Residential school survivor displays hundreds of toy trucks to heal lost childhood

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.”

It’s also an opportunity to turn toys that he and Loretta buy at thrift stores and garage sales into gifts for those who ask. To give what Gib never got.

“It just makes him feel better to do this,” Loretta says, starting to cry. “I just love him so much and I know what he’s been through.”

She also knows that more than a place to store his toy trucks, Gib’s display has become a space to honour too many others’ unfulfilled dreams.

Gib says he thinks of the individual kids he went to school with a displays a specific vehicle for every one. There’s a tractor for the boy who wanted to be a farmer, a fire truck for the one who hoped to be a firefighter.

“Everything I put there was… to help them,” Gib says. “[Each truck], that’s a child.”

And the boy who once drew trucks to inspire hope is now the man who displays them to provide healing.