Milk Spills and One-Log Loads

Book excerpt: Frank White started writing the story of his life as a pioneer BC truck driver in 1974 when he was only sixty. His boisterous yarn in Raincoast Chronicles about wrangling tiny trucks overloaded with huge logs down steep mountains with no brakes won the Canadian Media Club award for Best Magazine Feature and was reprinted so many times everyone urged him to write more. He started in his spare time but kept having so many new adventures he didn't finish until 2013--his hundredth year. Although Frank set out to tell the story of his life in transportation, from the horse and buggy age to trucking in the BC freighting and logging industries, Milk Spills & One-Log Loads is much more than that. Just as absorbing as his accounts of obstreperous men wrestling big timber are his memories of becoming his family's designated driver at age twelve; of his grandfather, who kept the bible on a pulpit in the living room and never passed it without stopping to preach; of the stiff-necked farmers who hitched rides to Vancouver so they could take in the sinful delights of skid row; of collisions with streetcars and tsunamis of spilled milk; of the hysteria that gripped the BC coast after Pearl Harbor; of starting married life with a family of ten pigs; and romantic interludes exploring idyllic islands and living off clams. Milk Spills & One-Log Loads has all the hair-raising road tales one could ask for, but it is a moving story of personal growth, a vivid account of life as working people lived it on Canada's west coast during the rough-and-tumble years of the early twentieth century.