Dumb Going Up There

Dumb going up there, the soldiers of the 35^th learned. Master Sergeant King of the Motor Pool carried an old 45 to British Columbia; kept it in a holster at his side. With his 45 King could fix anything. At Dawson Creek a civilian warned King about muskeg. Chester laughed.  “And old King, he… padded that old 45.” King said, “That’s all right… I’ve got my 45.”

Jaundice in Camp—and a Scared Bear

Chester chuckled again. “That’s just how stupid we was. We did not know nothing. We was just a bunch of dummies up there, but we learned.” And Chester remembered what they learned—with pride. Sixty-one years later, Chester remembered every bit of what he learned.

Interviewer Brown. “Do you have any regrets?”

Chester did not have regrets. He was proud of the road, proud of his part in it. He summed it up this way. “I wouldn’t take a million dollars for my experience, but I wouldn’t give a red cent to go through it again.

Chester also appreciated the people of Canada. Canada had kept the road up and continually improved it. “People like us… can drive this road.” That came in handy for Chester many years later.

Chester, thinking about writing the book that would become Tales of a Catskinner, had an editor who worried that Chester occasionally exaggerated. Of course, we know by now that Chester would never exaggerate. But the editor didn’t know him as well as we do.

Thanks to the Canadian people and their improved Highway, Chester and his editor could easily drive the Highway to reinforce Chester’s credibility.

At Muncho Lake a mountain climbs directly up out of the water—a long way up. Pointing up the sheer cliff, Chester told the editor the soldiers had to go up there with bulldozers and trucks because they couldn’t get around the edge of the lake. The editor looked up the cliff and decided he had definitely found a Chester Russell exaggeration.

When a helicopter carried the editor up and landed him on top the mountain, he could still see tracks up there—nearly sixty years after the trucks and dozers of the 35^th gouged them out of the mountain.

Images of Muncho Lake Today