Thursday, September 16, 2010

Alex, Ice Road Trucker

Published in Western Canada Highway News, Fall 2010:
Alex Debogorski is known to millions as a star of the History Channel’s Ice Road Truckers. That makes him probably the Northwest Territories’ most famous resident, and perhaps Canada’s best-known trucker.
But he contends the reality show’s title gives people the wrong impression of him.
“I don’t consider myself a trucker, but I drive trucks,” says the personable father of 11 and grandfather of seven. He pauses, and then concedes with a chuckle: “I’m not sure what that means.”
To understand how this truck-driving non-trucker came to be famous as a trucker, it helps to rewind the Debogorski story to the early 1970s, when teenaged Alex was trying to earn a living in his native Alberta.
Quite a raconteur, he’s happy to tell the story.
“I started out in 1972,” he says from Alaska, where Ice Road Truckers’ fourth season is being produced. “I didn’t plan on driving trucks. I went to university for a year – the University of Alberta – got married when I was 18 years old and had 16 jobs that first year. I was trying to get a job, get set up.
“We had a baby and I got offered a job in Grand Cache hauling coal. I was driving a truck and getting paid about three times as much as the other 15 jobs that I had.”
At that west-central Alberta locale, Debogorsksi drove a GM dump truck to transport coal to a power plant five days a week. It wasn’t long, he relates, before “we had these big diesel off-road trucks that were hauling coal down the mountain, and I wanted to drive those.
“That was dangerous work. We were coming down the mountain with a 30-yard box on a body job with a 350 Cummins in it. You know, in the winter time with two mountains, there was ice and chinooks would come through. It would get slippery and the trucks would run away, you’d run out of brakes and we had cliffs on all sides.
“And then from there,” he continues matter-of-factly, “I almost got killed.” A workplace accident sent him to a hospital, where he met someone who told him about an opportunity in the mining sector. He went looking for gold in central BC, but that was a bust. (“I lost my pants there” is Debogorski’s colourful way of putting it.) He and his wife and child returned to Alberta, and eventually a family friend found him a job in Yellowknife with Robinson Trucking.
“That was in August 1976,” he recalls. “I got there the 10th of August and I’ve been there ever since. Started with Robinson, and I drove a taxi, and I worked in a bar. I worked four jobs for a couple of years. I just about killed myself. Then I started my own business, and then I got it down to just driving a taxi and running my own (excavating) business. And then finally I quit driving cabs and just stuck with the dirt business and we survived. We didn’t get wealthy but we did alright. When I turned 40 I realized I had retired at around 28 but didn’t know it at the time.”
By “retired” he means isn’t a slave to his job; he can leave it at any time. “Just in knowing that you can pick your coat off the hook and leave, that makes the job 10 times better. That’s what retirement is – knowing that you can always do something different.” He says it’s a position everyone should try to be in.

No place like home
“A trucker, to me, is a guy who goes up and down the highway 12 months a year,” Debogorski says. “I’ve been fortunate and I spend most of my time around home.”
But, as he’s saying those words, he’s in Alaska for another season’s taping of Ice Road Truckers. “I’ve been here since the beginning of February,” he says, a few days before St. Patrick’s Day. “I guess I’m more of a trucker now, because I haven’t seen my family for a couple of months.”
Debogorski says driving isn’t something he would want to do year-round, “but I enjoy doing it for two or three months every year. Then I go do something different. This is part of retirement – doing different things. Otherwise, I get easily bored. Sometimes, driving is good. Sometimes, it can get monotonous after awhile. And especially on the jobs we do, if it gets too monotonous, if you take your eye off the ball, it’s an easy way to wreck stuff and get killed.”
The Alaska experience, taping season four of Ice Road Truckers, has been quite an eye-opener for him, in more than one way. Debogorski marvels at Prudhoe Bay’s “phenomenal industrial complex” and the region’s impressive scenery.
“On the clear days, the colours of the sky change. I could not believe how, on every trip, the colour is different. There are an infinite number of shades of pastel for the sky. It just blows me away.
“On the last trip, we had a herd of about 2,000 caribou on both sides of the road,” he remarks. “Then there were a whole bunch of sheep on both sides of the road, and we had to watch out for them. Some of the guys have seen musk ox under the pipeline. And, of course, closer to Fairbanks, you gotta watch out for the darn moose.
“And how many people have seen 40 eagles at once? Unless you’ve seen so many eagles at once, you don’t realize how different they are from one another. There’s tall ones and short ones, fat ones and skinny ones, ones with short beaks and ones with long beaks. They look comical because they all look different.
“Most people would have to pay lots of money to see what we see just driving down the road here.”

Famous in 50 states
By the time you read this, Ice Road Truckers’ fourth season will have premiered on the History Channel. The documentary-style series has changed Alex Debogorski’s life.
“I always thought I was famous, but now everybody else found out,” he quips. “Somebody told me that was actually a quote from some important guy, but I didn’t know that. I thought I invented that myself.
“It’s changed my life in quite a few ways. Like, last year, I spent quite a few weeks in the southern 48 (United States). I got my son to help me, and we got an agent, and we got these PR people this year we’re gonna try. Maybe we can make something out of this notoriety. Maybe we can make the world or some people’s lives better in some way, from an idealistic standpoint. Maybe we can make money off of it.”
The money’s important as Debogorski, well into 50s, ponders the conventional kind of retirement. But he says it isn’t all about the moolah.
“I don’t mind shaking hands and kissing babies, or shaking babies and kissing hands, talking to kids or visiting people in the hospital, or signing autographs,” he says. ‘If I can make somebody’s day by signing an autograph, that’s a pretty big deal.
“A lot of people say, ‘Oh that’s all baloney.’ Well, if I can improve somebody’s day by signing my name or having a picture taken with them, what the heck. It sounds stupid, but you’re making a difference in the world if you can improve somebody’s mood for a while.”
A sometime truck driver in the Northwest Territories becoming a star of a three-million-viewer U.S. cable show “might seem surreal for others,” he admits, but for some reason it doesn’t feel so odd to him.
“I mean, my life has been so twisty and turny,” he remarks. “For a guy that’s not very well travelled and not very well educated, I’ve lived a lot of life. For me, I’m not really overly surprised. The show’s just another twist, just another job, another opportunity to make a difference in the world, and maybe another opportunity to make a dollar. I know that my life is short. I think this show is a great thing.”