The Ice Pilots (2 page)

Those questions, and a hundred others, were bound to be answered during the first of what would prove to be many trips to Yellowknife in the coming months. In the meantime, though, I settled into the modern—if not particularly spacious—comfort of the plane, one of the most popular regional turboprop airplanes in the world.

For good reason. The Dash 8 is a picture of efficiency: depending on the model, the plane will carry anywhere from thirty-seven to eighty passengers at speeds that can eclipse five hundred kilometres (three hundred miles) an hour with relatively little fuel consumption. The interior of the cabin also speaks to modern aviation’s obsession with function over comfort. Somehow we managed to park two humans on either side of an aisle large enough to accommodate the flight attendants’ snack tray in a fuselage that boasted a diameter of less than three metres (ten feet). In other words, if your seatmate feasted upon a three-bean burrito for breakfast, you’d know about it.

Nevertheless, the seat cushion into which my nether regions nestled was soft and inviting, and the overhead lighting cast a warm glow throughout the aircraft that mimicked the brightening sky to the east. The plane’s highly insulated plastic shell deadened the sound of its two turboprop engines. We may have been squeezed in like suitcases on a luggage cart, but we were warm, cozy, and about to cover more than 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) in about two hours.

As the plane lifted off, Calgary’s winter landscape began to fall away. The city faded into a prairie patchwork of golden brown and white, dissected into neat squares by the innumerable roads that keep people and commerce flowing along the southern edge of midwestern Canada. Soon we climbed through the ceiling of clouds, and the world below us melted away. All was calm in the upper reaches of the troposphere.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. As we begin our final descent into Yellowknife...”

I awoke with a start to the pilot’s message; the flight had lulled me into a deep sleep as it hurtled across northern skies. And as my eyes adjusted to the light around me and I gazed through the window, I could tell we weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

The checkerboard of the prairie below had been replaced by something more primal. The golden landscape had given way to two colours that wrestled for dominance: charcoal grey and white. The grey occasionally won the battle, as masses of stunted, hardscrabble spruce trees huddled together, forming broad patches of forest in a great, untamed wilderness. It didn’t take a geographer to recognize that the leaden curves of the forest were mere accents on a backdrop of white.

There was a
lot
of snow down there. This came as no surprise to me, given that I had spent several years of my life criss-crossing the Arctic, from Fort McPherson in the west to Baffin Island in the east. Snow is a part of life in communities that pepper the subarctic and Arctic regions of the world, regardless of the season. What struck me on this flyover, though, was just how much water was sitting underneath all that snow. In every direction, as far as the eye could see, the landscape was peppered with white blots of varying size and shape, gleaming in the cold winter sun, each indicating yet another body of water, from long-forgotten ponds to vast lakes covering thousands of square kilometres.

It occurred to me that, other than the primal landscape of white and grey, there wasn’t much else going on down there: no herds of caribou loping gracefully across the frozen land, no eagles soaring over the rocky outcrops in search of prey. Hell, I couldn’t even spot a road.

It wasn’t until we were descending to within spitting distance of our destination that the trappings of “civilization” began to appear. Snowmobile trails snaked through the forest, bursting onto frozen lakes, where they broadened and braided, only to constrict again on the far side, where they once again plunged into the forest cover. We drew closer, and a road (singular:
one
road) appeared, though from that height it wasn’t much more than a grey stripe stretched across the land below.

If anything, the snow served as an acute reminder of my destination. With a population that fluctuates around twenty thousand, Yellowknife is the capital city of the Northwest Territories (it’s also the
only
city in the Northwest Territories), a place where old and new, traditional and cosmopolitan, blue collar and white collar, rough and refined, Native and non-Native, all coexist fairly peacefully.

The city is located some 512 kilometres (318 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, and bears the dubious distinction of being the coldest city in Canada. According to Natural Resources Canada, Yellowknife’s average nighttime temperature between December and February is a balmy –29.9°C (–21.8°F). Average. That means that for each day warmer than –29.9°C, there’s one colder too. Yellowknife’s mean annual temperature is –5.4°C (22.3°F), a figure even more astoundingly cold once you figure that the city also has the sunniest summers in Canada, with June, July, and August racking up a total of 1,037 hours (that’s forty-three complete days) of sun each year. It’s been estimated that an average Yellowknife winter comprises 191 days, or more than six months.

Yet by the grace of some omnipotent being who realized that my ability to withstand significant stretches of flesh-freezing temperatures had diminished in the years since I left the North, the immediate forecast was on the warmer side of things, relatively speaking. Overnight lows would touch –30°C (–22°F), but daytime highs might actually climb above –10°C (14°F) once or twice. I wasn’t breaking out the sunscreen just yet, but I was grateful nonetheless.

If that doesn’t seem tropical to you, consider the poor bastards who called Yellowknife home in the winter of 2008. At the end of that January, a cold weather system gripped the North like a vise, making people wonder if this might be the time to consider a move to Vostok, Antarctica, which holds the world record for coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth: –89.2°C(–128.6°F), in 1983. For nine straight days, Yellowknife recorded temperatures below –40°, with wind chills regularly exceeding –50°C (–58°F). The city operated in the hushed haze of a persistent ice fog, a phenomenon that occurs when the water molecules in the air freeze and hang suspended like a ghostly veil.

Entire neighbourhoods were obscured. Mail delivery came to a grinding halt. Schools closed to ensure the safety of students and staff.

It’s not like I
haven’t seen my share of –40°, though. Like many who call this eclectic place home, I came to the North by a rather unconventional route. Back in the early 1990s, I was happily ensconced in what I then thought was the dream job: working on Park Avenue in New York City, in the Commissioner’s Office of Major League Baseball. Several years earlier, armed with a journalism degree from New York University, I had peppered nearly every sports team on the east coast of the United States with letters seeking employment in their public relations departments. Most chose not to reply at all; those that did all said the same thing: thanks but no thanks. All but one, that is.

Major League Baseball informed me that there were currently no jobs available at the office, but I might be interested in applying for their Executive Development Program, started a few years earlier by new commissioner Peter Ueberroth, who wanted to bring young, eager, and talented executives to the industry. One or two recent university graduates were selected every year from a pool of several hundred applicants. Should I be lucky enough to land the position, I would have the rare opportunity to work in almost every department of the Commissioner’s Office, from legal to broadcasting, licensing to player relations, learning everything there is to know about the business side of the game. After about a year, the “executive trainee” would have the opportunity to land a full-time position in the industry, either with a major league club, a minor league club, or one of the various departments in the Commissioner’s Office itself. Realizing my chances were exceedingly slim and with nothing to lose, I set to the application form with a vigor I hadn’t felt since writing my final term paper for a senior NYU course called “Human Sexual Love.”

I somehow made it through the initial set of interviews, and was shocked to learn I had been selected as one of the finalists. At that point, I realized I was no longer a dark horse in the proceedings and had a legitimate shot at actually getting the job. It was time to break out the big guns. Donning my finest brown wool suit, baby-blue shirt, pink tie, and burgundy wingtips, I headed to the Major League Baseball offices at 350 Park Avenue for my final interview.

The place reeked of tradition, of cool, of a yeah-we-know-we’re-badass-but-we-like-to-play-it-casual-nonetheless attitude. I desperately wanted to be a part of it. Black and white photographs of famous players lined the modest walls. I tried to identify each one in turn, just in case the interview included a quiz:
Ty Cobb. Rogers Hornsby. The Christian Gentleman, Christy Mathewson. Babe Ruth.
Yup, I was ready.

As I walked into the conference room—the first one I had ever seen in my life—I likely let out an audible gasp. I was confronted by a cohort of nine Major League Baseball executives sitting around a giant oak table.

Nerves notwithstanding, I must have done something right, because within a week I got the call: I was going to the majors! With tears of joy running down my face, I called my parents, Traude and Gus, who had immigrated to the United States from Germany and Greece after World War II in search of a better life. I clearly remember telling them that I had just gotten the job that I would have for the rest of my life. “In forty years,” I said, “they can give me a gold watch, pat me on the back, and show me the door. I’ll be the happiest guy who’s ever lived.”

How wrong I was.

Only a few years later, seeds of discontent began to sprout somewhere deep inside me. As thrilling as baseball was (how many other people do you know who were
inside
Candlestick Park when the earthquake struck before Game Three of the 1989 World Series?), I started to want something more out of life. The shallowness of my existence was becoming obvious.

I would stand in front of the mirror every morning, wrap my tie into a neat half-Windsor and wonder which client I would have to pretend to like that day. As I began to consider more deeply my place in the universe, I realized I was not cut from the Egyptian broadcloth of Park Avenue. If life held any more great secrets for me, I guessed they would not be found in the hallowed halls of Major League Baseball.

I ended up quitting Major League Baseball and signing on as a volunteer with a small Canadian organization called Frontiers Foundation, which works to this day to provide—among other things—affordable housing in Canada’s aboriginal communities. My responsibilities would be simple, yet profound: renovate and/or build houses for some of North America’s most disadvantaged people. As altruistic as I felt, I was encouraged by Frontiers’ out clause: the minimum commitment was only two months. If I arrived at my posting at some as-yet-unknown hamlet in the middle of Canadian nowhere and realized I had made the biggest mistake of my life, I could always go back to 350 Park Avenue on my hands and knees and beg for my job back.

I didn’t need to. For the first time in my life, I was in a completely foreign environment, living with a group of volunteers from around the globe, working outside at a job for which I had no training, no obvious skills. The learning curve—both on the social and professional scales—was high. Not a day went by that I didn’t learn something about myself, the world, home construction, or the Native people who called these places home. I loved it.