toy trucks

DUNCAN, B.C. -- As he walks forward along the river, Gib thinks back on his childhood dream.

“I wish I was a truck driver,” he says before moving his hand like he’s holding a pencil. “I used to sketch trucks. Free hand. By myself.”

Gib started drawing them when he was about six, when he began attending the Kuper Island residential school. His wife Loretta says they weren’t allowed toy trucks there.

“He was putting [his truck drawings] on his wall,” Loretta says. “Because he couldn’t play with them, him and the other students.”

The truck pictures were Gib’s gifts to the other kids in lieu of the real thing until he found, during his decade at the residential school, that he’d lost the ability to draw altogether.

“I tried so hard to bring it back,” Gib says. “But the abuse, they really pushed it away.”

Gib says he hasn’t drawn since.

Instead, he’s focused on creating a family with Loretta. They’ve been married 46 years and Gib ensured that their six children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren had countless toy trucks to play with.

“[The trucks] just start overflowing in the house,” Loretta laughs. “And I said [to Gib], ‘You’re going to have to do something!’”

“Hey! I got an idea!” Gib recalls thinking. “So I start building this fence.”

A small fence that, over the past 14 years, has expanded to hold a big collection. The three-level structure, where Allenby Road crosses the Cowichan River, features hundreds of toy vehicles of various sizes.

“It’s my hobby,” Gib says. “It’s my lost childhood.” (CHEK TV News)