In 1972, I was a young lad out of school, looking for a driving job. I couldn't find one and no one would give me a job because I didn't know how to drive, so I went to a Ford dealer and told the salesman I wanted to buy that gold coloured gravel truck. I gave him a $1000 down payment and it was mine!  After sitting in the driver's seat for the first time I noticed TWO gearshifts on the floor??? After trial and error I found out that it had 20 forward and 5 reverse gears.
 
 

Photo by Duncan Smith

Photo by Duncan Smith

      Not long after my first load in March 1972 I got my first paying job... 500 miles north of Matagami,  Quebec to the James Bay Dam, a new hydro-electric plant under construction just south of James Bay, Quebec. The load entailed having the truck's dump box loaded with 45 gallon drums of fuel and pulling a 45-foot construction camp trailer hooked onto a custom built trailer hitch that had just been installed. The journey involved driving along a bush road, no pavement or gravel, just a plowed path through the bush. Fifty miles north of Matagami my trailer hitch broke... good, no more trailer to pull. Since I no longer had the trailer I became the lead truck.

      After a couple of long rough days the bush road ended at the edge of a lake. The lake was frozen but had a lot of open water throughout and I could see the road continuing on the other side. My thought was how do I get to the other side where the road continued? One of the older drivers pointed out the little branches that were sticking out of the water in a row as a guide and told me that as the "lead" truck I just had to stay between them. He guaranteed that there was ice just below the surface; he later told me that he had not been that sure. Just as I was about to cross the lake another driver came up to me and advised me to drive with the driver's door open, just in case the truck broke through the ice. As I'm slowly going forward,  I'm telling myself how stupid I was to be driving onto a lake with my new truck and asking myself if I should call it quits as the front tires hit the ice and the water touched the bottom of the doors. I kept driving very slowly to keep my engine as dry as possible as I didn't want it to stall in the middle of the lake. With the ice only two feet under me I had one foot on the gas pedal and one on the outside step, prepared to jump into the freezing water if the ice under me broke, if there was any ice at all. I made it, as did the rest, including their trailers.

      At the James Bay Dam camp we were served a good meal before heading back south. About five hours later we heard a loud explosion. We later found out that this explosion was caused by thousands of gallons of fuel exploding but never knew the cause. The trip south no longer held any excitement, since we all had become experts at crossing semi-frozen lakes.
 
 

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