January 2010 TRUCKER TALK
AN ICE ROAD LEGEND
BY WRITER & DRIVER KIM GRIMM
Alexander Debogorski calls himself the original ice road trucker – and after three long seasons on the wildly popular “Ice Road Truckers” cable television show, Alex has a following of fans as huge as his persona. My friend Pete and I were lucky enough to spend the afternoon and evening visiting with this intelligent and funny man from the brutal Northwest Territories of Canada. Alex is larger than life and enormously capable, able to take on the hardest and most demanding jobs – like driving a loaded truck over frozen lakes, being a famous television personality, and raising his eleven children.
Always acting like a big kid, Alex told me that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do when he grows up, and after talking to him for awhile, I believe him. I think he still has a lot more to do in life, and the show has given him many opportunities. He’s a man with his own opinion – and he’s always willing to share it. I figured out rather quickly that Alex is a very accomplished story teller. With his booming voice and infectious laugh, I really enjoyed listening to his stories. Just ask a question, and then sit back and listen.
Growing up in the Peace River area of northern Alberta, Canada, with his three brothers and one sister, Alex was teased a lot in school until he got too big to pick on. Back then, so he says, he was even pretty shy (that’s hard to believe now). When he was younger, he told me that he was a little clumsy and that he would spend most of his spare time in the woods talking to birds. And then the stories began!
He told me about a woodpecker that would peck on the side of their log house at the same time every morning. One day while he was outside, he saw what looked like a four-foot tall woodpecker moving dirt out by their barbed wire fence. He told his mother about it, but she didn’t believe him. Later, he found out that it was a Northern Pileated Woodpecker – the book I read says they can be up to two-and-a-half feet tall! With a call that sounds like a wild laugh, this is the bird that the famous cartoon character Woody Woodpecker was modeled after. Maybe this one was a little shorter than four feet, but to an eleven year old boy with an ever-growing imagination, it sure looked that big!
When I asked Alex about the cold up north, he told me a story about a friend he remembered. “He’d put on his long-johns in August, and by the end of October they’d heat themselves – and then they’d heat him and the truck until Memorial Day weekend! Then, he’d take them off and start the garden with them. That’s about as green as you can get.” He laughed and then added, “For this friend, a bath depended on the summer – he got two if it was a good summer, but if it was a bad one, he had to wait until next year.
Alex met his wife, Louise, at a dance. As he told the story, he said that he was sure that he had asked a blonde to dance with him but it was a brunette that was left on the floor. I gave Louise the opportunity to tell her side of the story, and she said, “He told that story again!” But they did meet at a town dance. At that time, they were sixteen years old and lived sixty miles apart. They used to have these dances so that the kids from different towns and schools could meet. After they both finished high school, they went off to Edmonton to go to college, where Louise began to study nursing – but I’m not sure what Alex was doing.
At the end of a semester, one of Alex’s professors invited the entire class to her house for wine and cheese and to discuss the book that had been assigned for that class. Alex attended the party for the free food and drink. While sitting there, he saw another professor heading down the hall with a bottle. Figuring that was where the fun would be, he found the man in the study and joined him to share the bottle and some conversation. He told me that he learned more from that man in a couple of hours than he’d learned the entire semester in the other professor’s class (the host of the party). They only went to college for one year, and then, as Louise put it, “We got pregnant.” They got married and moved north, and then Alex began working in a mine, running heavy equipment and trucks, but he always had two or three jobs (he was even a bouncer at a bar). Alex and Louise have now been married for 38 years!
Alex worked in the mines, with all that carbon and coal dust, running a dozer and pulling double shifts when others wouldn’t. He bought his first truck in 1978 to haul to the mine. He told me about a road in the Alberta Rocky Mountains that, on average, a driver was killed every six months. Hauling heavy loads on the icy mountain road made for a very dangerous combination. He told me about the first (and only) woman driver that ran on that road – she was very capable, but one day she lost control and crashed into a rock wall. The impact broke her neck and killed her. She had worked hard to earn the respect of the guys out there, and Alex really respected her. Louise told me that Alex had wanted her to go along for a ride with him on that road, but she was too chicken to go. And I don’t blame her one bit!
After two years of working in and around the mines, they moved even further north to Yellowknife with two little ones. Louise said that Alex was “looking for gold” out there. Today, Yellowknife has 15,000 residents, but back then, it wasn’t much. Located on the shores of Great Slave Lake at the mouth of the Yellowknife River, the town is the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories and the northernmost city in the country. Back then, they lived in an apartment until they built a shop with “living quarters” upstairs and moved there. They had no running water, no walls, and no doors – and no privacy. By this time, they had four kids. Then, they began buying old trailers that needed fixing up. They would live in the trailers while they were renovating them and then sell them. Needless to say, they moved a lot back in those days.
Alex always wanted twelve kids, but he only got eleven. He had come from what would be considered a small family back then (five kids), and Louise came from a family of seven – that, too, was considered fairly small. Louise said their only totally planned child was number three, which even came on the day he was supposed to. For each of their children, she wrote a birth story and has kept a lot of memorabilia, which she hopes to sort through one day when she gets the time. But with eleven kids (twelve if you count Alex), I can’t imagine that being anytime soon.
Alex is well-known around Yellowknife, and even once ran for mayor. He did not win the election, but it was a very interesting campaign (his campaign posters were printed on pieces of old automobile bodies). It was quite an experience for him. I am sure that the people of Yellowknife enjoyed his speeches much more than the stuffy politicians. When the producers of “Ice Road Truckers” came to Yellowknife looking for “characters” for their new show, everybody said that they should talk to Alex – and they were right.
For those of you who don’t know (you must live under a rock), “Ice Road Truckers” is a reality show about the truckers who haul loads to remote villages and work camps in northern Canada and Alaska. Running over frozen lakes and through a twisting landscape in temperatures as low as sixty degrees below zero, the drivers risk life and load to get the needed supplies to places that usually are cut-off during the winter. So far, Alex has been in all of the show’s three seasons, with the most recent one taking him up the North Slope Ice Road from the city of Fairbanks, Alaska to the town of Deadhorse, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
Besides driving trucks, Alex has also written columns for the local newspaper, but his writing experience doesn’t stop there. He also writes poetry, and he wrote the lyrics for the Ice Road Trucker song. He’s currently working on a book, but those wheels in his head turn slowly, so be patient. But look for it when it comes out – I think it will be a great read from a master storyteller!
Alex feels that the wildly popular show is teaching people about truckers and the life they lead. It shows the viewers not only the dangers and the rivalries out on the ice roads, but also the reality of getting the loads from one place to the other. The show has given Alex the opportunity to meet some great people and see some amazing landscapes. Out there on the ice, their radios are VHF and only have about a twenty mile range. Alex likes to tell stories on the radio, and if it’s a really good one, he’ll hear it again sixteen hours later, being told by someone else, when he’s on his way back.
If you have been lucky enough to see Alex at one of his several appearances this last year, then you know that he is friendly and that he likes to chat with his fans. And he is a tickler! I was warned that when you pose for a picture with Alex, he tickles your side to get you to laugh. Yes, he did tickle me, but I knew it was coming, so I did the same thing back to him. Louise came to the states three times during the four months that Alex was here. She didn’t get to see much of Dallas, and Las Vegas was not her cup of tea, but she did like New Mexico. My chat with Mrs Debogorski was just as enjoyable as chatting with Mr. Debogorski – these are real people, with real lives, and I find it funny that Alex has found fame (not fortune) on television and he doesn’t even own one!
Not looking to slow down anytime soon, Alex thinks that “retirement is a mentality” – which is not a mind-set that he really wants to embrace. Alex has worked hard his entire life and can’t imagine it any other way. We all get to see the stories they put on the television show, but I want to thank Alex and Louise for sharing some of their more personal “life stories” with me for this article! Pete and I had a great time with Alex and Louise and look forward to seeing them again soon. And if you get the opportunity to meet this “ice road legend” at an event or truck show out there, don’t pass it up. But if you pose for a picture with Alex, be ready to be tickled!