The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  Happy moments such as this one became more and more frequent as the months went by, but that didn’t mean I was immune to the occasional icy glare from Buffalo Joe.

  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.

  And so the two-month-minimum commitment window came and went, and I continued doing what felt like the most important work I had ever done. For six months, I bounced around several communities northwest of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. If the names Goulais River, Gros-Cap, and Batchawana Bay mean anything to you, you’re a better student of geography than I was at the time. And if I thought the challenges of working outside through the Canadian autumn and early winter were tough, I had a lot to learn.

  After a brief trip back to New York for Christmas, I was sent out for my second volunteer posting, one that would test my ability to withstand the rigours of weather like I had never before imagined. I was off to Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, a community of some eight hundred people—primarily aboriginal Canadians, the Tetl’it Gwich’in—that sits about a hundred kilometres (sixty miles) north of the Arctic Circle.

  In six months at Fort McPherson I learned more about life and love than I ever had in New York. Here were a people who by most modern-day measures had virtually nothing, but still knew how to appreciate the small treasures of their everyday existence like few people I had met before. If the Northern Lights appeared in the sky, people would stop you on the street to talk about it. When spring came, you would only need to bump into somebody at the grocery store and they would start regaling you with stories of the black ducks they had seen flying over the river earlier that morning. I was pulled into the methodical, comfortable flow of life north of 60, where drinking tea and eating bannock and dried caribou meat were enough to constitute a social event, and a damn good one at that.

  Sure, there were problems in Fort McPherson, problems I would soon learn are common throughout aboriginal communities the world over. Alcohol abuse was rampant. There was nothing strange about encountering somebody fall-down drunk on the town’s hard-packed dirt roads at any time of the day or night, regardless of the season. Suicide, glue-sniffing, spousal abuse, child abuse, arson, and petty burglary wove a tragic thread through the fabric of life in Fort McPherson. One of my favourite people in town was Robert Zheh (not his real name), who quite literally bore the scars of his discontent as a youth. Half of Robert’s face was horribly disfigured, the result of a botched suicide attempt many years earlier. And yet, for all that, I fell in love with the place—and its often brutal weather.

  And while the thought of working outside in temperatures that routinely sank below –30°C (–22°F) might have made for many sleepless nights back in my Greenwich Village apartment, I was amazed at how well my body became inured to the arctic environment. Maybe it had to do with the fact that my fellow volunteers and I were all in our early- to mid-twenties, but we threw ourselves into our pro bono work with nary a thought about our well-being. Hammering a nail at –30°C (–22°F) is a painfully drawn-out process (we didn’t have the luxury of air nailers), but the mere fact that we were out there, standing on ladders and dangling ourselves off rooftops in cold that most people would otherwise describe as ungodly, was a feat unto itself.

  And as the days got longer and the weather began to warm ever so slightly, we appreciated every ray of sunlight that shone on our ghostly white bodies. I distinctly remember working outside in only a shirt and sweatshirt one brilliantly sunny spring afternoon. The temperature was –20°C (–4°F).

  As the Dash 8 touched down on the tarmac of the Yellowknife Airport, I wondered if my body could handle the rigours of cold the way it once did. It’s not like I live in a balmy climate these days; the Rocky Mountain town of Canmore, Alberta, is known for its long, snowy winters. But sitting at a desk in the climate-controlled comfort of my home office is a far cry from pounding nails at thirty below. Frankly, I didn’t know how much I could hack it anymore.

  The walk from the plane to the terminal building was enough to foment my weather fears into a frenzy. The flight attendant was merciful enough not to share the temperature on landing, but it was freakin’ cold, and the wind howled across the runway, whipping the fine layer of snow on the tarmac into fanciful whirligigs. It managed to find its way into every nook and cranny of my clothing, poking intrusively at my flesh with icy fingers. At least, I told myself, the Buffalo Airways hangar will be heated.

  A couple of text messages later and I was waiting for none other than Mikey McBryan, general manager and heir apparent to the Buffalo empire, to pick me up. In the interim, I had time to ponder what Mikey might be like in person. Truth be told, I felt like I already knew him, the result of crash-coursing as many episodes of Ice Pilots NWT as possible before arriving. From what I could tell, Mikey is an enigma. He is clearly a savvy businessman and the driving force behind Buffalo’s emergence onto the world stage as a TV phenomenon. But at the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that he’s, well, a bit of a frat boy.

  And if I expected Mikey to show up at the airport in a late-model sports car befitting his status as a small-time celebrity, I was dead wrong. Instead, a ramshackle white van—resplendently bedecked with the Buffalo Airways logo—rumbled to a stop in front of the terminal. Mikey lumbered out, wearing what I would come to realize may be his only uniform: faded jeans, Buffalo Airways hoodie, and signature ball cap. In fact, in all the time I spent with Mikey in the subsequent months, I don’t think I ever saw him without his ball cap. I never worked up the nerve to check the validity of this theory, but I think he may even sleep with the thing plastered to his head.

  Round-faced and chubby, Mikey greeted me with a genuine, friendly air that immediately won me over. From what I could tell, this was a man with absolutely no pretense whatsoever, despite his new-found popularity. He does not try to be anything other than exactly what he is: a straight-shooting, endearing, insightful, forward-thinking, dedicated, hardworking guy who loves women almost as much he loves beer. And while Mikey McBryan demands a lot from himself when it comes to work, he does not (unlike his father) project those same demands onto those around him.

  It didn’t take long before I felt like we were old friends.

  “Hey, Mike,” he said as he walked into the terminal, greeting me like we had done this a thousand times before.

  “Mikey!” I cried, perhaps a little too eagerly, considering that this was, after all, our first time meeting face to face.

  “Let’s go to the hangar,” he said, shouldering my heavy, green duffel bag, jam-packed with as much arctic survival gear as I could resurrect from long-ignored boxes in a corner of my basement. The hangar, I soon realized, is Mikey’s home away from home. Actually, scratch that. If the number of hours spent in a place—including sleeping hours—count for anything, then the hangar is Mikey’s home, period. His house, perched on the shore of Great Slave Lake’s
Back Bay, is his home away from home.

  On the short drive from the airport to the Buffalo hangar, Mikey gave me the lay of the land, Buffalo style. Buffalo Airways started operations back in May 1970, when his father, Buffalo Joe McBryan, bought the operating licence from a man named Bob Gauchie. Since those humble beginnings with only two planes—a Noorduyn Norseman and a Cessna 185—Buffalo Joe and his family have built a unique empire of more than fifty planes, most of which flew during World War II. Instead of buying the latest and greatest aircraft money can buy, Joe McBryan is one hundred percent retro.

  As Mikey has been known to say: “Forty years ago, Joe was one of hundreds of people flying these airplanes. Then he woke up one day to find out he was one of the last ones doing it.”

  It’s easy to ask why Joe insists on using seventy-year-old planes, and I believe the answer is twofold. First of all, Joe is a collector of old things. “Vintage things,” Mikey corrected me. Right—vintage things. The guy loves vintage cars, old signs, retro hairstyles, and vintage planes. Reason number two: it makes financial sense. Old planes—though increasingly difficult to find and maintain due to a dwindling supply of parts and experienced mechanics—are cheap. Buffalo can pay off a DC-3 in a couple months of hard work, something few airlines can boast when they lay out tens of millions of dollars for a new jet.

  Yet for all of our talk about Buffalo the company, most of our conversation centred on Buffalo Joe, captain and president of the airline. As we talked, I got a sneaking suspicion that Mikey was trying to prepare me for something, something unspoken that lay between us on the floor of the rattling van, like a polar bear waiting to pounce on a seal. I ignored it and tried to focus on what Mikey was saying so I could be as prepared as possible to meet Joe in a few minutes’ time.

  “He’s always a stress case, always running around and micromanaging one aspect of the business or another,” Mikey said of his father, a man whose legend in the Canadian North has grown to untold proportions thanks to the success of Ice Pilots NWT.

  “He thrives on stress, eats it for breakfast, lunch, dinner. And anything going on right now—from a garbage can overflowing in the hangar to whether or not the lights in the bathroom should be left on—he’s worried about it. And he picks it; he picks whatever he wants to stress out about that day.”

  “Doesn’t seem like a particularly healthy lifestyle,” I threw in.

  “Yeah, but it keeps him going,” he said. “Look at the guy. He’s thin and healthy, but he survives on junk food and adrenaline. He lives like a sixteen-year-old would live, and he hasn’t grown out of it.”

  If anything, Mikey said, my biggest challenge would be to slow his father down long enough to get him to talk to me. “That’s why there’s hardly anything written about him; he’s as elusive as Bigfoot,” Mikey said. “How many videos of Bigfoot are there?”

  The key is to get to Joe on the weekends, which he spends in Yellowknife with Mikey, instead of at the Monday–Friday home he shares in Hay River with his wife, Sharon. On those days, when the whirl of business has slowed to a manageable level, Joe is at his most relaxed, and therefore, most talkative.

  Still, if the stories I’d heard about Joe are true—not to mention the way he’d been portrayed on Ice Pilots—he wouldn’t be inviting me to dinner anytime soon. Even when I lived in remote Arctic communities thousands of kilometres from Yellowknife, people talked about Buffalo Airways and its nefarious founder. Joe was the kind of guy you wanted on your side if you needed a job done—and done now. Hang out socially with the guy? Maybe not. There are stories of new recruits arriving at the hangar on a Friday and leaving for home Sunday morning. Either the TV show has managed to capture every one of Joe’s temperamental outbursts, or they happen with alarming regularity.

  Still, I was cautiously confident as we pulled up to the Buffalo hangar. I’d met—and cracked—many tough nuts in my day, so Joe McBryan should be no problem at all. I’d regale him with a few stories about my days in the Arctic to win him over, throw in a bit of the ol’ Vlessides charm, and soon we’d be shooting the shit like we’d been friends forever. He was already on board with the idea of the book, so it was just a matter of getting him to like me. Piece of cake!

  Purchased from legendary aviator Max Ward, the Buffalo Airways hangar boasts a concrete floor six feet thick, perfect for withstanding the weight of the aircraft and Yellowknife’s mercurial weather. The hangar houses several aircraft at one time.

  As if on cue, I literally bumped into Joe as we walked through the inconspicuous green metal door that opens into the inner sanctum of the Buffalo Airways hangar. I had no trouble recognizing him. His brown hair was slicked back into a neo-pompadour and showed nary a sign of grey despite the fact that he was approaching seventy. His face was not as wrinkled as I thought it would be, his teeth surprisingly white. His clothes were unassuming and spoke to the casual places he’s called home his entire life: dark jeans and a flannel shirt, a red plaid flannel lumberjack jacket on top. He wore his watch backwards on his right wrist.

  As Mikey introduced us, I sensed trepidation in my guide’s voice. “Dad, this is Mike. He’s the guy writing the book.”

  “Book...” Joe growled, eyeing me suspiciously. “What book?”

  Uh-oh.

  Mikey’s phone rang and he turned away, now deep in conversation with pilot Devan Brooks.

  Joe’s suspicious look bore holes into my skull, out the other side, and through the fuselage of the DC-3 lurking behind me. “I never agreed to no fuckin’ book.”

  Oh boy.

  I was drowning, my hands stretched helplessly toward the disappearing surface above. The light was fading, my watery grave becoming darker.

  Joe broke the silence as I tried to mumble something intelligible.

  “Do you have an aviation background?” he asked.

  “Well, not really. But I have flown a bunch of times, if that counts for anyth—”

  “Then it’s gonna be tough writing that book,” he cut me off. “I’d strongly reconsider it if I were you. I don’t have time to educate people, especially non-aviation people.”

  “Actually, this book is not really going to be a technical manual, but more of a story about—”

  “You go in that office of mine, and every book on the shelf is an aviation book,” he continued over me. “I read a lot of books to see how accurate they are and how they spread the credit and the blame around. And every one of them is a piece of shit. I buy the books only for time, places, and data.”

  Mikey must have seen the beads of sweating forming on my brow, because he finally ended his phone conversation and turned back to throw me a life preserver. Joe took no notice.

  “I’m very busy right now,” he continued, “and there aren’t a lot of people helping me. They’re finding me a lot of problems to solve because they can’t handle them themselves. So I’m not really in the best mood to be writing a book.”

  Mikey joined me in mumbling and fumbling, trying to explain things to Joe. “It’s really about timing,” Mikey said. Joe had turned on his heels and was heading for the far side of the hangar. Clearly, he’d had enough of our conversation. “Just think about it!” Mikey called after him.

  An uneasy silence hung between us as we watched Joe march away. “That went well,” Mikey said. “Better than I thought, actually.”

  * * *

  Great Slave Lake

  Given its English name by the British explorer Samuel Hearne, who first crossed the lake in 1771 and named it for the Slavey people native to the area, Great Slave Lake is the fifth-largest lake in Canada and the ninth-largest in the world (27,200 square kilometres or 16,901 square miles). The lake is 615 metres (2,000 feet) deep in some places, making it the deepest in North America. It’s icy cold and frozen for eight months of the year.

  There are seven communities peppered a
round the lake: Yellow-knife, Fort Resolution, Hay River, Behchoko (formerly Rae-Edzo), Lutselk’e (formerly Snowdrift), Dettah and N’Dilo (both located just outside Yellowknife).

  THE INNER SANCTUM

  Having temporarily removed Joe from my list of potential interview candidates, I was faced with more free time than I had originally bargained for, but at least it gave me an opportunity to explore the inner sanctum of Buffalo Airways.

  I’d never been inside an airplane hangar before, and the sheer volume of the place bordered on overwhelming. The hangar itself stretches 45 metres by 45 metres (150 feet by 150 feet), enough to house half a football field. The roof soars more than fifteen metres (fifty feet) overhead, curving slightly higher from its east and west walls to the highest point directly in the middle. On either end of the hangar are adjoining buildings that house Buffalo’s offices, various parts and storage rooms, the passenger waiting room, and the small but wildly successful shop that sells Buffalo merchandise.

  Huge though the place may be, one thing becomes immediately apparent: Joe McBryan runs a tight ship. The hangar is the picture of efficiency, a testimony to a near-obsession for Buffalo Joe: safety. An assortment of racks and stands peppers the hangar, each neatly festooned with a variety of airplane parts. Everywhere I looked, men were perched on rolling stands, elbows deep into the guts of an airplane. The walls were dripping with racks of belts, parts, and papers, all organized into tidy little rows for easy identification.

  Two enormous steel doors, each twenty-one metres (seventy feet) wide and fifteen metres (fifty feet) high, guard the entrance to the hangar. A series of windows near the top of each door flooded the room with natural sunlight. The place was abuzz with activity: bright, lively, and full of purposeful energy. Everybody, it seemed, had a job to do, knew what it was, and got to it without hesitation or question.