Mikey’s not the only one to realize this particular benefit. “Since the TV show has started, it’s been a real morale booster. We don’t go through as many people as we used to. Why? Because they see merit in their work. The show is now the mother. So it’s no longer necessary for Joe to come up to you and say ‘You did a good job.’ You can just go watch Ice Pilots.”
Mikey is certainly not the only member of the Buffalo crew who has felt the effects of stardom. Justin and Scott are both very popular with the ladies. Nevertheless, nobody, it seems, has let that fact go to his head. For the time being, heads at Buffalo remain level.
Even Justin, who is portrayed on the show as being as cool as they come, blushes his embarrassment when forced to talk about his new-found celebrity. Maybe it’s because he’s used to the attention. We take our customary seats at the Gold Range Diner, and the playful flirting between him and one of the waitresses begins almost immediately.
“Are you gonna get married yet?” she asks him, setting two glasses of water in front of us.
“I’m waiting for you!” he calls back as she makes her way to the kitchen.
“That’s what you say to all the girls, Justin.”
“Nope, just you, love.”
This is where Justin is most comfortable, in his everyday haunts, surrounded by people he knows and feels connected to. Perhaps that is why he has stayed at Buffalo longer than any other pilot currently on the Yellowknife roster. It also goes a long way toward explaining why he feels the need to spread credit for the show’s success as widely as he can, despite the fact that he’s one of its biggest stars.
“I was walking through the Edmonton airport with my daughter and heard a stampede coming behind me,” he says between forkfuls of the chicken cordon bleu special of the day. “I turned around and there was half a dozen girls there screaming and giggling: ‘Oh my God, it’s Justin Simle from Ice Pilots!’ They picked up my daughter and started passing her around like she was a toy. It was cool, but weird at the same time.” Ultimately, a very private person like Justin will look back on the Ice Pilots experience and appreciate it for what it was, but know that it didn’t really change his world.
“It’s a really neat thing that we’ve done here, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he tells me one night. “I’m grateful for the experience, but when it all goes away, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing. You can’t change for anyone but yourself.”
I’m not sure if the same can be said for Scott, who shares heartthrob status with Justin in the Buffalo hangar. Witty, handsome, warm, and engaging, Scotty Too Tall (as he is affectionately known) has won over fans around the world with his honest and forthright take on life in the North. Scotty shares Justin’s humility—he too struggles to understand why people find him so interesting—but there’s no denying he loves the attention. For Scotty, being a part of Buffalo and Ice Pilots is the best thing that could have happened to him.
“There’s lots of different perks and unique situations that we find ourselves in because of the show,” he says. “You know what? It’s cool to be recognized all over the place, and it’s flattering when good-looking girls just want to hook up with you without really knowing anything about you.”
For Scott, though, Ice Pilots has opened doors to experiences that go far beyond interludes with members of the opposite sex. On one particularly warm spring day, he and I were celebrating the fact that he’d just been checked out on the CL-215, opening the door to his first-ever summer of fighting fires with the water bomber. Not long afterwards, Scotty was rubbing elbows with some of Canada’s biggest political figures... all because of Ice Pilots.
Driving home one evening, Scott came across a rally and photo shoot for the Conservative Party of Canada in support of a federal election campaign. Interested, he stopped to poke his head in, and was almost immediately recognized by security personnel, who let Scott enter the rally, even though he was not on the guest list. It didn’t take long for Scott to offer Canada’s most powerful political figure a tour of the Buffalo hangar; minutes later—and much to his surprise—Scott was showing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and wife Laureen through the hangar.
“That was pretty damn cool!”
But as much as Ice Pilots may feed the ego, Scotty believes the show helps clear up some fairly pervasive misconceptions about the life of a pilot. “A lot of people think that you go to flight school, and the next thing you know you’re flying a jumbo jet around the world and drinking champagne with hot stewardesses and staying in amazing hotels,” he says with an ironic chuckle. “Back in the day it may have been like that, but it’s not any more. Before Ice Pilots, I don’t think people realized how hard we work. But I think the show really gets that point across. It’s a labour of love.”
Labour of love, indeed. For every unique opportunity that Buffalo hands its employees, there’s a thankless one waiting around the corner. Scotty knows. “You’ll get a day when you have to come in early to get the plane ready, and it’s –35° and the wind is howling,” he describes. “So it’s already hard enough to get to work as it is. Then you get there and the engines are frozen up because the heaters have unplugged overnight.
“So you get a frost fighter [a small, portable heater] to warm them up, but the frost fighter is out of gas because nobody could be bothered to fill it the night before. Then you get the fuel truck but the fuel truck doesn’t have enough gas in it, so you have to go fill it up. But when you come back, you realize that it’s so cold out that the fuel truck won’t pump because it’s frozen. So you go back inside where the freight is waiting, and the floor is slippery and it’s a bitch to load. By that time, the captain has shown up and he’s pissed off and yelling. Those are the real clusterfuck mornings that make you question why you’re here.”
In the meantime, Ice Pilots is alive and well, and everyone involved with the show seems optimistic about its future. Whether it ultimately proves as successful as other hyper-popular programs like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers remains to be seen. In the meantime, Mikey is not losing any sleep worrying about the future; he’s too damn busy in the present.
Late one evening, Mikey and I were the only two left in the hangar. For a moment, the massive building was silent but for the echo of our footsteps. I was waxing nostalgic again, hoping beyond hope that there is a way to keep something as raw, as true, and as authentic as Buffalo Airways alive. And I knew that the one hope for doing that was walking right beside me.
“Do you feel a desire to keep all of this going?” I asked.
As always, Mikey surprised me with his response. I was hoping for a moment of tenderness, a whispered “Yeah” that would bond us. No chance.
“Every single company that has ever existed—and ever will exist—will fail one day, will cease to exist.”
“You have a very pragmatic view of it.”
“I was born in the Microsoft age,” he replied, “where Microsoft was bigger than life itself, and everyone thought Microsoft would be running the world. But look around: Apple is gaining ground, things are changing, and Microsoft isn’t king of the world anymore.
“General Motors was king shit for fifty years,” he continued. “Hell, they built the planes that bombed Japan. And now they’re getting their asses kicked by Japanese companies.
“Every company fails, especially airlines. It will eventually happen. We just have to do the best we can while we do it... no regrets.”
So much for nostalgia. That doesn’t mean Mikey won’t be sad when Buffalo eventually does close its doors, because I know he will. He’s said as much. But for someone who’s always looking down the “rabbit hole of opportunity,” the death of one thing means the birth of another.
“There’s a freedom in mortality,” he said. “Once you realize you’re gonna die, you can truly be free.”
Clearly, Mikey is not stuck on the future.
He is comfortable with his place in the universe. “I feel very fortunate that I understand where I’m at, because most people don’t. They’re lost; they don’t know where they fit in; they don’t know what they want to do. I know what I want to do. I want to be at work at seven-thirty tomorrow morning, make sure the planes get where they need to be, and work at any challenges that come my way during the day. I can’t predict what it’s gonna be, but I can predict that I’m gonna try my best.”
We turned off the lights and headed toward the small green door that had marked my entry to the world of Buffalo so many months before. “Is there anything you’re scared of?” I asked.
He replied without hesitation: “The one constant fear is the old man.”
“Why?”
* * *
Yellowknife Light and Dark
At a latitude of 61°28' N, Yellowknife is 512 kilometres (318 miles) south of the Arctic Circle. That may seem like a fair distance, but it still means the city experiences huge fluctuations in the amount of light it receives throughout the year.
In the dead of winter, Yellowknifers get about five hours of daylight, between 9:00 am and 2:00 pm. Then the days get longer and longer. By late April, the sun rises before 4:00 am and doesn’t set until 8:00 pm. On June 21, the longest day of the year, the sun shines all day except between 10:00 pm and 2:00 am, and even then it’s still light out, though the sky takes on a quiet, dusky hue.
“Because in Joe’s eyes, you gotta be perfect—unless you’re a fuck-up, and then you’re a fuck-up. And he knows I’m not a fuck-up, so I gotta be perfect.”
“Why does he have such high expectations of you?
“Because he knows I can do it.”
* * *
Buffalo Airways Virtual
Is there no end to how hard-core aviation buffs can be? Enter Buffalo Airways Virtual (www.buffaloairwaysvirtual.com), a website that allows Buffalo wannabes to fly almost every airplane in the fleet. Using software like Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X—which incorporates geographical data from almost every corner of the globe (including Canada’s North)—the website allows its members to replicate the company’s missions or design their own.
The virtual airline started when Buffalo Airways fans Thomas Emms and Randy Kearnes presented Mikey with a prototype website. Mikey admired what Thomas and Randy were doing—and how seriously they take their online responsibilities. “These guys are physically flying more than my pilots! One guy was flying fourteen hours a day—and he was an American! If you don’t fly within the first five days of signing up, you’re deleted. If you don’t fly within a fourteen-day period, you’re deleted.
“These guys know more and care more about our planes than most people,” Mikey continued, “but a lot of them can’t afford to fly or never got a chance to. There are a thousand reasons why they couldn’t fly, and now they can fly. So we try to support them as much as possible.”
According to vaCentral (www.vacentral.net), a website that ranks virtual airlines based on an elaborate scoring system, Buffalo Airways Virtual currently ranks fifth-highest in the world, from a total pool of 192.
* * *
Mikey McBryan’s 10 Favourite Foods
1Chicken wings
2Lobster
3King crab
4Kraft dinner
5Ribs
6Big Macs
7Hot dogs
8Blackened steak
9Beans and toast
10Beer
DEPARTURES
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 actual
ly 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 Ice Pilots Page 20
