Once in a while I wake up in the middle of the night and a certain experience starts haunting my mind and I start shivering with anxiety and fear.
Anxiety and fear.
Not connected to that moment but something that has happened many year previously. I didn't really feel that fear at the time it happened but I can certainly after, years after when I wake up and feel that incredible fear.
Back in the early 80ties. I was a truck driver on the Faroe Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. Some small windiest wind ridden islands, right in between Scotland and Iceland. Sometimes they kill whales there, just for the sake of it. I didn't do that, I was a truck driver.
For a week. Then I got bored and became a taxi driver. For one night. I think that was the night where I ate the eye of a sheep. But that is yet another story.
It was as a truck driver I got scared. Well, not back then. I was too young and dumb or maybe just too naive to be as scared as I should have bee. The rest of my life was still in front of me -and still is- so what could possible go wrong, apart from nearly everything.
Short time before that I'd just finished my military service and felt so free that I could fly to the clouds and beyond and above, like Jonathan Livingston seagull.
They needed more roads on those windiest islands. They gotten themselves some more cars because they caught more fish and built bigger houses and even bigger boats. Then needed to catch more fish to pay for it all. And now this road.
We were quite at the beginning. Two men was drilling holes in the rocks and cliffs and filling it with dynamite. In the night they would blow it. Next morning the digger would go there and start to dig in the pulverised rocks and lift them onto the loader of my gigantic truck.
Once my truck had been filled with tons and tons of rocks and rubble, I would push the shift forward, into first gear, release the clutch, give some gas and the monster would slowly start moving. It was a heavy dealt. And loud.
Basically I was building my own road to drive on and for every load I delivered at the other end I had to drive further and further.
There, at the other end a colleague in bulldozer was moving back and forth to flatten the rocks and rubble to a plain surface. Later gravel and sand would be added, then some layers of Tarmac and a new road would be finished. At the end of that new road, a wee remotely village, which only had been reachable by boat or hiking over the hills.
Now the cars would come, and the tourists. Like the German car that suddenly came out along the road we were building. As they came to a halt at the front of my huge truck, they got out with a map and asked why they couldn't continue.
"Well, because the road isn't finished yet" I replied.
"But it is here on the map" they argued and shovelled a big map out of the passenger window and up under my nose.
"Look, here it is, you can see the road there as a red line".
And they were right. There on the map was a clear red line marked along the coast line whee we were just building that road.
"When is that map printed?" I asked.
"This year!" They replied.
"I see." I said.
And then, I, as a "migrant" worker, had to explain to some German tourists why that road was on a freshly printed map as a finished solid road when it clearly still was under construction.
Do I need to explain it here too? I guess I do.
Okay. Back then, the Faroe Islands was still like a culture of fishermen. Like people of nature. They were used to a hard life with very few resources. Apart from fish. And maybe that was how and why their philosophy was this way.
If you catch a lot of fish, you have a pile of them. Then you can start eating. When you have eaten the last fish you can't eat anymore, unless you go fishing again to catch some more.
When they build roads they behave a bit the same way. Roads are build and paid for, using some of the money they collect from taxes. Each year the know more of less how much they take in. Then they budget. So much for this and so much for the other.
At the beginning of the year they pile of money was all there, but opposite as with the road we were building that became longer and longer by the day, the pile of money got less. Until one day there was nothing more. Then they stopped and waited until the next year and a new pile of tax money.
That was why they knew that the road would eventually be there at some time, so they printed the map with the projected road. Although it wasn't there, yet.
Clearly the German tourists weren't largely impressed by that explanation, but I couldn't blame them. After all they were German and used to different kind of budgeting and efficiency.
This isn't what sometimes keeps me awake though, not the slightest.
My huge truck was kind of the dump truck type with a solid metal Vessel. To unload the rubble and rocks, I had to back up to the edge of the track we've created, reverse as far I could to the very edge, and then kip it all down using the powerful hydraulic pump to lift the vessel.
I loved this part of it, the part where I had to reverse this massive & heavy ten wheeler and manoeuvre it as close to the edge as possible. Sometimes I had to get out to go have a look how far yet to go before the whole machinery would crack the hundreds of meters down into the North Atlantic Ocean.
At that time I didn't give that much thought. I couldn't imagine that I would misjudge the distance in the rear mirror when I put that machine in reverse. I didn't imagine that my foot could slip from the cloth or the break. Never it came to my mind that those breaks could even fail.
This is, however scary and somewhat risky it actually was, not what sometimes let me shiver when I get to think about it. That something else entirely.
One day when I'd stopped at the sheer drop ready to kip my load of rocks and rubble down into abyss.
I started the hydraulic pump. The hoist started pushing upwards and the bed slowly rose and soon the first rocks started dropping. As the dump bed came higher and higher the whole load got moving and with a cracking noise rolled out with more and more force. That's when it happened. Suddenly there was an unfamiliar noise, another crack I didn't recognise and the dump bed stopped moving but began shaking.
What was that. I looked out and up under the dump bed, I saw that the hydraulic hoist had become loose and was now just holding up the heavy dump bed as it was stuck at one of the metal bars at the bottom.
The whole load was gone and I shut down the hydraulic so the hoist and bed came down, but I couldn't take another trip. I had to get back to the garage to get this fixed.
To call it a carnage is a little big bit of an overstatement. Basically the truck was owned by one man who lived in a house just opposite the entry to the building site. If he owned more of the heavy material on the construction site, I cannot tell.
As I came there I found him in his office, or rather where he had his calculator and a telephone.
I explained the problem and he got up and out, found himself a really dirty and oily boiler suit. The we went out to the patient which I'd parked in the driveway.
Now it was standing there like it was looking at us coming towards it, boiling and steaming and smelling of oil and diesel and hot hydraulic oil.
He jumped up into the drivers seat and hit the ignition. The truck started and a big cloud of black smoke shot out of the exhaust pipes and up in the air. As he tit the gas pedal a deep roar thundered through the Atlantic air.
Then he hit the hydraulic lever and the dump bed started moving. The hoist was still stuck in the corner of two crossing metal-beams under the chassis of the bed and so it managed to lift it up.
As it came as high as it could he stopped it and let it stay there. Jumped down and found a wooden pole.
He took it and carried it up onto the chassis of the truck. Then he placed it between the bed and the chassis to support the bed in its upright position.
I thought to my self: will that really hold the weight of that heavy dump bed.
Or at least now I tell my self that was what I was thinking. But maybe I wasn't. Because I found my self standing there next to him working with a power tool and trying to cut out the broken metal joint that should connect the hydraulic hoist and the dump bed.
It did take some time to fix it, and all that while we were both standing there working on the truck chassis. Only with a wooden pole to hold up that metal dump bed above us.
There has been hundreds of accidents worldwide in similar situations. Fatal accidents as well. That thing would have squashed us both to minced meat had it come down.
And exactly that is what sometimes keeps me awake when I start thinking what could have gone so terrible wrong.
But because you can read this it obviously didn't.
