My friend, Sandy, spent a good part of his life as a long-haul trucker. Sandy was born, raised, and lived most of his remarkable life in South Carolina. But this is not about Sandy. I mention him now because he was addicted to a television program called Ice Road Truckers and he wanted desperately to have the experience of moving a trailer load of goods across frozen rivers and lakes. My stock in Sandy’s eyes went up significantly when I told him that I knew the original ice road warrior. The guy who built the roads into the NORAD and DEW line installations across Canada’s north. This is the story of that guy – Stuart DeMelt.
To say that Stuart (Stu) had an unusual life is to understate the meaning of “unusual”. Stu’s dad had left his parents and siblings in upper New York State, came to Canada and married a young woman who had come with her sister and brother-in-law from Glasgow, Scotland. When Stu was 9, his parents split up and his mother took his younger brother to Vancouver, BC. He and his father moved to a small Indian village on the south shores of Great Slave Lake. It was not an obvious choice of location but at the height of the Depression perhaps it looked a lot better than scratching a living out of the soil of northern Alberta.
Whatever his father’s plans were in northern Canada they didn’t seem to include Stu. He was left in his father’s shack to make out as he could while his father went further north to work in the nascent mining industry. In fact, his father staked claims over most of the new gold and uranium deposits that were being discovered and worked for some time as the mine recorder for the Federal government. When I worked at the Con Mine in Yellowknife almost forty years later, the company was developing and mining the DeMelt claims that Stu’s father had staked in the 1930s.
Stu made his way in the small indigenous community by cutting and selling firewood to the local Hudson’s Bay post and anyone else who could pay the charge. He also bought a trap line, built cabins, and kept a team of dogs so that he could spend January to April at the edge of the Barren Lands luring fur bearing animals into his traps and selling the semi-cured hides to the Hudson Bay Company in the spring. He did this from his early teens until he was 30 years old. What was I doing in my early teens? I certainly wasn’t doing dangerous work to make enough money to feed myself. I was going to school, which is something that Stu couldn’t and didn’t do. His formal education ended in grade 3.
When asked, Stu told me that he saw his father from time to time. He would return for short periods every year to ensure that his house was still standing and that his son still walked upright. What surprised me about Stu’s re-telling of his early life was the lack of rancor or blame that he assigned to his father. Giving him a bed to sleep in and checking in once a year seemed to be all that Stu required of him. Fortunately, he did not take such a lackadaisical approach to the raising of his own children, one of whom I proudly call my wife. But that is to jump ahead.
Against all odds, in his little community also lived a white woman who operated a general store and was raising her five children. In his early twenties Stu married her daughter and by his early thirties had four of his own children. Seeking educational opportunities for those children, he ended his trapping partnership with his brothers-in-law and took up residence in the mining community of Yellowknife on the other side of the lake. With a natural affinity for motors and mechanics he taught himself to drive tractor-trailers, dozers, backhoes and virtually all other types of heavy equipment. For a time he owned and operated a haulage service across Great Slave Lake using a Bombardier in winter and a boat in summer. When it was necessary to find someone to lead the construction of ice roads to the far north, the project sponsors did not have far to look. John Denison provided the executive leadership and funding. Stu made it all happen. Much later, prior to his passing in 2007, he entertained me for almost two days recounting his adventures.
In his hunting and trapping days, Stu had learned to “read” a frozen river to prevent his dog team from running over “rotten ice” that, due to the speed of the river current was too thin to hold the weight of the dogs, sled, and him. At times he was a bit dyslexic in his reading. He recounted a run across a river in which the ice opened, and the dogs pitched headlong into the fast moving current. In went the sled and in went Stu. Ambient air temperature was below minus 45 degrees.
“So, what did you do?”
“I got the dogs pulled out before the sled could drown them or the current pull them under the ice and then I got out of my clothes.”
Now I don’t think that getting out of one’s clothes at minus 45 degrees is the most intuitive thing to do. In response to my question, he assured me that he meant all his clothes. Socks, underwear, all of it.
“But why? Wasn’t there some insulating capacity in the clothing?”
“I had 60 seconds to get out of the clothes before they froze solid. If they did then I couldn’t move and so would die of exposure or starvation.”
Picture a buck-naked guy in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a pack of shivering dogs hot footing into a nearby bush to find wood and hoping that he had some dry matches to get the fire going. Obviously, he got the fire going and dried out his dogs and his clothes enough to get to his trapper’s shack. The difference between life and death in northern climes is measured in seconds. Then as now, when I picture Stu running around in the snow devoid of clothing, I laugh out loud. He laughed with me but was adamant that the humour escaped him at the time.
I was first introduced to Stu by his daughter when I was 16 years old, and it was a formidable experience. I later learned that his nickname was Griz and it was appropriate. He stood over six feet tall, had chest hair billowing out of his shirt and the crags on his face could hold lunch for two. He was also the strongest man I have ever known. I once paddled a canoe with him and even with me sitting in the back he had to stroke half as often as me to prevent us from going in a circle. After ten minutes of paddling, I was exhausted from keeping up to his idling. I once saw him lift a 45-gallon drum of diesel to move it and, seeing my eyes bulging, he said that he had seen his father lift one into the box of a pickup truck. Lean, tough, and very strong. More than once I reconsidered the advisability of presuming to date his daughter.
Part of ice road building involved the recovery of equipment when he and his men would have it fall through the ice. Instead of dogs, they were driving D-6 Caterpiller dozers to plough off the snow while pulling sleds of equipment and a heated caboose that contained a kitchen and beds. If the dozer broke through the ice, it would take the sleds and caboose in with it. You didn’t want to be asleep in bed when that happened so the caboose door was always left open. He told me that a point of great pride was not letting a single dozer go to the bottom of a river or lake before the ignition was switched off to prevent water from being pulled into the cylinder head and destroying the motor. This meant having the presence of mind to switch off the motor as the dozer slid under the water with you on it. I know what I would have done in that situation, and it wouldn’t involve turning off the ignition.
Erecting a tripod over the hole, he was always able to winch the equipment back onto the ice, dry it out, and continue on. In one memorable story, the temperature was hitting minus 60 degrees and the frame of the D-6 snapped. He wrapped the winch cable around the frame to hold it together long enough to struggle to the next camp. As one would do.
When I met Stu, those days were behind him. He was responsible for the Public Works Department for the City of Yellowknife and for three summers, he hired me as a labourer. Those were formative experiences. My working summers in Yellowknife coincided with its growth from frontier mining town to capital city and government administrative center. The town doubled in size each summer with students from across Canada and one could party endlessly if desired.
It also coincided with the proposed McKenzie Valley Pipeline project which was designed to bring natural gas from the Beaufort Sea to markets in Alberta. It would be one of Canada’s first modern megaprojects if given the green light and a lot of people were hoping for a green light. Others of course were not. The Trudeau government established the Berger Commission to assess the environmental and social issues associated with the proposed project and make a recommendation whether it was in the public interest for the project to go forward. Stu decided that the project was in the public interest and organized an advocacy group comprised of indigenous leaders from along the pipeline route. He gave his group the striking name of “White Power North of Sixty”. Clearly he had not bothered to focus group the name prior to launch but he and his team represented their interests at each of the hearings held along the proposed right-of-way. What the group lacked in sophistication of analysis they made up in spades with controversy over their name. It put Stu “on the map” and when Energy Minister Chretien came to town, he was sure to look up his friend Stu. Justice Berger, being from the left of the spectrum, found reasons to deny the construction application much to Stu’s disappointment but it likely saved the proponents from financial disaster when energy prices subsequently dropped.
In the 1980’s Stu moved out of the Northwest Territories, bought an acreage near Edmonton, and, with his son, started a hot shot trucking company to service the booming oil fields. Things were going very well until Mr. Trudeau struck again by introducing the National Energy Program which, through the uncertainty it introduced, caused a significant recession in the energy industry. I had many friends who lost all their equity and gave their house keys to the mortgage company or bank. I also had a father-in-law whose trucking company was now bankrupt. Flash forward forty years and it was Mr. Trudeau junior’s turn to separate me from my job. We don’t have a good track record with political leaders called “Trudeau”.
Stu finished his career working as a shovel operator at a coal mine and, true to his conservative temperament, paid union dues under considerable protest. Being a born leader, whenever there was a problem with management, it was Stu and not the union who was called in to sort things out.
In retirement he realized his dream and bought a bunch of cattle making him a rancher. A bad rancher. He had become blind by then and continued to drive for as long as he could make out “shadows”. He also made the classic mistake of naming his cows and was not able to part with them. As a leader and mechanical savant, Stu was unequalled. As a businessman he was a wreck – perhaps also unequalled.
A couple of final stories. When my new bride and I left our summer jobs in Yellowknife we needed a small trailer to haul wedding gifts and other possessions. Stu found us a trailer and agreed to weld a hitch onto the car. He and I kept up a patter of small talk as he lay under the car welding the hitch onto the frame. Before I could warn him, a big gob of red-hot steel dripped off the frame and onto his chest. It burned through his coveralls stimulating a natural desire to sit up – quickly. I don’t think there is another man in the world who could have hit the frame of my car with the speed of Stu’s head and not ended up in the hospital. As he entertained me with the most creative combinations of vulgar language, I lay gasping for breath I was laughing so hard. To Stu’s credit and my relief, as he rolled out from under the car he started to laugh as well. He almost evened the score, however. When, on our two-thousand-mile journey to Vancouver a wheel bearing went on the homemade trailer, we took it to a garage and the mechanic put it on a lift. He gave me the most unusual look as the box of the trailer lifted off the frame and was suspended in the air. Now I knew what all those bolts were for.
I loved my father and have infinite respect and gratitude for how I was raised and the opportunities I was given. Stu comes close to that level of my esteem and love. He was a major influence on my reasonably smooth transition to manhood, he successfully raised the wonderful girl who became my wife, and he was a stalwart grandfather to my children. His ready smile, chuckle and advice are sorely missed.
In the fulness of time Stu died and we, of course, attended his funeral. Maybe it was because he became a Christian late in life or perhaps, he just wanted to have one last go at influencing the work product. In any event, he convinced the pastor to read his parting advice to those in attendance. For many of them it amounted to,
“You insist on doing the following stupid things. Smarten up and stop doing them.”
I shed real tears when Stu passed but at his funeral oration, they were the same tears as were shed on that afternoon so many years earlier when Stu installed the hitch on my car. Classic Stu.
A work of obvious devotion to manhood and family. Thanks for sharing.