The Ice Pilots (30 page)

By August, I
had spent sufficient time in the hangar, on the ramp, and in the offices of Buffalo Airways to have become, by all measures, a familiar face. For the most part, the people I crossed paths with knew who I was, what I was doing, and seemed genuinely happy to let me be a part of their lives. Well, almost everybody.

No matter what I said, Rod McBryan never really seemed to trust me. On some level, I understand. From what I hear, Rod is tired of the regularity with which engine problems and breakdowns appear on
Ice Pilots.
Sure, they make for tantalizing television, but they are rare occurrences. Yet the show makes it seem like they happen all the time. Rod takes that kind of thing personally. As a result, there’s something in him that just couldn’t trust me either. I guess he thought that was my modus operandi too.

And then, of course, there was Joe. For months he and I had been playing a cat-and-mouse game of epic proportions. He’d see me, then dart around a corner before I had the chance to even wish him a good morning. Other times he’d eye me with a stare so icy it would freeze the engine of a DC-3 in mid-flight. That’s when
I
would turn the corner as quickly as possible.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if that was how Joe always acted around me. But he’d lured me in by showing me his softer side on a couple of occasions, and I was hooked. There was that one morning in the kitchen when he told the story of growing up in Edmonton, and I’ll never forget the time he let me in his office and showed me his Chuck McAvoy scrapbook. So I knew there was something there, that undercurrent of kindness and vulnerability that everybody talks about. It pulled me along, like a carrot leading a rabbit.

And so the world’s longest fencing match continued.

My dogged pursuit
of Joe continued through Yellowknife’s all-too-brief summer, as August began to make its uncompromising march toward autumn. Mikey and I were driving down Old Airport Road one late summer afternoon when he noticed a yellowing leaf on a nearby tree, a sight that sent him into a tailspin of emotion. Like most Yellowknifers, Mikey is not particularly thrilled by the idea of summer coming to an end, though he knows it will—and quickly.

I couldn’t help but share Mikey’s feelings, though for different reasons. For me, the turning of the leaves meant my time at Buffalo had nearly come to a close, another northern chapter in my life nearly written. Yet still Joe eluded me. That one magic moment, the instant where it all would come together and provide me with the caring conclusion I so desperately sought, stubbornly refused to happen.

So I turned to the trusty fallback plan that had helped me so often over the course of the past six months: I enlisted Mikey’s help. Maybe, my thinking went, if I could get Mikey to convince Joe to take me out on his old Noorduyn Norseman float plane—likely the most sentimental plane Joe owns—he would let his guard down and let me in.

I envisioned the moment: Joe and I soar high over Great Slave Lake, the late summer sun casting an orange glow on the land below us. He has decided to take me on a tour of the places that have meant the most to him during his fifty years in the air. We visit Chuck McAvoy’s crash site, maybe his old homestead at Gordon Lake. Later that night, as I walk away from the float plane base in front of his Back Bay house, he calls after me and says “Hey! You’re not so bad after all.”

How wrong I was.

Some aspects of my fantasy held true. Yes, Joe did end up taking me out on the Norseman. That, however, was where any similarity between fantasy and reality came to a crashing end.

The morning of
our long-awaited trip, Mikey and I were sitting in his new Ford F-150 on the ramp outside the Yellowknife hangar, waiting for the sked to arrive from Hay River. It was a Saturday morning, which boded well: if Joe McBryan is going to do anything resembling kicking back and relaxing, it would be on a Saturday or Sunday. But this morning, things started to go wrong right away: there was heavy fog in Hay River, so the sked was delayed three hours. It was almost noon by the time it arrived.

“The sked is delayed only about three times a year,” Mikey said, “and never for this long.”

Terrific.

Yet despite the weather, Joe was surprisingly upbeat when he got off the plane. As Mikey says, Joe doesn’t usually get hung up about things he can’t control. And with safety such an important priority for him, Joe McBryan will not risk the well-being of his crew and his passengers for anything. He actually threw me a casual “Hi” as he walked out of the cockpit.

After helping the rampies unload the plane, I wandered into the kitchen, the one place I knew Joe would eventually show up. As usual, Joe was buzzing in and out, holding a conversation with Mikey and me and simultaneously performing some mysterious task in another part of the hangar. It seemed like every time he walked into the kitchen he plunged his hand into the big glass jar of jujubes on the table and deposited a handful into his mouth.

“You can’t sit still, can you?” I asked.

“Why would I want to sit still?” he barked at me. “Is it productive to sit still? Might be productive for you, not me.” His face, I noticed, had started to turn red.

So I tried to break the ice by asking him a few questions about his past. If I’d come to know anything about Joe, it was that he’s a stickler for dates. So even though I knew the answers to the questions I was asking, I threw them out anyway. I figured it may be a way to draw Joe in, open the door to more conversation.

Wrong strategy. As soon as I asked Joe about a couple of dates (in this case, when he started Buffalo and acquired his first DC-3), he used it as an opportunity to lecture me on what the book should and shouldn’t contain.

“All you need to say is I learned to fly a DC-3 in Whitehorse in 1969. And by the seventies I was operating them. But if you wanna get date-specific, then...”

He stopped talking for some reason, so I figured it was my chance to jump in and clear the air. “All I really wanted to know was—”

“That’s all you have to say: we were into them in the seventies, and we’ve been operating them ever since. I don’t think that’s
Star Wars.
”

“The historical stuff is pretty brief, I just wanted—”

“I don’t wanna get into that,” he said. “Because then I have to sit down and do the whole thing. And then it’ll just look like a Max Ward book, eh? Now hopefully this book just covers you and Mikey and the Ice Pilots.”

“Well, that’s most of it, but there is some stuff about you in it and how—”

“Then all you gotta do is say that Buffalo Airways and I came together on May 13 of 1970. You don’t have to go into how I got it, why I got it, what I paid for it—all that bullshit.”

“That’s pretty much all it is, Joe, just a little historical contex—”

“So all you gotta do is say the company’s been here since 1970, operating DC-3s since the seventies, and kick-start into the
Ice Pilots.
Mikey can do the rest.”

I started to talk again, but Joe would have none of it. He stopped pacing for a second (which was disarming enough) and looked right through me. “I can tell you and I aren’t gonna get along,” he growled.

Yikes. I was stuck in a real-life version of Groundhog Day, the 1993 movie where Bill Murray is forced to live the same day over and over again for eternity. I knew,
knew,
that any second now Joe was going to say, “Book—what book?”

As always, Mikey came to my rescue. “What about that Norseman flight?” he chimed in.

A couple of hours later,
the three of us reconnoitred at Mikey’s place. I showed up with sandwiches and Timbits in one last desperate attempt to win Joe’s favour, but as luck would have it, he’d already eaten.

The Norseman bobbed serenely in the waters behind the house, unmistakable in mustard yellow with highlights of Buffalo green. My original fantasy had me and Joe taking off alone together, but he wanted none of it. Still trying to figure out exactly
why
he was taking me for a ride, he urged Mikey to join us, which he did. Luckily, Joe offered me the right seat in the cockpit; Mikey sat in the back.

Soon the plane was taxiing across Back Bay. The front of the plane sat so high in the water that it was almost impossible to see over the engine and propeller directly in front of us, but Joe guided the plane masterfully. A few minutes later he turned into position and gunned the engine; the Norseman immediately rode high in the water, its floats skimming lightly across the dark surface of Back Bay. Soon we were in the air, and Yellowknife receded beneath us.

Though he’d done this tens of thousands of times before, Joe was all business behind the Norseman’s controls. His hands moved deftly from the yoke to the various switches, buttons, and levers peppered throughout the cockpit. The Norseman did her part too: she was graceful and elegant in the air, and showed no sign of her nearly seventy years. Comforted in the knowledge that I was in good hands, I sat back and enjoyed the ride.

Joe circled around Back Bay and I could see the dichotomy of the city laid out beneath me. From here, a few hundred feet off the ground, it was easy to make out rustic and colourful Old Town, protruding like a jointed finger into the waters of Great Slave Lake. Farther south, the tall buildings of downtown eventually gave way to the sprawl of neighbourhoods to the west of the city’s core.

Yet it was the water below that held my attention like a vise grip on this warm and breezy summer day. The many lakes that pepper the cityscape gleamed dark blue beneath us, the warm afternoon sun reflecting off their choppy surfaces. Frame Lake stood out proudly, in some places lined with trees and grass, in others interrupted by a massive, curving, and crevassed outcrop of charcoal-coloured rock. Among the many buildings that line its shore, the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly is most distinctive; from above it looked like a huge silver-green alien craft waiting for the mother ship to land.

The Norseman was loud—
really
loud—but with the headset on, the sound of the engine died away. Joe, Mikey, and I were able to talk to one another. Mostly, Joe ordered me not to touch any of the controls.

For the next half-hour we flew south, over the waters of Great Slave Lake and past Dettah, an aboriginal settlement of about 250 people that sits across the finger of Yellowknife Bay from the city itself. And if I was expecting to see nothing but the wide expanse of black water in every direction, Great Slave Lake had other plans for me, at least this close to shore. A few hundred feet below us, the water was a hodgepodge of rocky islands. Despite their myriad shapes and sizes, the islands had one thing in common: all were covered in a combination of brown-grey rock and the green of stunted spruce trees. Around the islands, submerged rock cast colourful shadows under the water, from browns and tans to greens and blues.

We weren’t the only ones with the idea of exploring the countryside that Saturday afternoon. In almost every direction I turned, boats plied the waters of the lake, leaving foggy fingers of white foam trailing behind. Their destinations eluded me for a while, but as Joe brought the Norseman ever lower, I realized where they were going. Scattered throughout the islands below were signs of occasional human inhabitance: a small cabin here, a canvas wall tent there. Many Yellowknifers are devout outdoorspeople, and those with boats build their camps on the islands in the waters around the city.

Fittingly enough, our destination that afternoon was a fishing camp where one of Joe’s friends, Dean, spends time on the weekends. My fantasy of Joe taking me to the places that had shaped his life as a bush pilot had long since vanished, but I was grateful for any opportunity to get up in an airplane with Joe. Plus, meeting someone whom Joe calls a friend—not to mention seeing how Joe operates in a social setting—would be an opportunity I might never get again. In the end, I knew Joe didn’t have to do this for me. I imagined he didn’t want to, either. But he did it... and that says a hell of a lot about the man.

Soon we put the plane down and were taxiing across the water, hoping Dean had seen us and was coming by boat to lead us to his camp. That’s when the unthinkable happened. A horrible shrieking noise filled the cabin and we could feel something grinding underneath us. The right side of the plane lifted up slightly, sending us all leaning toward the left. The right float of the Norseman had ground up against a flat, shallow rock.

I looked at Mikey.

Mikey looked back at me.

Joe looked shocked. “Shit,” he muttered softly.

We were stuck.

If you’re thinking this kind of thing is a common occurrence, think again. Joe says it’s only the second time in his life he’s ever run aground with a float plane. The last time was in a Cessna 182 with his brother Ronnie. They tore the float right open.