103 Stuck in the Mud with Doug

One of my good friends over the years at the Pacific Forestry Service was Doug Linton a very colorful character who spent most of the eighties roaming the Chilcotin with me. It was early May and we were out again cruising the Chilcotin for possible Mountain Pine Beetle sites. This was our first scouting trip of the season and the roads in many places were still quite muddy and soft because of the melting snows.

I enjoyed working with Doug even though he came from a completely different background then me but I appreciated his perspective on life. He had quite a different outlook and was far from spiritual in the traditional sense but was very respectful of my beliefs even though he couldn’t fathom why anyone would go to church.

This particular day we were cruising through the pine forests on what might be called a road, at least it had been used that winter as a means of hauling pine from a large landing to a sawmill in Williams Lake.

Doug was behind the wheel and came flying down the road and out into the landing where we slid to a stop, all four wheels up to their axels in the deep gumbo. We were stuck and I mean stuck, what had looked like a nicely graded clearing turned out to be a patch of bottomless gumbo.

If I remember correctly the air turned blue as Doug described the situation as best he could. And even though I did not say anything I would have to admit that Doug’s description of our predicament was fairly accurate.

The only thing to do now was to get the jack-all out and go to work.

In minutes out boots were the size of water buckets with the gumbo clinging to them like snot to a kids face. We could hardly lift out feet they were so heavy.

We began by jacking and or digging each wheel up and out of the mud to make room for whatever we could find in the nearby woods to place under it for traction. The truck was at least the length of itself out in the soft gumbo and it would take us well over two hours to free it from the mud.

Before we freed it from the gumbo we had to jacked each wheel up at least four or five times, as the truck would only move about three feet before the wheels would slide off the chunks of support wood and the truck would again be bellied out in the gumbo.

Shovelling the mud was also a real challenge as the gumbo refused to leave the shovel and if you weren’t careful the shovel would take off with the gumbo.

In the meantime Doug and I were getting more frustrated as the operation continued, Doug however cracked first about halfway through the scenario and looking at me says with the most disgusted look on his face he said, “I don’t know how you can stand there and be so stoic.” All I could say was, “You’re swearing enough for both of us.”

That was the last of the talk but boy were we sure relieved when the old Dodge crew cab again found solid ground.

It seems that anytime work is done on a road in the winter it leaves the ground really soft. A few years later this sort of thing happened again, but only this time I was driving on an otherwise good road when suddenly the truck hit a stretch of winter road repair, and again bellied out in the gumbo. Malcolm Shrimpton and Sue Poppel took off and left Paul Bodwyn and myself to dig us out. Only this time we used some old boards we had found from a dilapidated shack that happened to be near by. At least we had something to put under the wheels to make it a might easier, but it still took the proverbial two hours to get the truck back on solid ground.