trying to figure out what my "angle" was. "I just thought it would be an interesting thing to do, it seemed like coming out here would make a nice little Saturday!" I told him, but he did not accept my response at face value, I could tell he thought I was up to something, but I was not.
I tried to answer his questions as well as I could to put him at ease, but sometimes I either heard him wrong or misinterpreted his meaning and gave the wrong response to his prompts, and he would get noticeably agitated. At this Dennis would gnaw on his lower lip looking a little worried. Being that we were eighty miles from civilization somewhere on the east coast area of Great Slave Lake. But I was not sure exactly where, and that Danny seemed to continually keep a large hatchet in his right hand at all times; I don’t know if awkward is an adequate word to describe how that all made me feel.
Dennis left me to fend for myself; he offered Danny no reassurance by vouching for me in any way. He just kept gnawing on his lower lip looking a little worried. But I was very intrigued with Danny, the courage he had to be left way out here in the dead of winter by himself with no practical means of comfort or safety, just pure survival necessities, and even very little of that. He had a type of courage I did not posses, in many ways I was fearless, or at least I could fake it, acting brave in spite of being in liquid terror. But without an audience to fool I was nothing.
Danny put himself in a position that no amount of acting could save him, for he was alone with no audience. I did not believe I could do that, and so I envied Danny, but in a good way, I wanted what he had, but not to steal it from him, just to get lit by his flame. Danny saw that I admired what he was doing, and that it was genuine, and he responded in kind. Before long he had dropped his guard and was very jovial. Dennis and I headed back for Yellowknife, leaving Danny standing alone on the frozen Lake in the fading daylight to watch as our tail lights disappeared in blowing snow and distance. I knew I had made a new friend.
Dennis did not posses what Danny had, Dennis was always the favorite child, and was treated extra special, he often bragged that he had four hundred and fifty Tonka truck toys, while Danny never got even one. I would learn that Danny was never made welcome at home, and that his mother often made him sleep under the porch steps outside their house.
While Dennis could do anything he wanted, use or take anything of his fathers or mothers with their blessing, Danny was forbidden from even touching their stuff. Danny had once used his fathers cutting torch to fix a cement mixer he needed to do some work on his parents house, and when his dad found out about it he got the police to arrest him for theft.
Actually it was worse than that; Prince Charles and Lady Diana were in town at the time and during the parade. Danny was watching them pass when Danny's dad came up to him and knocked him out cold with a punch to the back of his head. Then he dragged him to a police officer that was tending to the security of the parade, demanding that the policeman arrest him. He did this right in front of their Highnesses car, he dragged him right across in front of the car so that the car carrying the Prince and Princess had to actually stop to avoid running them over. There were more horrible acts perpetrated upon Danny but they are unspeakable and as such best left unsaid.
Over the next year I kept in touch with Danny, but we did not hang out together or anything, except to BS over a cup of coffee or two at the Gold Range Cafe. But as fate would have it the timing chain on my truck jumped a few teeth one day and it ran out of steam in front of his house. Danny came out of back yard to see me thinking I had stopped in to see him, I had never done that before, and so he was happily surprised to see me. Unintentionally I had burst his bubble when I exclaimed; "She just died as I was coming up the hill and this is as far as I could make it!" When Danny saw that I had only stopped at his house because my truck would not go any farther, he looked a little hurt.
It so happens that I always had a good amount of mechanical aptitude, and so after securing a new chain and gear set from the auto parts store before it could close. I was able to get that big old four sixty cubic inch Ford three-quarter ton running again as good as new. Danny was amazed that I had been able to install a new timing chain right where it quit in front of his house on the side of the road in less than a few short hours.
From that point on when ever Danny had some kind of mechanical problem he would get a hold of me to fix it, even though he could probably have fixed it him self. "Yeah, but why should I when it is so easy for you, for me to do it, it is real hard, but for you it is just a snap." He would always say. He would tell me how much of a genius I must be to be so good at so many things and that was all it took, a little padding of my ego and I would do what ever he wanted.
About a year and a season later Danny got a hold of me one cold November day, he needed my help, and told his tale of woe. He had bid on a bombardier at an auction and got it. The catch was that he had to get it out of the auction site by November twenty fourth, or he would lose possession of it and not even get a refund of his money, such was the sales agreement of the auction house.
He had asked his brother Bob if he could help him get it, and Bob, who owned a small trucking out fit, had agreed, but now Danny was suspicious that his brother was going to steal it from him. Danny was afraid that since he had told Bob of the conditions of the sale that Bob would not help him. Instead Danny thought that his brother would come up with some reason why he could not help him at the last minute and then Danny being unable to find a new method of picking it up before the deadline expired would lose it and then have to forget about it.
Meanwhile Bob would go get the Bombardier sans Danny before the deadline expired and with no one the wiser Bob would get the bombardier for nothing! The fact that Bob lived four hundred and fifty miles south of Yellowknife and that the Bombardier was in High Level nine hundred mile south of Yellowknife made the whole evil plan feasible. I would have found it hard to believe that his brother could be so diabolical but by then I had seen the way Danny's family treated him and so it was possible.
But what was more difficult to believe was that Danny could have been able to correctly perceive what his brother’s intentions were. Within the frame work of his family it was defiantly possible that a scheme like this could exist, but I found it difficult to believe that it did, only because Danny had no hard evidence just a hunch. What are the odds that his hunch could be correct? Slim was what I thought, slim to none.
Danny was persistent and kept hounding me for my help. I was not sure how I could even help, all I had was a couple of old pickup trucks; I had no trailer of any kind. Danny continued to plead for my assistance, he said that his brother had just called and told him that he would not be able to help him, just like Danny had predicted. So I told Danny that if he could find a trailer that would do the job then I would pull it with my pick up truck.
Ralph my business partner was not happy with me for offering to help Danny, we were very busy and I was needed in town to keep the jobs going, and especially to start a new job that was coming up right away. "You can get that job started, just set stuff up, you know how, and by that time I will be back" I told him. "Besides, Danny is never gonna find a trailer in time anyway" I added.
Ralph was not so sure; this job was like nothing we had done before. It was a new concept style of architecture and we had gotten the job only because I was the only person who had come up with a way of doing the job, and so we had beat out some much larger competitors for the job. I had been able to visualize what it was the architect was looking for and been able to communicate to him how it could be done, something my competitors had failed to achieve.
If I had to go I told Ralph to just set up all our equipment, take extra time doing it to stall till I got back; "They will never know the difference" I told him. Ralph did not like that at all, he did not know how to do this job, and I had failed to adequately explain it to him. Looking back I think I had not completely explained it to him because I wanted to surprise him with my clever plan. Also, keeping him in the dark may have given me a level of control that I did not want to give up… I’m a small man in many ways… a small petty man…
Later that day Danny came back to the job site we were on with the news that he had found a trailer. Ralph was not pleased. I tried to reassure him that everything would be okay, but he was not listening. Later that evening Danny and I drove over to check out the trailer he had found. We drove into this large parking lot and at the far back was a high boy trailer. "This is it?" I asked skeptically.
"Yeah this is it!"
"It's a high boy!" I told him unable to disguise my condescending timbre.

"Yeah so?"
"Well its supposed to be pulled by a highway tractor not a pickup truck you moron!"
"It's just a single axle highboy!” Danny insisted matching my condescending tone.
"Small for a highway tractor maybe, but huge for a pick up!" I told him.
"Naw, it ain't that big, I think your truck can pull it!"
"But I don’t have any way of pulling it, all I got is a trailer hitch, not a fifth wheel!" I explained.
"I know where we can get one, and I am sure you can figure out some way of mounting it on your truck!"
"Well true, but what about the brakes? This thing has air brakes, and if they’re maxis with out any air pressure they will be spring loaded on and this thing won’t move!" I tried to discourage him.
"Can’t you fix that?" He asked in such a manner that it was as if he was questioning my abilities.
"I guess I could cage the springs with the caging bolt,” I said hoping to impress him with my mechanical prowess.
"Okay let’s go down to my dads shop and put a fifth wheel on this thing!" Danny directed.
"No wait this is crazy, if a cop sees us he’ll go nuts on us!" I protested, "Besides that what if we get into a wreck? If some one gets hurt or if we kill some one they will throw away the key!"
"What key?" asked Danny, "Who cares about a key?"
"Well you would care if it was the key to your jail cell!" I explained.
"Nothing like that is gonna happen!" Danny insisted. "I mean really, what are the chances of anything like that happening anyway?"
"Okay, but I thought you already got in big trouble for using your dads stuff?" I asked.
"Oh ever since that time in the parade I can do anything I want. At the police station there is a big picture of my dad and written on it is a sign that says: Do not take complaints from this man concerning any of his family members."
"Really? They put his picture up with a sign?" I asked rhetorically. “But even so, aren’t you afraid of what your dads going to do if he catches you…or rather, us?"
"Naw, I ain't afraid of that old fart!" Danny said convincingly.
If we were to make this trip I would have to travel the Mackenzie highway. Every year there were stories of people breaking down and dying on the side of the road, in fact a week earlier a man was found frozen to death about fifty yards from his broken down car. There was apparently a pile of cigarette buts out side his car window, he had sat there waiting for help, no one came by, and when he ran out of cigarettes he decided to try to walk, but by that time he was too cold and succumbed to exposure.
Now at this time I owned three pickup trucks: I had a three quarter-ton with a big engine under the hood. I also had white half ton extended cab pickup, and an older half-ton pickup that I had bought off a friend of mine who goes by the name of John Merringer. I used these trucks to run my contracting business. I could not find a spare for the three-quarter ton, so I did not want to take it, it would be too risky, I could not risk death for want of a spare tire.
The extended cab had heater motor trouble that I had not taken care of yet, but the half ton I got from John had several spares, and ran pretty good, but had only a straight six cylinder engine and a standard transmission with three in the tree shifter. But I decided it was the best choice, since it was not so new that making modification to accommodate pulling a highway tractor-trailer would depreciate its value at all.
The battery was in poor shape in this truck, but the alternator worked well, and since it was a standard transmission, if worse came to worse, it could be push started, and it always started well. Hot or cold, it always started right on the first flip of that engine. The weak battery usually was of no consequence since the engine always started so easily; it was just if you left the lights on or let it sit for to long that the battery would refuse to perform. During normal usage it would start all day every time you turned the key. But it never started when left overnight, but I rarely used this truck so I had not bothered to change the battery.
The half-ton was a little small; ridiculously small for the job we had planned for it. I don’t recall, but perhaps I had purposely chose this truck because I thought it could not pull the trailer, and so if it couldn't pull the trailer we couldn't go. That way I would not have to go, and it wouldn’t be like I hadn't kept my word, because at least I had tried. This truck had one other problem, the shifter for the three speed manual transmission was in the steering column, and it had broke while John still owned it.
To repair the shifter, John replaced the whole steering column with a used one he had got from somewhere. There is a seal that seals the steering column where it passes through the firewall of the truck. John had forgotten to install it when he replaced the column. This allowed cold air to blow into the truck cab through this hole. It had not bothered me ever before, but I had mostly driven the truck in the summer. I had never driven the truck very much more than a few blocks in the winter.
Danny's dad Frank had this dilapidated building in the "Old town" part of Yellowknife that served as his shop. It was a corrugated metal over wood frame building with giant homemade sliding garage doors. They were locked with a chain, but Danny lifted the corner of a piece of the siding and forced his considerably sized frame through the opening. He beckoned me to follow, I was able to squeeze through a little easier than he had, but the cold steel of the siding rubbed against my ear and it stung as it nearly froze it instantly.
It seemed colder inside than it did outside, as if some how the walls radiated the cold back at you from all directions. I don’t know why that is, perhaps it is psychological, because you expect it to be warmer inside, and it maybe a little warmer, but it feels colder because you were hoping for it to be much warmer. In the dark Danny fumbled with the frayed end of an old extension cord as he tried to plug it into a receptacle on the power box. He was at first unsuccessful but I was able to provide a little light for him from my disposable lighter.
After wiggling the plug just right the yellow stained bulbs hanging from the pigtail type light bulb fixtures that hung haphazardly from the open rafters began to glow dimly. Of the more than half dozen fixtures only two of the bulbs were glowing. These two little bulbs were no match for the darkness of this place; it seemed the soot-coated walls just absorbed all their efforts. Old house type wiring, which had no doubt been salvaged from some demolition project, was all that connected them together.
Inside, the barn beam style framing was also heavily coated with a layer of black soot, years of burning welding rods and torch-cutting smoke was evident. The black dirt floor was hard but lumpy, stained with years of being abused with used motor oil and grease. Upon closer inspection, I could not be sure if it really was a dirt floor or not, such was the state of this place, it was apparent that it may never have been cleaned, so it was possible that there might be a concrete floor under several layers of grime.
Danny was able to find a pair of bolt cutters and cut the chain from the sliding garage door. I then backed my truck into the shop. At the back of the shop was a six by ten-foot piece of quarter-inch thick steel plate. We measured it to fit over the top of my pickup box and Danny lit up his dad’s torch set, seemingly oblivious to the return of his wrath. After he cut it to size we used a prefabricated tripod made from three inch steel pipes and a come a long chain hoist to lift it onto the back of my truck.
We had stacked some timbers inside my truck box between the wheel wells and shimmed them even with the top of the truck box sides. In spite of my protests Danny unceremoniously cut one-inch holes right through the pristine floor of my truck bed. We then fit a four-inch 'c' channel under the frame of my truck with corresponding holes cut through it.
After cutting matching holes into the steel plate on top, we dropped four long seven eighths inch threaded rods down through them all and torqued them as tight as we could, squeezing the blocks between the steel plate and the truck bed and clamping it all to the frame. After drilling holes through the steel plate into the truck box rail we used several three-eighths -inch nuts and bolts and bolted it down to the top of the box in about eight spots.
Frank had a small GM cab over gas pot highway tractor of mid sixties vintage out behind the shop. It had no glass left in it and snow had covered a good portion of the interior. Danny was sure we could get it running and could drive it into the shop to steel the fifth wheel hitch off it. But after considerable effort and failed attempts of boosting it with jumper cables hooked to the weak battery of my half-ton, we gave up. Working in the cold dark night we struggled to remove the fifth wheel from the truck.
By this time it was four o'clock in the morning and Frank and Danny's brothers Richard and David came home from working a late shift at the Department of National Defense hanger at the airport. They had a contract to install a pair of giant hanger doors that required a huge hundred and twenty foot long steel "I" beam header over it. The military spec required it to be a continuous beam, not two or more beams welded together. They had secured the contract by assuring the military that they had such a beam, and since no other contractor could assure them of that, Frank and his boys got the contract.
The irony of it all was that Frank had no such beam, what he did have was cutoffs from some large fabrication project that went on at Giant Mines years earlier. He had salvaged the irregularly shaped cutoffs from a scrap metal pile. The were the right dimension and weight of "I" beam in the spec, just short and angle cut on one or both ends of each piece, not one more that four feet long, and most under three feet long.
They were carefully welding them all together to form the hundred and twenty foot long beam, grinding and polishing, and sandblasting it to hide their deed: Carefully welding into it the mill stamps and trade markings to fool inspectors. They were all excellent welders, and justified their actions by reasoning that the beam they were fabricating would be as strong as or stronger than the beam they were asking for anyway. Also the ridiculous spec that the military was asking for could not be met by any steel manufacturer any where, as it would be impossible to ship such a beam to Yellowknife.
Their arrival interrupted our progress and we had to make our escape without being detected. Danny did not seem too concerned whether or not if his dad caught us in his shop, but for me it seemed awkward at best. I was some what confused, hearing the stories of how terrible Danny was treated I thought Danny should or would be a little more fearful of his father. Perhaps it was the thought of the police protection, perhaps he felt that photo of his dad in the police station was protecting him, and gave him the boldness he was displaying.
But I felt uneasy, I knew Danny was taking liberties with his father’s property, I did not feel it was anything too criminal, since it was after all his dads stuff, not some stranger, but just the same, we were acting without his permission. I was hiding behind Danny's mantle, that is to say, that I would let Danny take all the blame if caught, and I would play dumb, as if I did not know that we were doing anything wrong. At least that way it would be between Danny and his dad; it would just be a father and son thing, but with me; I was no relation, and so I had no mantle of justification to remove the criminality. That is what I meant when I said I was hiding behind his mantle.
It just so happened that the battery in my truck would not restart my engine, and at this time my truck was parked in the alley behind his dads shop. We decided to take a proactive position rather than retreat to a get away. We boldly walked around to the front of the shop and met Danny's dad and his two brothers as they got out of their pickup truck.
It was quite a strange pickup because it had no windshield! Apparently the windshield had been badly cracked and Frank had received several citations from some young "punk" cop (as he described him) for its condition, and ordered him to have it replaced. Frank was indignant, he in no way wanted to listen to any kind of authority figure, much less a young "punk" cop. So on that point alone he was too stubborn to have the windshield repaired. In Frank’s defense I must say it was an old truck, not worth much, and it really was not worth the price of a new windshield. So I could see why he did not want to replace it.
Frank had his back up and so he read the motor vehicle laws to some how thwart the police from forcing him to change his windshield. After some research he found that there is no law in any motor vehicle code that says you must have a windshield. There are laws regarding windshield condition, wiper operation, and defroster operation, but no law said he had to have a windshield. So he took it out.
Soon enough after that, that same young cop pulled Frank over, an argument broke out between the cop and Frank over his lack of windshield. The police constable ultimately wrote frank up a ticket for not having any windshield in his truck. Frank of course took this to court, and when he showed the judge that there was no law saying that he had to have a windshield, the judge agreed and Frank won his case. So from that point on, no matter how cold it got to press his point he would drive that truck without any windshield at all! He sure showed that young "punk" cop a thing or two!
I know what he is thinking in his mind when he is driving that truck with minus thirty degree wind frost biting his cheeks, freezing his ears, everyone in the truck with him wrapped in as many scarves as they could find. I know he loved it! Every time he drove past a cop and they took a second look but they could not do nothing about it gave Frank the chance to relive that victory in that he had enjoyed in that court room, that warm court room, I might add. In his mind he was driving the police nuts by flaunting his rights that way. But really, to me, I am not so sure he was getting the last laugh.
"What are you guys doing here?" Frank asked suspiciously.
"Oh Dave needs a battery for his truck and I told him you might have one he could get off you" Danny responded.
Pure genius! I thought.
"At this time of night?" queered his dad.
"Well we were sittin' around at mom’s house and I realized you guys would be getting here about now so we headed over to wait for ya” Danny tells him.
"Okay, well we should have something here." Frank answered.
Danny's brother Dave had the keys to the shop, or rather the lock on the chain that tied the big doors shut. Danny had cleverly cut only one link off the chain, the link next to the lock, so that the chain could be reused. Dave noticed that the chain was no longer hooked through the chain, but the chain had been replaced to only look like it was locked. When Dave saw this he gave us look that told us he knew we had been up to something, but used the keys to unlock the lock anyway; tricking Frank into thinking that nothing was wrong.
We all entered the shop; it was now dark again, as we had unplugged the lights in preparation for the possibility of Frank coming back to the shop as part of our effort to hide our trail. I was worried that when they turned the lights on the piece of steel plate we cut would be discovered and all hell would break loose. But no one attempted to turn on any lights, and I followed them through the darkness to a small door at the side of the shop.
The door opened up into what was like a hallway, perhaps twenty-five or thirty feet long. But this was no ordinary hallway; the walls were entirely made from old car batteries, pallets of them. Each wall was more than a yard thick, and a full eight feet high. The roof was made from old pallets and crisscrossed boards supporting corrugated sheet metal roofing. It seemed slightly warmer in there than out side, but not much.
I followed them down the hallway to the end where it turned to the left; some plywood was fastened some how to the batteries by a couple of hinges and a clasp type lock held it shut. The plywood door swung open into a room that was about twelve by sixteen feet in size. All the walls were also made from pallets of old car batteries. Richard switched on a small table lamp that was sitting on an end table between two of the three beds.
The beds were those old steel frame and tubular head and foot frame type beds, draped over them were old woolen Hudson Bay blankets. The blankets were in poor shape, not just dirty, but the effects of battery acid had burned large holes in them so that it took several blankets to make up enough coverage to be effective to keep oneself warm. The pillows were covered with what once was a white pillowcase, but now were stained with an imprint of dirt and grime where their heads had laid.
The lone un-shaded bulb in the table lamp dimmed considerably when Frank plugged in the electric space heater. The fan in the old shaky legged portable heater squeaked with a crescendo rhythm until it smoothed out into a continuous high-pitched chirp. I watched the heater coil within it expecting to see it begin to glow, but it did not. I reached out and held my hand over to feel the heat coming off of it but I could not detect any warmth at all radiating off of it. I guessed that it maybe starts to work better after the room warms up a bit more, which I am sure would take a long time.
It was all very strange and awkward; I did not know why I had followed them all into this room. It all seemed surreal, like some kind of hillbilly hideaway; it felt like this should be a scene from the movie deliverance. All I knew was one thing; "There ain't no way I was gonna squeal like a pig!"
As it turned out they had only returned to the shop to pick up some more hose for their oxy-acetylene torch. Apparently they were cutting an opening in the hanger and their hose would not reach high enough to cut the wall out across the top where the hanger door was to go. Frank took a quick look for a battery for us but in the dark he was not sure which ones were good or not. They got the hose needed and we all went to my truck and push started it before they drove off back to the airport.
When they were out of sight we quickly went back about our deed and with great difficulty slid the fifth wheel off the little highway tractor and onto the steel plate we had fastened to my truck box. Dave had considerately left the door unlocked, and had only fake chained it back up, not actually locking it, allowing us access to the shop again with out having to cut the chain. I was surprised that he did this, not even knowing what it was we were up to. I backed my truck into the shop so we could weld the fifth wheel down to the steel plate.
We noticed that the springs were bottomed out and the frame was resting on the axle. The weight of the steel plate and fifth wheel plate alone were more than the half-ton suspension could handle. We dared not to pause to think of how it would handle an empty highway trailer, let alone a loaded one. So we jacked up the truck and cut some wooden blocks to fit between the frame and the axle to restore the proper ride height to the truck. Needles to say it rode like a plank after that.
By now it was past five in the morning, and I had to get to work in a couple of hours. I went home and it felt like I had just closed my eyes and it was time to get up. I hate working when I am over tired, I just hate it. I remember friends that could stay up all night and party, and the next day function as if they had been sleeping like a baby since nine o'clock the night before. I could never do that, and I hated the way it made me feel when I didn’t get enough sleep.
After work that night Danny met up with me and we went over to the trailer with the truck and backed it under the trailer and hooked onto it. Even though I had stayed up all night to rig the truck up to try it, I did not believe that the little half ton had a hope of moving it. I carefully eased out the clutch pedal and gave her a little gas. The first gear of this truck was way too high for pulling any kind of normal trailer, let alone a highway tractor type trailer. It took a bit of fancy clutch and gas pedal footwork to get it rolling, but I was able to make it roll.
I chuckled nervously as I pulled off the lot and onto the side street. This must look insane! I was thinking, and picturing what it must look like from some one else's point of view made me chuckle. Getting it moving was one thing, getting stopped was another. I could barely even stop it; I had to plan well ahead for any stops we would have to make, so as long as there were no surprises, we should be okay.
I was so very tired, and I headed home with the trailer to get some sleep, our plan was to leave about one or two in the morning. This would allow us to make the first ferry across the river. At least that was our plan, but as it would turn out the ferry was running twenty-four hours a day. At that time of year they ran the ferry steady in an effort to keep the crossing open as long as possible. But I had not realized that at the time, but it wouldn't have made any difference as to when we would have left anyway. I mean now when I think about it, what difference could it have made? But at the time my whole departure time was based on irrelevant factors and I didn't even notice.
When we arrived at my house I told Danny that he could take a nap on the couch and I would go to bed for a while to get as much sleep as possible before we headed out. It was still early, about six in the evening, and Danny was not as ready to sleep as I was. So before I headed upstairs for bed I made a small list of tools that I thought he should gather from my three quarter ton pickup that was in the driveway. I made him a list and told him to put everything in a couple of five-gallon plastic paint pails that he also could find in the pickup box of the truck.
I tried to sleep, but I could hear Danny down stairs, he was much too excited to be quiet, and I couldn't get to sleep for all the noise he was making. Danny was acting like a kid anticipating the arrival of Christmas day. So I just lay there, resting as best I could, almost falling asleep, then only to be jerked back awake by some new noise Danny had caused down stairs. By eleven o'clock I could take no more, so I got up, and told Dan that we were leaving.
I rounded up four thermoses from the kitchen and filled them all with strong coffee. If I were going to drive all night I would need them. Danny said he had everything I wanted ready and it was all in the truck. Before heading out the door to leave I took another look through the house trying to see if there was anything that might be useful should we break down out on the highway. Danny was so anxious to get going that he kept distracting me from imagining what sot of things that we might need if something went wrong. So I just grabbed a sack of rags out of the kitchen closet and stuffed it into the pickup box under the steel plate that we had installed to mount the fifth wheel hitch to. “What’s that for?” Danny asked as I slammed the tailgate shut and climbed out from under the highboy.
“I don’t know, but if we need you’ll be glad we got it!”
Pulling a highboy trailer with a half-ton pickup truck is slow going. I could not hold high gear, I would try to put it into third gear after winding second gear out till that three hundred inch six-cylinder engine was screaming, and then put it into third gear. But it was too big a jump in gear ratios, and the engine would labor and we would begin to slow down, so I had to go back down to second gear, and this was with the trailer empty!
Thirty-two miles an hour was all I could get out of her; it was going to be a long trip. It was at least two hundred till the river crossing at Providence, so at this rate it would take us at least six hours to make it that far and I was already tired. I had not even slept the night before; having stayed up rigging the pickup with the fifth wheel hitch. I then worked a full shift, and the rest that I had just before we left could not really be counted as sleep. But I was committed now, or at least someone should have had me committed, but now there was no turning back.
It was no easy drive, the trailer had a mind of its own, and it took steady concentration to keep it straight. It was so stressful to concentrate on keeping us on the road that my hands were becoming sore because I was gripping the wheel so tight. I was constantly correcting to the left, then to the right, then to the left again, over and over. I had developed a rhythm of steering the wheel that seemed to work, left back to center, left then back to center, then left again and then back to the right, then right, back to center, then right, then back to center. Repeating this routine over and over, if I tried to just hold the wheel straight the trailer would begin to jackknife on us, it was a strain to keep it all gathered up behind me.
There was a cool wind blowing up my pant leg from the hole in the firewall where John had neglected to replace the seal. I had never driven this truck much in the winter so I had no idea of how big a problem this was. I stopped the truck and we packed some of the rags around the opening. But it did not help very much, we stopped several times to repack the air leak, but no matter how well we thought we had it sealed, it still blew a cold draft on my legs.
It didn’t take too long for my legs to ache from the cold, it felt cold, but it ached more. I told Danny that it was as if I could see my leg bones in an x-ray of pain. I could feel a perfect bone shaped ache in the middle of my lower legs. Both lower leg bones were aching out their outline in my minds eye. I draped my parka over them, but this was awkward and made it difficult to drive. Eventually I resorted to shifting my legs to position them out of the draft, putting my right leg out of the draft and onto the transmission hump, and using my left leg on the gas. This would give my right leg some relief, but not my left leg, there was no good place to put my left leg, and I could not position it out of the cold draft. By this time we were less than eighty miles out of Yellowknife, there was more than four hundred miles yet to go and that was just one way, we would then have to turn around and come back; I could not imagine how I was going to bear it.