Raging Rollagon

A rollagon is an immense vehicle with huge, low-pressure tires designed for travelling over the muskeg of northern Canada. Ours was six-wheel drive and could hold 120 boxes of trees. And it was now on fire.

The trees had been coming in by boat — a five-hour trip along the river. From the river they were taken by rollagon out to the blocks. In order to keep up, we had to run the rolly 24 hours a day.

I was working for a treeplanting company in northern BC. It was two in the morning and we were on our way back from stocking a block ten kilometers from camp. I was in the back of the rolly huddled under a tarp

We were stuck at the time. The rollagon may be designed for travelling over muskeg, but muskeg is designed to prevent rollagons from travelling on top of it. It's a sewage-like concoction of mud and moss and water. The moss holds everything together. As long as you don't break through the surface, it is possible to travel on top of it. Once you break through, it turns to rancid soup. We had broken through.

Fruity was rocking the rolly back and forth hoping that it might crawl out in one of those directions. I was trying to decide if I was happy we were no longer lurching all over the place or whether I was upset that we were stuck and I was going to have to crawl out from under the tarp and splash around in the mud.

Suddenly it was bright under the tarp. I wasn’t really alarmed. I thought that Fruity had turned on the rear lights. Or perhaps a nearby star had gone Super Nova. The only thing that bothered me there under my comparatively warm tarp was that Mike was shouting something. Mike worked for the mill and had come along to keep an eye on us. The mill had some concerns about the damage the rolly might do to the muskeg. He was far too tough to huddle under a tarp, and had been huddled on top of it near the edge of the rolly where he could catch more of the refreshing night breeze.

It was an important part of my job to look concerned whenever Mike was shouting so I peeked out from under the tarp to see flames shooting six feet in the air from the back of the cab.

"Interesting," I said.

Fruity had leapt out of the cab by this time and fallen promptly in the mud. He jumped up and began wrestling with the tarp. I pulled it back for him and he again fell in the mud. He leapt up and fumbled for the fire extinguisher, which he promptly dropped. He dove after it, snatched it up and began putting out the fire.

Fire extinguishers are really quite loud. They create a dramatic white fog when used and leave gobs of gunk all over everything. They also have a pronounced smell. All in all, they are a treat for the senses.

Fortunately, they are also effective. Soon the fire was out and Fruity stood in a cloud of smoke and steam, covered in black gobs of mud and white gobs of fire retardant. Fruity has long hair, which was now singed, and little round glasses which were now smeared with mud. Somehow, he looked quite noble.

Fruity and Sonja (Fruity's co-pilot for the night) cracked the cab and examined the engine with the help of a flashlight. Once they found what they thought was the problem we set to work figuring out how to get the rolly unstuck. We played out the winch cable, attached it to a stump, and threw some logs under the tires. It’s difficult to find logs in a cutblock in the dark. You’d think it would be easy. I certainly tripped over enough of them, but, as soon as I tried to grab hold of them with my hands, they would vanish or refuse to leave the ground they loved. It was like a nightmare where trees that others of my race had killed came back in the night to torment me.

Eventually, we were ready to give it another try. We stood back as Fruity fired up the rolly and tried to back out. It immediately burst into flame.

Once again, Fruity leapt out of the cab, fell in the mud, got back up, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and dropped it in the mud. Mike and Sonja cranked open the cab so Fruity could get at the engine more easily. Unfortunately, this time the fire extinguisher was empty.

Fruity was momentarily stunned. "It's empty," he said. However, quick-thinking lad that he is; he twisted the top off the extinguisher and began dumping the residual contents on the fire.

"There must be another fire extinguisher," I said. "Don't you have two?" I climbed into the back of the rolly and began sifting through the assorted emergency equipment.

"There’s one in the cab," said Fruity. "Behind the seat."

The cab was now tilted at a 45-degree angle. I climbed into it and balanced with one foot on the dash behind me and one on the floor in front of me, and began pulling old newspapers, lost coffee cups, and assorted mystery objects from behind the seat. I was working mainly by feel. Mike had the flashlight pointed at the fire so we would know where it was.

"Could I have the flashlight please?" I said. Sonja took it out of Mike's embarrassed hands and passed it up to me. I got my hands around the second fire extinguisher and passed it to Sonja, who, according to ritual, dropped it in the mud before giving it to a now frantic Fruity. Fruity kept it trained on the fire until the fire was out and this extinguisher, too, was empty.

There was a moment of silence -- not complete silence of course. The rollagon was making a fair bit of noise, clicking and wheezing and trying to relax after its horrendous ordeal, but the rest of us shut up for a bit.

"I don't suppose you have another fire extinguisher?" I asked Fruity.

"Nope," he said.

"Because it probably wouldn't be too safe to start it up again."

Fruity nodded.

"I mean no doubt you'll be able to fix it, no problem," I said. "But, if something does go wrong — there wouldn't be much we could do except watch it melt down into a big pile of slag."

"True," said Fruity.

"I mean, perhaps if we had some marshmallows or a couple of steaks and a bottle of red wine, it might be a good plan, but we don't and the office would be upset if we turned a $100,000 machine into a pile of slag for no good reason."

Fruity nodded and we all just stood there in the dark, soaking up the heat from the engine compartment. Then, slowly, Fruity smiled. "We need some steaks."

"What?"

"Let's get some steaks and some vino and burn this sucker up."

Mike did not look impressed. He wasn't a chatty kind of guy. He was willing to come with us and help unload a hundred boxes of trees, but he hadn't signed up to bullshit in the dark with a trio of freaks. I doubted he appreciated Fruity's suggestion.

"Come on, it'll be great. We could have the whole crew come out and have a big party and consign this piece of junk to hell."

"And we could get really, really drunk," said Sonja, who was leaning into the engine compartment pressing a cigarette against a hot piece of metal in the hopes of getting it lit. I handed her my lighter. Her jeans were soaked from her thighs down and her dreadlocks were singed.

We were all soaked. Mike was probably the wettest and he did not look in a good mood. He didn't much like rollagons to begin with.

"You might as well burn it up," he said. "There's no way you're going to be able to use it again next year."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"Look at these ruts," he said, pointing to the wallow the rolly had created. "With the new regulations coming in, there's no way we'd be able to get away with this. It's going to be a helicopter show from now on out here."

"Are you serious?" I asked.

"Deadly," said Mike. "Everything's going to change out here. They're talking about fines of a million bucks for damage like this."

"Holy Freak!" said Sonja. "It's a swamp. It was a swamp. It still is a swamp. It will always be a swamp. How can you wreck a swamp?"

"Can I say just one magic word?" Fruity asked.

I shone the flashlight on him. He was sitting on a stump, scraping mud off of his jeans with a stick.

"Insurance," he said, blinking into the light.

"What!"

"Look, let's just think for a moment about what would have happened if we hadn't had that other fire extinguisher. This piece of junk would have just kept burning. Just like you said, we wouldn't have been able to do anything except watch it melt down into a big pile of slag. And then what?" Fruity stood up. "We're going to have to get a helicopter for tomorrow anyway. It would just mean that we'd have to keep the helicopter for the rest of the job which would be easier for everybody. Insurance would cover the cost of the rolly. The mill is already paying for the access costs and they wanted to use a chopper in the first place. Nobody loses."

"You're crazy. That's arson. We lose. We lose when we go to jail. That's who loses."

"It's not arson. It might, possibly, be negligence. I'm not saying we physically set light to it. I'm just saying we try to start it up again. If it catches on fire, it just wasn't meant to be. If it doesn't catch on fire, then at least we'll get back to camp tonight."

I looked to Mike for support. He shrugged in the darkness and took a smoke and my lighter from Sonja. "What's wrong with it, anyway?"

"In general, tons." He stood up and started cranking the cab down into place. Sonja went to the other side to help. "The walking beam has cracked and been welded four times now. I've currently got it held together with haywire. We go through U-joints like tissue paper." He let go of his crank to help support the cab as it dropped into place. Once it was down, Sonja climbed up into the driver's seat and started cleaning up the mess I'd made. "As for the fire, one of the hoses came loose and sprayed hydraulic fluid over everything. I think the fitting might be stripped. I thought I had it tight last time, but apparently I was wrong. I could attach it again. It might hold long enough for us to get back to camp."

"Or it might come loose again and burn up."

"Yep."

It may not be much of an excuse. But I'd like to point out we were all wet and freezing by this point. I was weak. I admit it "Those sound like pretty good odds to me," I said. "Let's fire it up."

So Fruity started the rollagon one last time. Sure enough, it burst into flame. Fruity pulled a couple cans of beans out of the emergency supplies. They cooked up nicely and Mike had a flask of Golden Wedding in his pack. That and the rolly kept us warm 'til morning. I radioed for a chopper and the contract became a fly show from that point onward. This winter, once everything freezes, we'll drive in and haul the wreckage back to town. The office doesn't expect there to be any trouble with the insurance company.