I graveled a 7 mile stretch of national forest road in the mountains just outside of town, operating an elderly day cab Peterbilt.

In winter. It was a 9 speed truck, with a push-button ignition.

Sleepy Pete.

The truck had a few problems.

Air leaks left it wheezing like a congested pachyderm. (I would find out later that the brakes only worked on 2 of the 3 trailer axles, but that’s another adventure.) The relay valve failed at one point. The tires would randomly go flat. The belly dump doors would do their own thing when the air pressure got low enough.

The heater would randomly quit.

It lost antifreeze, which would get so low it would trip an emergency shutdown and stall the truck.

And it’s not really a reassuring thing when you can grab hold of what’s left of the front shocks and shake them freely. It was not a truck to have an open cup of coffee in whilst it was hobbling along.

It had to be that truck, there were no others. I was the only belly-dump and I hauled the bulk of the gravel for the project for 7 miles worth. Back and forth I went, for all the hours of daylight that we had.

There are reasons that people don’t mess with gravel in the winter, in the mountains, but the owner of the very-small construction company (we’ll call him ‘Murphy’) was unaware of that. Murphy would get very frustrated and scream curses at things. Machinery quivered in dread at his presence. Things that were working would suddenly stop working when he came near them.

Besides the gravel freezing, so does all the equipment. (And the operators!)

Any snowfall, which occurred frequently had to be completely cleared.

Clearing snow in the woods.

We were set up in an ironically-named forest service hot-shot fire-fighters camp. That’s where the owner put the rock crusher, which also frequently broke down. There was no garage, no heat, no running water, no nothing.

Torches were necessary to de-ice the equipment in subzero temperatures.

-10 and froze up.

The truck quickly grew tired of the weather and the jostling. It developed the habit of sudden cardiac arrests in addition to the low-coolant shutdowns. It stalled repeatedly. 10+ times a day.

Up and down the washboard road, I almost did too. I couldn’t blame the truck. Murphy thought maybe the problem would go away if ignored. It was an interesting tactic but not an effective one.

You’d be jostling down the road when suddenly everything would go dead. It was a little unnerving.

This exciting problem required crawling out of the truck, pulling the fuse panel cover and resetting a circuit breaker. It was eerily like applying a defibrillator. <Charging! Clear!>

Afterward you could bounce and jolt on your merry way, ever cautious for the next incident.

The road we were graveling was steep in places, winding and full of ice from the frequent snows due to the higher elevations. It was a forest-service back road, there were no guardrails.

I retrieved my load of gravel and set off on my way. It had rained and snowed again the night before and then froze. Bouncing up a grade at a crawl on a corner, I thought to myself what a terrible place that would be for the truck to stall out.

<sputter…poof> The universe snickered.

“Oh *&#@!”

The truck came to a stop, quite abruptly due to the grade. I applied the brakes to keep from rolling backwards, knowing it was going to be difficult to get going again, on the ice, with that weight on that grade.

<ssssshhhhh>

“What the hell?”

<ssssshhhhh>

Oh dear god, we (the truck and I) are skidding backwards on the ice! Towards the edge of a drop off!

It was like something in a disaster movie, complete with creaking Titanic sound effects. I’ve never liked disaster movies. The truck would shudder, creak and slooowwllly skid backwards a few inches at a time. I knew we were going over the edge and there was little I could do.

I could only try to hold the truck back from gathering any more momentum and try to guide the trailer a few skids at a time.

I felt strangely matter-of-fact. In my years of safe equipment operation, I was now going to skid over the edge of an embankment while driving for loony people, with a fully loaded belly dump on an icy gravel road in the butt-cold winter, when normal people just don’t do construction work like this. I knew that to roll the truck over off that drop-off probably wouldn’t kill me, but it wouldn’t be very fun.

Creeeaaak!

In my head, Celine Dion passionately sang, “My gravel will go on…” I’ve never liked that song either.

I tried to jack the trailer across the road, but at a few inches at a time it wasn’t very effective. By this time the truck also had a lung collapse and the low air siren wailed away, adding to the atmosphere.

Skidding backwards a few inches at a time.

The 2 way radios were out of range. I had a cell signal and called Murphy in the few seconds I had between skids, who was up the road in a grader.

“You’d better get down here, your damn truck died again, it’s steep and we’re skidding backwards on the ice, going over the edge.”

“Oh.”

(Oh?!)

“I’ll send the loader up there.” <click>

Creeeaaak!

Right on the edge, it suddenly stopped.

What on earth?

The truck quit skidding. I climbed out to investigate on my newly-rubberized legs.

I saw the passenger side front-tire was being chocked by a tiny, 1.5”-2” ice plow berm that you couldn’t see because it had been covered by the new snowfall. Just barely enough to hold the truck.

I looked at the tractor and it wearily looked back at me, we both shrugged. The minutes ticked by.

With a rumble, the loader finally came chugging up carrying a heavy chain to pull the Peterbilt, a bucket of gravel for traction and tire chains.

We blocked the road, a graveled forest grade. A car came rolling up, skis attached to a carrier on it’s roof. A guy, with slicked back hair and a literally orange face from spray-tanning gone-wrong, pushed the button to roll his window down. He was wondering how long we’d be because he just really wanted to get to his ski-area?

Really? We stared in disbelief.

It was pretty obvious by the jacked-truck, loader, chains and positioning that a nasty incident was narrowly averted. Never mind the road being in very poor shape. It was very inconsiderate of us to block the grade and interrupt his skiing; and would we be long?

It was surreal. I had visions of him leaving orange traces in the snow wherever he went. I pondered that he could blaze his own trail and never get lost.

Muppet-man eventually decided he’d find another route into his ski area and we eventually got everything back on track.

It was determined later that an ignition switch wire had worn down to bare metal. It would make contact with other metal behind the dash panel, short out and blow the breaker. It took multiple days, over 20 stalls and nearly losing the truck to get the problem addressed.

I’ve been asked why I didn’t just jump out and let the truck go (over the side). I didn’t because I was hired to deal with these kinds of things and make decisions. Since there was a chance I could stop the truck, I had to stay with it.