Trucks and Mud

February 25, 2013

(This post details a souped-up truck competition from a couple of years ago at the “Maynooth Days” fair, which takes place annually over the Labour Day long weekend in Maynooth, ON.)

The mud bog was great: women and men raced their dune buggies and monster trucks through a lot of mud. And Mum ran through, too! (Yes, blind, with her glasses off, flailing her arms in the air and squealing the whole way. The other entrants were all 20-something men, and they beat her by a good minute, but a nice older fellow ran beside her, so they tied for last. I cheered from dry land.)

 

The mud bog is serious business, and folks are out to win and to entertain. One of the more interesting entrants was this truck: flying a “Redneck” Confederate battle flag, and painted with the Tonka logo. It was indeed fast, the fellow driving it looked like he was having a good time, and it was a favourite with the crowd, most of whom definitely qualified as rednecks. But it left me wondering about the strange mashup of cultural icons from the American south (and the flag’s resurgence as statement of racism thinly veiled as conservatism), television, and childhood that make up this slice of self-representation in the Canadian north.

 

Problematic imagery aside, the weekend wasn’t without its traces of labour celebration. The logging and agricultural events were obviously tied to the participants’ jobs, but the mud bog, too, is a celebration of working life in the north. If you want to get through the bush to get to the logging camp, you need a vehicle that will get you through the muck. It was neat to see some extreme adaptations of technology to the climate and terrain. If your adaptation fails, you get stuck…

 

And have to be pulled out by the giant skidder, a much larger version of the tractor for pulling logs that the loggers had raced the day before. From what was swinging and flopping around under this truck as they pulled it out, it looked like it had either hit a rock or just gotten so swamped in muck that the drive shaft snapped.

Adapt right, and you get freaky technological beasts, like “The Sasquatch”: a 4 wheel drive tractor, once, now with an engine pulled from an old truck, and the body of a 30s Ford coupe thrown on top.  Another, less troubling, mashup from the “Redneck” team.

 

So that, I suppose, is what you do when you’re way up north and there’s no labour march for labour day. That, and look at the 1st place winning load of logs in the parade, of course.

 

Best logs ever.

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This is a reproduction of a post from September 5th 2011 on my blog at https://landing.athabascau.ca/profile/sarahma108

Written by sarah m Posted in Class, Culture Tagged with culture, labour, monster trucks, northern ontario, technology