LIFE on the road has many ups and downs, but former truck driver Frank Saul wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Lake Boga resident has spent a significant portion of his working life freighting goods across Australia. Life on the road has shown him some incredible and devastating things, and a few minor miracles.
“When you’re on the trucks all the time you see a lot,” he says.
“He probably won’t tell you this, but one of the times up in Queensland he saved two people’s lives,” Mr Saul’s wife Hazel chips in.
As the story goes, Mr Saul was driving into Brisbane when a car with a trailer on the back got too close and clipped the front wheels of the truck, causing the smaller vehicle to turn at a 90 degree angle — straight into the oncoming truck.
Mr Saul swerved to miss them and barrelled off the road and down an embankment, losing half his load of general goods in the process.
Thankfully no one was hurt, and the next day the grateful couple came back to the accident site with their own truck, to help him cart the wayward goods into Brisbane.
“The woman looked at me and said you just saved our lives, but that’s one of those things that just happen, you take those things as they come.”
Ms Saul says it’s amazing the things the truck driver has taken in his stride over the years.
“You have to,” he replies.
Born and raised in Rainbow, Mr Saul left school at the age of 13 to work as a woodcutter with his father.
He was driving the family truck, “a T-Model Ford”, he says with a glint in his eye — by the time he was 14 years old, and together the father and son team supplied wood to pumping stations at Nyah and Lake Boga.
For more of this story, see Wednesdays’ Guardian (March 6).
