HUMOR

Get Your Hands Off My Jungle Box

Two truckers started a prank war — who will win?

For my first job out of school, I was a laborer for a trucking company that moved loads of heavy equipment, supplies, and rig mats all over in the bush.

I was swamping for a trucker named Wayne. If you don’t know what a swamper is, I was the slave, and he was the driver. He told me what to do. It wasn’t all bad, but it wasn’t all good either.

The thing about Wayne was that he was a little overweight. He was eating all day long, non-stop. There wasn’t a minute that went by without Wayne putting a sandwich, some cookies, or pretzels in his face.

Trucker Pranks

This group of truckers all worked for the same company(a convoy?) and got sent out on the same jobs. We were busy moving rig camps and such.

Wayne and Dale had this competition to see who could out-prank the other. I’m sure Dale started it. He always had a smirk like he was planning something.

Dale was built like Fozzy the Bear, tall, furry, and goofy, but he had a mean streak. And he liked to play tricks on the unsuspecting. I didn’t trust him.

I remember that morning when Dale filled Wayne’s gloves with grease. Wayne grabbed ’em and slipped his hands in all the way before he realized there was a sticky situation here.

“What the frack!” Wayne yelled. He pulled his glove back off his right hand, walked over to the toolbox on the side of the truck where he kept his rags, and grabbed the handle, smearing dark, sticky grease all over the place. It got on his shirt too.

Dale was standing over by his truck, laughing fit to burst. And the war was on.

A couple of days later, Dale took a big swig of his orange juice and sprayed it all over his dash. It turns out if you mix mac & cheese powder with water, it looks a lot like orange juice. It doesn’t taste the same!

We were all at breakfast in the diner the next day, and Wayne slipped off to the bathroom, unwisely leaving his chocolate milk on the table. While he was away from the table, Dale got another glass of regular white milk and doctored it with soya sauce. It looked sort of like chocolate milk. Close enough that Wayne got a big gulp of it into him before his brain registered the problem.

After that, Wayne sweet-talked the girl at the motel's front desk and got Dale’s room key. He slipped inside with some saran wrap, put a layer over the toilet bowl, and then put the lid back down. Later that night, Dale lined up for a shot on goal and spread yellow fluid all over the bathroom floor.

The next morning, when Wayne jumped in his truck and put his foot on the clutch, he found out it was rigged with an air horn that blasted loud enough to scare the shit right out of him. He bailed out of the truck, looking like he was gonna have a heart attack.

There were so many pranks the rest of us lost track. The two of them were always pulling something on each other.

Slogging Down Arsehole Road

They called it Arsehole Road, and for good reason. It was made out of clay. There was no gravel involved, not even dirt with rocks in it. Just clay, which stuck in your wheels like you wouldn’t believe. Sometimes you could look out of your truck, and you’d see a tube of disgusting clay stuck all over the outside of a wheel rim, wobbling around like on a potter's wheel.

Yeah, that road was a real arsehole to us.

When it was dry, it was okay. But the problem was the rain. That year it rained a lot. So every time we went out there, it was muck. Good thing it didn’t see much traffic, only truckers, loggers, and oilfield workers.

This one day, we were on Arsehole Road heading north, and we went across a one-lane bridge. There was a low swampy area on the other side of the river, where the water flooded down a big hill. The road was covered in a foot of greasy slop.

Dale was in front, and Wayne was next in line, three trucks following us. Dale roared right in there and buried his truck and trailer deep. He was stuck. The mud came halfway up his tires. And the worst part was he wasn’t even halfway across the wet area.

There was no way to turn around. All of the trucks but one got off the bridge, but that last guy had his trailer still partway on the deck. No one else was going through until we got unstuck. The road was blocked.

Cell phones didn’t work out there in that valley, and at first, we couldn’t get ahold of anyone on the CB radio. We had to wait it out.

Eventually, we found out they were bringing a dozer with a winch, but it had to get trucked in from a different area. We were getting paid by the hour, so I was okay with some overtime.

Living Out of Their Jungle Boxes

You know how a group of guys who work together for years have their own little language, slang words you never hear anywhere else? That was like these guys and their jungle boxes.

Each trucker had a box of snacks: crackers, tiny packages of peanut butter, bags of chips, hard candies, cans of sardines, water bottles, granola bars, stuff like that. This wasn’t their lunch; it was more of an emergency kit and snack box all in one.

But Wayne used his jungle box more like the rest of us used air. He just couldn’t stop breathing in the food. Since he was always eating, his jungle box needed daily re-supply. Today, we weren’t going back to town.

As we sat in those trucks for hour after hour, stuck in the mud, Wayne chewed his way through a few rice crispy squares, some oatmeal raisin cookies, a big bag of peanuts, three packages of crackers, a Kit Kat bar, and a little tin of mints. This was after he ate the sub sandwich and the bananas he brought for lunch.

It was around twelve hours of sitting there waiting for a rescue when Wayne ran out of food. At hour fourteen, he was starving. By the sixteenth hour of waiting, he was on the edge of his seat, dying for a snack.

His big belly was causing him some grief. I could almost hear the noise it was making from where I was sitting on the other side of the truck cab. He was ready to start eating trees he was so hungry. He came up with a plan.

Wayne’s Plan

Wayne turned toward me and told me what he had in mind. “Dale‘s got lots of food in his old jungle box there, and I need to get it. You’re my swamper, and you got to do what I say. You’re going to go up there and steal that jungle box for me.”

“No way,” I said. “Dayle‘s a mean guy. I don’t need to be getting on the wrong side of him. He’ll be pranking me next.”

“Do you remember how I got you out of that bind that one night at the bar when those two guys are going to beat the shit out of you? All cause you were hangin’ out with that guy’s girl on the dance floor? Then I came and saved your ass?”

I had a sinking feeling. “Yeah, but…”

“Well, now you’re gonna pay me back.”

“Okay, fine — what do you want me to do?”

“Sooner or later, Dayle‘s going to have to go take a dump in the bush. It’s only a matter of time. Let’s keep our eyes peeled, and as soon as he heads out there to drop a load, you run in there, grab his jungle box and bring it back here.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea? He’s gonna go ballistic.”

“That bastard owes me, and I know he’s got lots of food left.”

The Heist

I agreed to the plan. Part of me wanted to get back at Dale and take that smirk off his face.

It was pure mud between our truck and Dale’s truck and highboy trailer. I went on a recon mission, keeping in the bushes on the edge of the road. I figured it must be waist-deep slop in some places. I hid behind some shrubs and waited—nothing better to do anyway.

As luck would have it, I didn’t have long to wait. I heard a truck door slam, and off Dale went with a roll of shit-paper, out into the forest.

I snuck up on his truck on the passenger side, got up on the running board, and reached through the open window. There it was, right on his front seat: His jungle box. It was a square lunch box with a zippered flap on top.

I zipped the lid shut and grabbed it. Then I slowly made my way back through the bush and handed the prize to Wayne.

Wayne didn’t know what to do with it. He was like a kid opening Christmas presents in the closet two weeks before the big day.

“I’m just gonna scarf a few things out of here, and then you can sneak it back,” Wayne said.

But we were too late. Dale came back out of the bush. He jumped up in his truck and noticed right away that his food stash was gone. I could hear the bellow from a hundred feet away.

Dale came running through the mud, slipping and yelling. He wasn’t watching where he was going, I guess, because he stepped right in the ruts from his own trailer and sank in almost to his waist. The mud closed around his lower half. He couldn’t move. But he kept yelling, “ Give me my jungle box, you son of a bitch!”

We were laughing pretty hard. Wayne was in tears at the sight of Dale flailing his arms and screaming at him.

Dale Was Trapped

We went over to the edge of the mud and waited for him to calm down.

“Well, don’t just stand there, help me out!” Dale was trying to dig with his hands, but it was hopeless. He was too big, and the mud was too sticky.

“Let’s call this prank war off, and I’ll get you out,” Wayne offered. “Otherwise, forget it!”

“Okay, but you better give me back my jungle box,” Dale looked like he was gonna cry.

I got a shovel and a chunk of rope out of the toolbox, and we got Dale free of that slop. It drizzled on and off the whole time too.

After we were done, it looked like the three of us had just lost a mud-wrestling contest. We didn’t have anything to change into, so we just splashed creek water around until most of the mud was off, and sat in the trucks with the heaters running full blast for a while.

The dozer showed up and pulled us out soon after that.

Aftermath

The two of them seemed to get along a lot better. The fight was over, or so we thought.

It was Wayne’s birthday shortly after that. We were all staying at the same motel, and I was by the lobby having a smoke. I saw Dale heading towards Wayne’s room with a big piece of pie covered in whipping cream. He banged on the door. Wayne opened up and looked really happy to see the pie. He grabbed it, waved goodbye to Dale, and shut the door. Dale had that smirk on his face again. I went over to where he was messing around with something on the seat of his truck.

“Whatcha got, Dale?” I asked. He jumped and tried to cover up the empty can of shaving cream before I could see it.

“Nothing,” he smirked.

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