Goodbye to Two

As we get older we start losing friends, but at this age, you start to expect it, that is what happens in life, people die. Life is like a sliver of light preceded and succeeded by two infinite voids of darkness. I, like everyone else, think about it. I don’t like the idea and I hate to see it happen to anybody else. The thing that's brought on this more or less melancholy rant is the fact that over the past weeks I have lost two good friends. The first was Rick Bruhjell.

Rick was 56 years old, who just happened to be in his truck in Cloverdale, waiting for his load when he lay down, went to sleep, and never woke up. I liked Rick, I think everyone liked Rick; he was an easy guy to like, tall with dark hair, and a slim build. I hadn’t seen Rick for about six months when I talked to him one day at the Chilliwack Shell card lock. He was waiting for a load and I was just heading North and had stopped to fill my coffee cup.

I had a coffee and cigarette with him and the conversation was about everything you could imagine. You know what it’s like when two old truckers get together. We discussed what the cigarettes were probably doing to us, but we still smoked.

I remember he got that easy smile on his face, looked at me and said, “You silly old bugger, at your age, you don’t have to worry, something’s going to kill you anyway,” and we had a good laugh. I was told that on his last day he had phoned his wife, told her that he was tired and was going to have a rest. Then he died.

The other was a friend by the name of Gordon Anderson. Gordy was a big barrel-chested blonde Swede with a ruddy complexion and every time that I had ever talked to him over the last 20 years he had a smile on his face. I talked to Gordy just a week before he had the accident that killed him.

That day we both had our trucks in the shop for repairs and he said that he was getting awful tired. He was sixty and he thought that maybe it was getting close to time for him to pack it in. We talked about quitting the business but neither of us had any idea of what we would do, we had been Truck Drivers most of our lives. What else would we do? How do you retire from something you like to do?

There seems to be no indication of what happened to cause the accident. He had stopped at the brake check at the top of the East Pine Hill and simply drove around the right hand corner, left the road, went up a bank and flipped over onto his roof. The only person that really knows is Gordy.

Loosing people like Rick and Gordy is not only devastating for their families but it also raises the question of who is going to replace them beside us on the road. They were good, hard working, safe truckers who took pride in what they did.

I know that there are many good young truckers coming up and I hope for the sake of the profession that they will have the dedication and the ability these two men had. They will go through their learning process, like a child learning to walk. When they start getting their wheels under them, they will run with wild abandon until they fall, then they will pick them selves up and when they learn that speed only cost them, they will slow down and get to their destination on time with a lot less grief, expense and hurt. The one thing that they can depend on is the fact that departed drivers like Rick and Gordy will be looking down on them from where ever Old Truck Drivers go, judging and taking care of them.

Editor’s note: Mel sent his column to Gordon Anderson’s daughter for her approval and this was her response.

Hi Mel,

I want to thank you so very much for doing this story. I think that is quite an honor for something to be written about my Dad like that. Your phone call yesterday brought a lot of tears for me. I just couldn't believe how nice that was that someone out there would want to do something like that. It really just amazes me as to how many lives my father touched in some way or another. You find a whole other side to someone’s life after they’re gone. I knew my father in my own little world. He was my father - a man that did the best he could as a single father that was a truck driver. A man that put me and my children ahead of everything else in his life, and supported us in everything we did right up to the very end. But there was a whole other part to my father that I guess I in a way knew about but I just never realized until he was gone.

Take care and thanks again,

Corea