The Ice Pilots (23 page)

He drew long on his pipe and looked out the window. “You oughta hear a bear when it comes out of its den in the spring,” he said softly. “The den is starting to melt, and everything is dripping on their fur. Well, they come out and they got icicles hanging all over their fur. And when they walk, everything is tinkling, like a crystal chandelier.

“You have to be in the bush to see that.”

He was the bush pilot who went by many names. Aboriginals of the north dubbed him “Snow Eagle”; non-aboriginals called him “White Eagle.” To the press, he was “the Flying Knight of the Northland.” No matter what his nickname, Clennell Haggerston “Punch” Dickins (pictured on page 172) was a pioneer of northern aviation.

Born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, at the turn of the twentieth century, Punch fought with the Canadian armed forces in World War I, where he became a bomber pilot. When he returned in the early 1920s, he was one of the first pilots to join Western Canada Airways, one of the airlines credited with opening up the West and North to the age of aviation.

Punch played a huge role in charting the unmapped Barrenlands of the North, flying more than a million miles in his career, often in treacherous weather conditions, with unreliable navigation aids and few landing strips. In 1928, Dickins flew one of the first aerial surveys of Canada in a Fokker Super Universal. In January 1929 he delivered the first airmail to the Northwest Territories, stopping at ten communities between Waterways, Alberta, and Fort Simpson, Northwest Territories. In classic Punch fashion, he extended the trip to Aklavik, in the bargain becoming the first pilot to ever fly the entire length of the Mackenzie River.

Punch’s final flight came after his death, in 1995, when his ashes were scattered by his son John along the Mackenzie River.

B
y northern standards,
Hay River is a substantial place. With a population of almost four thousand residents, it is the second-biggest in the Northwest Territories, and also one of its most affluent. The town stretches alongside the muddy waters of the river that bears the same name, streets laid out in tidy rectangles.

Yet as close as Hay River may be to Alberta (it’s less than one hundred kilometres north of the provincial border), the town still has that unmistakable Northern feel. Dirt roads vie for dominance with their paved counterparts. Small, unassuming houses share streetscapes with seventeen-storey buildings. And like Yellowknife to the north, the town boasts a population of Native and non-Native residents that together bring the town’s cultural mosaic to life.

That mosaic was alive and well the night the Hay River Chamber of Commerce held its annual gala, a night of food, drink, and fun where members of the town’s business community come together to celebrate themselves. That night, though, was a particularly important one for the McBryans. The chamber was about to unveil a commemorative five-dollar coin that could be used as currency at any Hay River business. The face on the coin? Joe McBryan’s.

If Joe was touched, it certainly didn’t show. He chose not to attend the event, instead leaving those responsibilities to Mikey and Sharon. So when the president of the Chamber introduced the coin and waxed poetic about the positive impact that Buffalo Airways has had on Hay River, it was Mikey who stepped up to the microphone and made the requisite thank-you speech.

Mikey regaled the crowd with stories of Joe’s disinterest in appearing at such events, telling them how he’d rather visit his mom and dad down the street than have to socialize with a crowd. It struck me that Mikey is growing into his celebrity. He swears he’s not a public speaker and is terrified at the idea of “performing” in front of people, but as he held the crowd in the palm of his hand and hammed it up for the
Ice Pilots
cameraman a few feet away, I found that difficult to believe. He was in his element.

As the party wrapped up, Mikey disappeared with some friends. From what I could gather, they were off to the local sports bar for a Hay River night on the town. I had a rampie morning waiting for me the next day, so I opted for an early evening, the idea of another night drinking with Mikey was too much for me to handle.

Sharon drove me home in her fancy new Ford F-150, a rig that doesn’t fit her demure personality. But I didn’t argue with a free ride on this –30°C (–22°F) night. We headed straight for Buffalo’s staff residence, a house the company keeps there for its Hay River rampies, overnighting pilots and truckers, and anybody else doing business with the company who needs a place to crash. It was nearing midnight, and Sharon asked me if I would prefer to sleep in their guest room, since the boys in the staff residence were likely all asleep. Somehow, I couldn’t see a bunch of twentysomethings calling it an early Friday night, so I kindly declined.

Truth be told, the idea of spending a night in Joe’s house was more than slightly discomfiting to me, especially given the events of earlier that evening, when I’d waited in his living room as Mikey got ready for the big gala. Joe had walked in while I chatted with Sharon and two members of the
Ice Pilots
crew, and the look on his face when he saw me in his home was enough to make me shiver in my boots. Bad enough that I’d invaded his work environment; now I had to show up at his house too? Anyway, I’d been promised the “Captain’s Room” at the staff house, an invitation I might never receive again. Sure enough, the lights were on when we arrived, so I bid goodnight to Sharon.

As I made my way up the stairs of the house, though, I couldn’t help but reflect on Sharon, a woman who has played such an important role in the lives of all the McBryans, but manages to fly so low under the radar. In some ways, she reminds me of the women who have made their mark on the fine art of piloting in the remote northern wilderness.

Of the countless women who have flown bush planes in Canada over the past century, none resonated with me quite so much as Lorna (Bray) deBlicquy, a trail-blazing spirit who stepped out of the shadow of a stereotype and into the life of adventure she had always craved.

Born in Blyth, Ontario, on November 30, 1931, Lorna grew up in an era when it was not fashionable for women to do anything other than stay at home and raise a family. But she had other ideas. At fourteen she decided she wanted to fly, and soloed for the first time at fifteen. She took up skydiving at sixteen and became the first woman in Canada to make a parachute jump.

Lorna and her first husband, Tony Nichols, spent time in Thompson, Manitoba, and Sudbury, Ontario, where she flew bush planes and earned her instructor’s licence. Her second marriage was to well-known Canadian bush pilot Dick deBlicquy, whose travels took the couple to several spots in Ontario, as well as New Zealand. Along the way, Lorna had a baby girl, but she never stopped flying and teaching. In fact, the adventure bug kept biting Lorna, and the salve she found was in moving her family to the tiny hamlet of Resolute Bay, Nunavut (then part of the Northwest Territories), on remote Cornwallis Island in the Arctic Ocean, where she flew scientists to their camps on the tundra. Needless to say, in a place populated almost exclusively by men, where darkness settles for half a year, Lorna was
very
popular.

On one occasion, Lorna was scheduled to fly into the scientific research base at Eureka. At the same time, Canada’s new prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, was visiting the Arctic. Trudeau had just left Resolute Bay and was on his way to Alert. As it turned out, weather prevented Lorna from landing in Eureka, so she made her way north to Alert. Word soon got out of her impending arrival.

The prime minister landed before Lorna, and with his entourage was soon on his way down to the barracks-like room where a modest reception was to be held on his behalf. When he arrived, Trudeau noticed a cook quickly doing up the buttons on his white shirt.

“Oh, you don’t have to do anything special for me,” Trudeau said. “Just be yourself.”

Quickly gathering himself, the cook countered, “But it’s not for you, sir! Lorna deBlicquy is flight-planned here!”

Any nostalgic ideas
I may have had about bush flying evaporated as soon as I opened the staff house door in Hay River. The scene that met my eyes was a combination of
Animal House, Porky’s,
and
Top Gun.
Mikey’s house may have struck me as reminiscent of a college fraternity, but it had absolutely nothing on this place. As I entered the living room, I was greeted by four guys strewn across various tattered couches and chairs in the living room, all watching in rapt attention a movie being projected onto one of the room’s blank walls. Giant chip bags and booze bottles were cast willy-nilly around the scene.

But it was no movie I’d ever seen before. In fact, it wasn’t a movie at all. They were watching a live Internet feed from a bar in Saskatoon. Seems a young woman who until recently tended bar in Hay River had moved there to ply her trade. They were intermittently joking, texting her, and taking swigs from their bottles.

“You guys realize you’re probably the only people on Earth watching this feed, right?” I asked. Nobody seemed to care; they were having too much fun. Adopting the when-in-Rome philosophy that has allowed me to see and do things my taste otherwise argues against, I sat down and grabbed a bottle. The movie didn’t hold my attention, though, and before long I was asking where the Captain’s Room was.

Jules, a Buffalo rampie who had just taken a job elsewhere and was enjoying a few glorious days of freedom before moving on, showed me to the room. If I was expecting to be ushered into the lap of luxury, I was wrong. Dead wrong.

An upturned mattress was propped against one wall, and a variety of boxes and largely unidentifiable piles of clothing crowded the floor. Sure, there was a bed, end table, and lamp; it just wasn’t that easy to get to them.

“Don’t run one of those CSI black lights over the bed,” Jules joked. “You won’t like what you see.” Perfect.

The bed had no sheets, just a lone blanket crumpled in a corner. The pillow’s stuffing was falling out of it. So Jules led me down to a linen closet in the basement, where I grabbed a sheet that seemed like it’d do the trick.

I lay the single sheet gingerly in the middle of the double bed, rested my head on the pillow, and promised myself not to move an inch all night. As I stared at the ceiling waiting for sleep to come, I turned to check out the reading material on the end table. It had been a long, long while since I’d read
Penthouse Letters.
But when in Rome...

My alarm rang
at four-thirty in the morning. The cobwebs in my head reminded me that not nearly enough time had elapsed since I closed my eyes, but I was happy nonetheless to bid a fond farewell to the captain’s bed.

Though I was still bleary-eyed, it was difficult to overlook Tyler Sipos as he pulled together his breakfast in the kitchen. Tall, thick with muscles, and sporting a model’s good looks, Tyler is the anchor of the Hay River operation, a hard-working rampie who knows what it takes to get ahead in Buffalo Joe’s world.