Here's the label:
The front cover of the brochure started with:
The Campbell Brothers Present...
Engineer Behind
(again with the picture of the dozer stuck in the bog)
One of the many misadventures of Ralph Campbell, known then as Ralph of the bog.
On the inside of the brochure the story started:
This is a true story, the names have not been changed because nobody is innocent.
This is decanted to the memory of one Lucien Lemetang (and I hope I spelled his name right). He is remembered fondly, even after all these years. I hope his spirit rests in peace.
Lucien has the right to be called a character. The reason for this is because that’s what he was, a real character. He was a hard working, hard living, wiry man who worked up north in the bush for a sawmill company (like the one that had just hired me). Lucien had no family, at least that he knew of, and his way of life was to work incredibly hard in the bush, driving bulldozer, for maybe three months at a time, and then take the next three or four weeks off to get drunk and hang out, basically to live, in a brothel until all the money ran out and he had to go back to work. That was his life.
But Lucien was a good friend to me. He helped this young English Canadian come up from Southern Ontario, a guy still wet behind the ears, a collage kid just graduated from school. Well, Lucien was my teacher there, or one of them, and from him I learned about logging, and working with people.
Not long after I started with the lumber company the order came down from the owner to move the cutting crews to a new cutting area. We had two days, Lucien and I, to make a logging trail and a landing site (for the rough cut timbers to be collected).
Early one morning a flat bed truck dropped off the D-6 bulldozer at the beginning of the new cutting area and then left. Lucien and I, who had driven out in a pick-up truck to the site, got out and readied ourselves for work. I turned to Lucien and told him that I wasn’t too sure about how to go about this (rough dozing a trail). He turned to me and said in his heavy French accent, “Hokay den, I teach you to be engineer behind.”
And I said, “What?”
And he said, “Yeah, you stay dere behind the bulldozer with the photograph, map and compass (a compass, by the way, doesn’t work very well on or near a bulldozer because of all the metal) and tell me which way to go? Hokay?”
Truck on a logging road
So we started to make a trail through the bush, me walking behind the D-6 with my map and my compass trying to figure out where we were and what direction to go. Lucien was busy ahead of me building the trail (de-building the forest) and he would look back at me every once in a while to see which way he should go; right, left, or straight ahead.
For the first couple of hours things went great until I missed a turning point. Instead of making a turn we went straight…straight into a bog. I soon learned where the expression ‘to get bogged down’ came from. It happened so quickly it was unbelievable. Black bog mud came up over the bulldozer’s tracks and the dozer sank up to its belly pan in the muck. Muck rhymes with stuck, and with another choice word that I’ll refrain from using here.
Lucien tried as hard as he could to get the bulldozer out but it kept sinking further and further into the bog. There was a look in his eye which seemed to say, ‘Look what dis #*&%@* stupid English person done to me and my baby’. He didn’t say much to me after that, only a couple of times, to direct me in what he wanted done.
In doing soil classifications you try to describe the type of soil you’re looking at. For example, in describing a bog the description might be a ‘peaty muck’ or a ‘mucky peat’, but this stuff was either a ‘crappy muck’ or a ‘mucky crap’, or what we call, in layman’s terms, ‘loon shit’, and that’s the way it smelled and the way it felt. It oozed in everywhere and into everything. It seeped into your clothes like India ink. And did I mention the smell?
The way we eventually got out, after about three hours of backbreaking and dirty work, was that we cut small trees and kept feeding them under the tracks of the D-6 and slowly walked it backwards out of the bog until we got to solid ground.
Once out, I climbed on top of the D-6 and we started to follow our trail out of the bush. It seemed like hours that I sat beside him and watched as he operated the controls. He never said a word, he just steamed. The look in his eye made my heart and soul sink further and further (like a dozer in a swamp). Even though I was a big lad I felt pretty small right then. We finally got back to the road, cleaned the mud off the tracks of the dozer before it froze there, and still not a word from Lucien.
We were sitting in the truck, just about to start back for home, when Lucien poured himself a cup of coffee from his thermos, took a sip, and pointed to the D-6 and said, “You know dat yellow ting over dere? It no submarine.”
And that’s the story of my first experience of being an engineer behind.
S
One night, a few years later, when it was -40 below (and it doesn’t matter whether you use Celsius or Fahrenheit, they’re both the same) and Lucien was quite drunk, he went outside of his little shack in the bush to take a piss. He passed out and, as they say, when he woke up he found himself frozen and quite much dead. It wouldn’t take long at that temperature. You could have used him as a plank on a logging bridge.
Sigh. He’ll be missed very much.
And that is why this wine is dedicated to Lucien. I hope that you will raise a glass in his honour.
And that's it. I really liked the story and even though it's a departure from what we usually do I think it works well.
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