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My Life
Through a Broken Windshield
By Mel
McConaghy
I Don’t Think So, Not This
Cowboy
A few decades ago my brother Jim had some Cattle Liners that he
used to haul livestock. He was getting busy so he asked if I was
interested in going to work for him. At the time I had a good job
but you know what it’s like, the other side of the fence was
starting to look pretty green.
I was getting tired of tying down loads and running around in
the bush so I gave the idea a lot of thought. Heck it would be
almost as good as driving bus because your cargo would walk on and
walk off. You would have to wash out the trailer but with a big
fire hose, rubber boots and a rain suit, you could do that from a
distance.
I was pondering the idea late one afternoon while I was heading
west out of Prince George hauling a D8-Cat to Terrace. I had gotten
a little dirty loading it so I decided to have a shower and have
supper at Broman Lake, a truck stop just west of Burns Lake.
I had my shower, changed into some clean rigging and was sitting
down in the restaurant ordering my supper when this fancy Cattle
Liner pulled in and parked. It was a clean, pretty truck with lots
of chrome sparkling in the fading sunlight and it had clearance
lights from one end to the other.
I watched as the driver got out of his truck and walked over
toward the restaurant, looking over his shoulder for a moment to
admire his outfit. He was obviously proud of it.
He came into the restaurant and sat down at the driver’s table,
across from me. If I had been a casting director for a cowboy movie
in the late 1950’s I would have hired him immediately. He was a
good-looking kid in his twenties wearing a fancy cowboy shirt and
jeans, (that had been Pressed) his cowboy boots were polished and
shone as bright as his truck. I was impressed!
After he ordered his dinner, I started quizzing him about the
job.
“Oh yes, it’s a great job,” he told me. We talked about it all
through dinner and I was almost ready to get up and go phone Jim to
tell him that I would take the job—but for some reason I held
back.
We paid our bills and walked out to our trucks, it was dark by
then, so he got a flashlight and started to check his load. His
trailer was a double-decker and he had to climb up on the side to
look in. As he climbed up, one of the heifers directly above him,
who just happened to be pointed north with her south end up against
the side of the trailer, decided to relieve her self.
As he headed back to the restaurant to have a shower and change
his clothes, I was thinking, “Jim can haul his own damn cows,
there’s no way that I’m going to haul anything that can do that to
me. I get enough of that from my dispatcher.”
I pulled out and drove west in my dirty tractor with almost the
legal amount of lights on it (one right hand side marker light was
out) and a beat up low bed. I was happy to be doing what I was
doing - for a little while…
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