Q: There are amazing scenes of you driving and the wind is blowing the snow over the ice and the northern lights are playing in the sky—it really does look otherworldly.
A: I can’t say enough about it. It touches the soul. You get this horizon on all sides except the shore maybe a mile away. It’s all pastel colours in the wintertime, like the desert. You know, the sun rises, the sun sets, the mountains, the hills, always different pastels. Indigos. Early in the springtime the eagles migrate back and you’ll see 30, 40, 50 eagles, short ones, tall ones, fat ones, long beak, short beak, different colorations, sitting on the ice, in the trees. The kinds of things nobody gets to see. The Arctic wolves that are almost every bit as big as caribou—just gigantic animals, with long legs. Or the caribou dancing. I’ve seen caribou running back and forth on their hind legs and thought the truck had scared them, and really all they were doing was just playing. As spring comes the ice starts to smooth out and the snow melts and the road just turns blue. It’s slippery—unbelievably slippery—it can take a quarter of a mile to slow down.
Q: You said it “touches the soul,” an interesting way to put it. You’ve volunteered as a lay prison minister, and I wonder what part that background plays in your coping with the risks of ice road trucking?
A: I was raised Roman Catholic and my dad used to make me go to the Armistice Day parade on Nov. 11 when I was a kid. I’d freeze my ass off sitting in the pickup in front of the legion hall while he and the boys had a few beers for a couple of hours. When I was young, I’d ask, “How many Germans did you kill, dad?” He’d say he didn’t kill any. He’d say, “When we started to fight, I put my head against the side of the foxhole and covered my head with a shovel and prayed to the blessed Virgin Mary. Once a German threw a hand grenade and it bounced off the shovel and blew my best friend’s head off.” One day he had a few extra ones in the legion and on the way home I asked him, “How many Germans did you kill, dad?” He said, “Thousands and thousands, I couldn’t count them.” That made the hairs stand on my neck. He always said what carried him through was his faith. I stopped going to church when I left home, except for the wedding. I told my wife I wanted my kids to learn how to pray, take them to church. Of course, Sunday was my hangover day. We’d have a battle every Sunday and she’d drag me to church and one thing led to another. Like I say, I’m not a great example of Christianity, but I’m a much improved version of what I once was.
Q: You’re a long-time ice road trucker in Yellowknife, a tight-knit community. How has being on TV changed your life?
A: Well, I don’t have a life anymore. I’ve lost my equilibrium. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not an actor, so I’m not really a movie star—a Hollywood guy. And four years hasn’t made me one. I have a business and a family at home and the business has basically ground to a halt. So I decided, maybe I can be a movie star—maybe I can be “The Britney Spears” and make money and some kind of constructive difference in the world from being “Debogorski, celebrity.” But I need to promote myself. So I started last year, I went to a truck show in Las Vegas and met some people, ended up going to more truck shows. The whole idea is to take advantage of the notoriety, so I’ve written a book.
Q: Are you happy with all this?
A: Oh, I’ll never be happy. I’ve never been one to be happy. The only time you’re happy is when you’re loaded. No. This is my new job. My life is upside down, I don’t have a lot of control. That’s what throws me off—I like to be in control and I’m not. I wait for the phone to ring so I can get on the plane, or do this or do that or don’t do that. I’m basically a monkey just waiting for an organ grinder.
Q: You must like the job enough to put up with it.
A: I have a different understanding of life than you do yet. We’re just putting in time until the coffin gets built. As a matter of fact, we should build our own coffin. And if I get the time, I need to build my own coffin, just to prove my point. You make your coffin and if you have a big house you make it into a coffee table. If you have a small apartment, you make it into a closet and you put it by the door and you hang your suit, coat, the stuff for the wedding or maybe for your funeral. And every day when you walk by, you give your coffin a pat. And you bring your day into perspective. And you’ll have better days because of that. The one thing about the ice roads, you spend a lot of time by yourself. If you don’t have the radio cranked up and your ear buds in or a TV turned on sucking one’s brains out, then one gets to think about a lot of these things. The shortness of life is amazing to me.
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