Petunia

I used to drive a truck with an engine called a ‘boat anchor’, and named Petunia.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure if truck is the right term. Rig, maybe. It’s the kind of unit that guys, some guys, anyway, really want to drive because it’s such a gnarly beast. I can tell you now that it was fun, but that monster tried to kill me, a lot.

I needed a job, so I called my friend-I’ll just call him Tao to maintain anonymity-and he said he’d give me a wage, a truck, and a phone if I came over right away, which I did, and he did. He’d landed a good contract up at the Sechelt mine, and he had a ‘truck’ for the job but he needed a driver, and thought I’d be a perfect fit. I was vehicle-less at the time, so he came to pick me up from Vancouver, and on the way home we picked up a very weird old street sweeper, and a....well used hydro vac truck. I drove the daily driver, and the others limped the other units to the ferry, and back to the Sunshine Coast.

I’ll say this with love and no small amount of baffled admiration for one of my oldest friends, he likes to buy things that require his buying even more things, and a septic service company with a few old trucks is certainly one of those, especially if you keep buying more old trucks.

Petunia was one of those old trucks. Her front end was boxy and massive, with the top of the flat hood about seven feet high, and the top of the cab at about 10. The cab was followed by an 8000 litre tank topped by a water cannon, and punctuated at the rear by a bumper(that was not a bumper)made of a massive T fitting off the back of the tank that fed baffled 4-inch steel pipes off to each side. Riding on 65-inch balloon tires and hinged in the middle, not to mention painted flat black and sporting a dozer blade on the front, it immediately-and to this day-sparked visions of post-apocalyptic zombie squishing in a world where nobody remembered carbon footprints or virtue signalling. She was glorious.

I like driving a lot, but at this point, it had been a while since I had been behind the wheel of anything, and I was a little nervous to climb up into that cab. Tao, who has always displayed enthusiastic and unshakeable confidence in me, said I’d be fine, and that, as usual, was enough for me. My phone was a Blackberry, my daily driver was a flat black Dodge pick-up with a 318 named Roger(Dodger), The Beast was parked up at the treatment plant, and the work site was all over the adjacent Sechelt gravel mine.

I was all set up for the job, which was as follows:

Actually, I should describe the site a little bit first. There is a LOT of gravel in that mine. They have been digging gravel out of that mine for over 25 years, and they are nowhere near the end of it. With all that digging, they’ve obviously made some pretty big holes, but someone is planning the progression, so it’s not just one gigantic moonscape. There are long, jutting ridges, clifftop roads overlooking the settling ponds over 100 feet below, massive, flat roadways wide enough for the mine dump trucks to pass one another, and that go from the lowest pits to the heights where all the digging is happening, and there are also smaller roads going every which way so the lighter trucks can take shortcuts and stay out of the way of the heavy rollers.

There are also several islands of green. On areas that they weren’t going to get back to for a while, land restoration contractors planted forests of Poplar trees if the area was flat, and seeded tough grasses and wildflowers on the slopes. The functions of this verge were to keep the dust down, provide ground stability and water retention, and maybe pretty the place up a bit for a while, but all those plants needed more than gravel to thrive on, and that’s where I came in. And now we’re back.

At day one.

· Check the oil a lot because this is a juicy beeatch that never stops leaking.

· Start her up and make sure everything is working, certainly the hydraulics, but especially the air system, because if you don’t have air, you don’t have brakes, because it’s an air diaphragm pushing on a hydraulic brake system, so don’t lose air.

· The steering system is two hydraulic rams bending the truck at the hinge in the middle. It’s weird, and it’s really hard to turn if you aren’t rolling, and it sucks to back up.

· There are a lot of hoses and lines and wires crossing that hinge and going to all the stuff on the back of the truck, so be careful with them.

· Drive the Beast for a couple of laps around the treatment plant site to get a feel for her, and if you drive it into one of the ponds just walk away.

· Park by that hose, engage the PTO to fire up the vac pump and suck a tank full of sludge out of the pond.

· Drive through the gate into the mine, lock the gate but don’t let the truck roll away.

· Drive up the really steep hill at 5 minutes per kilometer until it levels out and you can get up to 30 kph, but watch out for the mine trucks. They don’t like stopping. And don’t drive 30 kph.

· You have the map. These two areas get sprayed with the pooh cannon on the top, and these areas with the rows of trees, you drive down the rows and spray out the back.

· Good? Good. See you after. Give me a call if you need anything.

I really don’t know how to tell this story....

The thing about old trucks that have been sitting around for a while is that they’ll often work well enough that you expect them to not stop working, but when you really start working them hard all those hoses and all those lines, and wires, and bolts, and diaphragms start to show their age, and fail.

Everything went pretty well the first trip out, but I was pretty nervous about the steep hill that led back down to the treatment plant. There was a bermed corner just past the gate, and if I went over it, it was over 100 feet to the water of the settling pond, and that was a trip I did not want to make. The brakes had worked fine on all the other hills, though, so....

I lost brakes about half way down the hill. The Beast was an automatic, so there was no hope of using the transmission to slow me down, and because I thought I was going to blow the engine or the transmission, I put the truck in neutral, and the revs dropped, but I sped up, so I grabbed the ‘Oh shit” handle and dropped the dozer blade onto the road, which did nothing. The roads were so hard and flat that it wouldn’t dig in, it just skipped along the surface for another hundred meters or so-I wasn’t counting because I was looking at that berm at the corner while pushing on the dozer blade lever and fumbling for the door handle-and then it bit, and over the next few meters, stopped me while I face-planted into the front window.

I didn’t see the point of getting out while the truck was still on the hill, so I backed up past the gate, put it in gear, still didn’t have brakes, and did it all over again. Then I decided to back in through the gate-which was really hard in that rig-parked it, and called Tao.

We laughed about it, of course.

It WAS pretty awesome for day one, of so many.

 I’ll have to pick this up again.

Another time.