Wednesday April 27th, 2022
The Atlin Whisper “Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world.” Margaret Mead
TRUCKS AND TRAILERS Prairie Boys By Paul Lucas Atlin,1980’s. ‘Driving to the gig’ has an entirely different meaning in the North. For most northern musicians, the bread and butter gigs are in the winter - after everyone has worked all summer, has their wood in, and their freezers full of moose meat and fish. Once that first serious snowfall arrives, then it’s time to settle in and have some fun. A winter gig in a northern town pretty well guarantees a good turnout. Getting there is always interesting though. With the possibility of temperatures dropping to -30 and -40 (and occasionally lower), blizzards, and sometimes deadly road conditions, it is consistently one of the North’s grand adventures. And it can be a longish adventure, the distances between gigs falling anywhere between 100 and 900 miles. As a result, most northern musicians who play on the road and manage to arrive for the gig on time despite harrowing conditions, tend to be a little cocky when they storm into the bar with their instruments slung over their shoulders. And they are looking to party. My playing partner at the time was Dave Marcus - a fine singer and guitar player, but more importantly for the purposes of this story, one hell of a driver. The destination was Watson Lake - a little under 300 miles from Atlin. Weather was not the best. It sat in that nasty ‘not cold enough’ place on the dial. Snow, as the Inuit will tell you, has many faces. When the temperature is a ‘good cold’, snow has a granular quality, almost like sand. You can feel your tires grabbing it and holding on to the road. When it leans towards the warmer end of the spectrum it’s a bugger. As the Inuit say. Temperatures that hover just below freezing cause all kinds of problems, from snotty road surfaces to gas line icing, but by far the worst conditions are caused by thaw and freezing. The result is a road that is literally a sheet of ice; fun when you have a gig ‘way on down the Alaska highway and limited time to get there. The Ford was a solid three-quarter ton with a big V8, a common sense two tone brown paint job, a canopy, a trailer hitch, and good clearance. It was a two wheel, rear wheel drive vehicle, which really wasn’t a problem in this case. We had plenty of weight in the bed. Too much weight in fact, and not enough space. So we dug out the horse trailer, stuck it on the back, and proceeded to load it to the brim. Then we were off - like a big old coal train barreling down the track, with the whistle blowing and a 6 pack on the seat. The whole thing was a cakewalk until our return when, at Jake’s Corner, we hit the experimental section.