Page 95 - Donnie MacDermid of Margaree Valley: "It could have been worse!"

ISSUE : Issue 73

Published by Ronald Caplan on 1998/6/1

here towards Margaree Harbour, and he had a bulldozer, a D6 Caterpillar, nice 'dozer, a good 'dozer, and so we hired him to bull? doze it. Level it out for us. Course it was all blueberry hills and stumps and stuff. It was a hell of a mess to get that all cut down, you know. So the day he sent his op? erator with his 'dozer to do it for us, the operator came and the guy's wife and anoth? er woman come, and they brought a bunch of booze and this guy sat in the car with them and drank all afternoon. So he was drunk all afternoon, so who do you think run the 'dozer? I was on the 'dozer all afternoon. So I did the original scruffing of it. The original 'dozing. And then a few years later, when we decided it was time to get it improved a little bit better, we were looking to try and get pavement on it or something, had to be brought up to certain standards. Had to be brought up to a certain grade and all this, you know. And it had to be leveled and all that. Had to be real good. So, Ralph Mac? Pherson up here, got the store up here, he got mixed up with a grader and stuff for the pulp company up the mountain here, so he was kind of in construction then, he figured, so he put in for the job to do this. So he got the job all right. So he rented an old 'dozer in Halifax and got it hauled down here, and he hired me to oper? ate that for him, 'cause I was already op? erating this old 'dozer for him that he had out on the road grading the roads on the back of the mountain for the pulp company. And that old 'dozer was a 14 or a 15 Inter? national. An awful sick old thing. (That) International had no dang power at all. The Caterpillar was a nice machine with lots of power, good. But this thing was an awful sick rig. You'd get hooked into those lit? tle blueberry hills and she'd just die be? fore she could push them. It was an awful job to push anything with it. But anjrway, I got it levelled, and then of course we had to grade it all up, so I had to grade it all up with this old Adams grader that he had which was a worn-out old thing. So I got it graded all up and got it up to shape, so then we went after the gov? ernment for a little help on it and we got a seal coat first on it, a tar coat sprayed. And that kind of held it down a bit. There's a company, a paving company come in and they put kind of a fine grade coat of gravel on it and seal coated it. So that made it, kind of, that it was a fairly clean surface, you know. It still wasn't licensable, but it was a clean surface. Then we decided to get it licensable. Well, this required paving. Now this took a lot more fussing and frigging. Of course, D.O.T. had grants available at that time for paving rural airstrips, but not if it was private. It had to be in a Marine Atlantic Marine Atlantique

Cape Breton's Magazine