Alaska! Up North and to the Left

by Steven Swaks

  We walked to the plane in silence, but I was indulging in the experience. Everything was vivid and bright, the sky was exploding in a sheer blue, the rows of hangars swarmed with activity, loaded planes taxied by, and the bare asphalt finally free of snow echoed each of my steps towards my new destiny. Even the marvelous Jet-A Kerosene scent added a final olfactory touch to the surrealistic scene. The Cessna 207, the work horse of the tundra, my steed for the months to come, was waiting for us. It might not have been much with its single engine piston and its high wing in the small trainer fashion, but it was an intimate part of a pilot’s life. It was their office up to eight hours a day. It was a place of joy and challenges.

  I swung open the vertical cockpit door. At that moment, the car-like access was a lot more than that; it was an opening to a new universe. It was an access to the cradle of commercial flying, to the very reason why I had worked so hard for so long. The crammed cockpit was where I belonged.

  Roman sat in the captain’s seat on the left; I sat on the right. I had been in a 207 before, but only for a quick look and a glance of what was to come. The cockpit was basic with four radios and a large GPS screen stacked up between doubled flight instruments for a pilot and a potential copilot. Beneath it, there was the throttle, propeller control, mixture knob, along with the flaps, and cowl flap handle. A few other electrical switches and engine gauges were scattered throughout the rest of the panel. On the left side of the pilot, right around his left knee, a plethora of electrical fuses and circuit breakers spread like a corn field.

  The Cessna 207 was an a la carte aircraft with a choice behind the front row. In a few minutes time, the pilot could either configure the plane as a passenger cabin with another five seats, as a freighter with the space wide opened, or everything in between in a combi configuration. On this historical first flight with Norton, our sled was a full freighter with boxes stacked all the way up to the ceiling. The bush plane was a relic with an old cargo net thrown over the mail for a final nostalgic hint to the greasy plane. The flight was a step back in time, an encounter with the explorers, the bold adventurers who came before us to discover Alaska. The colorful GPS was the only modern touch reminding me of my impending reality. This was not a fantasy, this was becoming real, and I had a job to do.

  I untangled my head set wiring and plugged it in.

  “Where are we going by the way?” I asked.

  “Newtok.”

  I closed my door and grabbed my seat belt along with the shoulder strap.

  “Next time, don’t close the door so hard!” The sentence felt like a farmer wringing a chicken’s neck. My excitement had snapped like a tooth pick. Who was this man? Who was I sitting with? I had been gentle with the door.

  “Ok,” was the pale extent of my answer, the oral expression of my surprise.

  We taxied out and took off in a vain silence. Roman turned towards the west and continued climbing to cruise altitude. I stayed quiet for the first few minutes of the flight and looked outside; there was nothing I was not used to, hundreds of lakes and an endless ribbon of thawing tundra.

  “How long have you been with Norton?” I asked to break the thickening ice.

  “Too long.” Each word Roman was expressing was like a verbal sting, a live dart in quest of torment. I felt like a nuisance, an unwanted guest on his ride.

  “Let me know if I can do something,” I humbly asked.

  “You can be quiet.” Roman was not looking at me, I could only hear his dreadful voice on the intercom.

  The flight went on for another twenty five minutes. I reviewed the paperwork and read the weight and balance. I glanced outside and continued familiarizing myself with the cockpit. Roman was rapidly becoming a no fly zone, a topic to avoid in the middle of an otherwise wonderful experience. After all, I was in the middle of my first commercial flight; I was supposed to be enjoying this. But the Roman character was a bitter taste to this first experience; he was the alarm clock buzzing in the middle of a wonderful dream. There was no snooze to hit, only the realization of a reality behind the fancy curtain. Roman Matic was the first hiccup in a dream job, and I could only wonder how many more would come.

  If the previous chatter had not been clear enough, his present mood did the rest. There was a palpable coldness about him, maybe even a latent anger. I stayed quiet and remained open to any chance of learning anything.

  Roman picked up the VHF* radio.

  “Newtok 591, Norton.”

  “Norton, go ahead 591.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” Roman consulted his clip board. “I have 800 pounds of mail, and… 8 UPS.”

  “I‘ve nothing for you. See you at the airport.”

  “See you there.”

  “Fifteen minutes out, you have to call the village agent. The frequencies are on the clip board. Tell them the type of freight you have and the weight.” Roman said while looking outside.

  “All right, thanks.” There was nothing else to say.

  Ten minutes to Newtok. The small village was on a shore line of an estuary twelve miles from the Bering Sea. Like any other village in the delta, it had its school and store, along with a small clinic to patch up the sick and injured while waiting for the medevac plane. The airport was one of the worst in the delta. It almost looked like an aircraft carrier with a gravel runway floating a few feet above the rest of the tundra. It was a narrow and unforgiving island surrounded by wet lands. The apron was not much better with an old metal grader shed on the left, and a noticeable slant towards a large pond on the right. A long boardwalk ran all the way to the village two hundred yards further east. Roman skillfully landed, taxied back, and entered the apron. With a curious eye, I looked at the right wheel rolling a few feet from the uneven edge of the ramp dropping into a small lake. Roman shut down all the systems in a gesture repeated a thousand times and stepped out of the plane. I followed.

  A native man was standing on a four wheeler with a wooden trailer by the boardwalk. As soon as the propeller stopped, the man worked his way around the right wing and parked beside the cargo door. Roman walked around the front of the aircraft to meet him. The man was Yupik Eskimo like most of the people in the villages, but I could not really tell his age, late forties probably. His dark and withered skin along with thin musculature clearly indicated a tremendous amount of time spent working outside. The Alaskan weather was not kind to people, but it was the way the locals lived. There was nothing much to do inside anyway. Life was out in the open, they hunted game and fished; they picked berries and visited the next village in a way of living still very much based on nature.

  “Hey, John. How you doing?” Roman called out.

  “Goot, the store keeps me busy. You’re my third plane today.”

  “Well, that’s good!”

  I approached the agent. “Hi, I’m Ste-”

  “Yeah, he’s a new pilot,” Roman cut me off.

  “Well, we’re going to see a lot more of you here!” John smiled.

  “Yes, you will!” I replied with a quick smile.

  “Ok, new guy, stop talking and unload the plane.” Roman barked. I quieted down and did what I was told. I was a new comer and did not want to make any waves even if his attitude was regrettable. In a few days, right after my checkride*, we would be equals, even if the seniority card could still be pulled once in a while to enjoy the perks of longevity.

  In an industry where down time did not pay, we stayed on the ground seven or eight minutes, just enough time to unload the plane and restart the engine. The return trip was the mirror of the outbound flight without any unnecessary talk. I was grateful for occasional advice but his methods were bare and coarse. Roman sounded like a robot, a soulless recorder made in Eastern Europe, whatever the label meant. His thick accent did not help the dryness of his voice either; it was only the final touch to an odd character. I did not know where I was going with Norton, how I would like it or how long it would take me to upgrade to the Skyvan, but one thing was obviou
s, I knew that Roman was darkening the once idealistic picture.

  Hopeless

  May

  The next days with Roman might as well have been in the twilight zone. The flying was fun, we flew like ping pong balls from village to village; we met the agents, delivered the mail, and dropped off occasional charter passengers. We spotted moose and herds of caribou, bald eagles and musk oxen; we flew back to Bethel, gassed up, loaded the plane and left for more. It was enjoyable and instructional, but it was all in a royal silence. I felt like a little kid in a 1940s classroom, at the first unauthorized word, the teacher would throw a small piece of chalk towards me for a quieting impact. Our communication was laborious and drier than a Sunday morning stroll in the middle of Death Valley, where any conversation attempt had to be strictly necessary and to the point.

  In rare acts of kindness, Roman did vaguely attempt to teach me the tools of the trade, but deep down, I could not help but wonder if it was not to fulfill a more personal agenda by training his own little gofer. While I might have been experiencing a mild episode of paranoia in trying to accurately assess Roman’s interpersonal skills, I could safely conclude that he did not care about anybody else but himself. I did not take it personally as I saw him, on multiple occasions, interacting with passengers or other employees in the same despicable fashion. People were unavoidable bags of meat. Roman had to deal with them, all day long. People were everywhere, omnipresent like a Bubonic plague in the middle ages. Even in the bush he could not get away from them. There were the cumbersome coworkers, the demanding passengers and the newbie on top of the filthy chain, always asking questions, and wanting to find out, and wondering something else, and why this, and why that. Even in flying, Roman could not be left alone. There was a float plane job around the corner for the summer. This time, he was about to fly deeper into the mountains, still further, away from the populace. He wanted to have peace and quiet, he wanted to escape the crowds. Now, there was that constantly jabbering Californian. Solitude, that’s all he wanted, was it so much to ask?

  It was by spending time with the Eastern European bear that I learned the intricacies of negotiating the weather and its rules (as for the meaning of “Eastern”, the exact location still remained obscure). Among the meanders of aviation regulations, the all mighty five hundred foot ceiling* and two mile visibility stepped out of the crowd and imposed its sovereign ruling. Anything below the prescribed regulations and the pilot stepped into a forbidden no-man’s-land for an unfortunate expedition to the dark side of the law. If the pilot was caught, the FAA came out and showed its sharp claws. The ensuing temporary license suspension, or any other disciplinary action no matter how insignificant, was an indelible stain on the pilot’s log book and the end of a potential career with a major airline.

  While we avoided jumping to the other side of the legal fence, I learned to deal with the passengers and the required safety briefing. Once again, I stood back and observed Roman working his craft. The correct and required content was indeed there; however, his approach was a mockery of the reality, a troublesome display of his condescendence for the commoner. Roman waited for the passengers to be seated as we boarded the plane. There was no welcoming word, no kindness, not even a basic hello or any form of greeting. Roman often looked at the travelers with a lifeless gaze and started his talk.

  “Zi is zhe door. Open zaht way.” He mechanically showed the door handle. “Fire extinguizher right here. Pull on zhe pin, squeeze on zhe handle.” Again, his large hand illustrated the description. “Zi is how you use your zeat belt…” Roman’s chronically mutating accent was the physical representation of his disdain. It was an act of self-claimed independence, highlighting his rugged look and heights to disarm any passenger’s attempt to converse.

  The following days stayed engraved as a dreadful memory, a grotesque false hope to communicate with my fellow pilot. The commercial dream was on standby, choked by this strange personage sitting next to me. I did try another few times to tame him, but it was in vain. After all, it would have been such a magnificent experience to find out more about Norton, or even from his experience on the other side of the Iron Curtain; he could have been an open book to the life over there. I could only imagine how it would have been to grow up in the Communist era. Where was he when the curtain collapsed? I did try one last time to go beyond the minimum chatter required. The scene was the same as always, lost in cruise over the Y-K Delta, the engine monotony humming for what felt like hours.

  “So, how was it to grow up over there?” Wherever over there might have been, I still did not precisely know.

  Roman grunted back at me.

  “Do I talk too much?”

  “YES!” He said with a large aggressive grin as he looked at me in the eye.

  That was it, the sad extent of our conversation and the camaraderie I could expect. I never really felt bad about it, there was nothing personal, Roman mishandled everybody the same way. The passengers were treated like pariahs; his vision of customer service was based on ignoring the clients and barking commands. But I did not walk out from my experience with Roman empty handed. I had learned the plane and the procedures fairly well, even without flying it. I understood the company policies and paperwork. I became familiar with the village agents, the dispatchers, and some frequent flyer passengers. My temporary daily routine at Norton Aviation was established. Another few days and I would meet Robert, my company instructor. In the meantime, I would go on my runs, relegated to the right seat, barely good enough to unload the plane and stay quiet.

  New Stuyahok

  May

  I was still on standby waiting for Robert Allen, my long awaited company instructor, to come back from his monthly break and set me free. In the meantime, I only had to stay quiet and skim from flight to flight, from heavy silences to occasional short comings.

  This next trip came as a nice break from our daily routine with Jeb, our young and ambitious dispatcher, assigning us to a charter for two construction workers and their tools. The destination was New Stuyahok, a village an hour and a half flight east of Bethel, where they would take advantage of the summer months to start building a school.

  Unlike the scheduled flights which mostly left Bethel bound to the northern woods, or the coastal regions west and south west, we were heading east away from the more conventional routes. Long ago, the locals realized the harshness of the mountains and wisely decided to stay by the sea or along the flatter landscape of the Yukon and the Kuskokwim rivers. New Stuyahok was on the other side of the sixty mile wide Kilbuck mountain range, hiding behind its tall peaks and deep valleys. The small village was near Bristol Bay and Dillingham, the main town in the area, but the bay could have been a world away with the mountains acting as a natural barrier against the natural flow of the delta.

  We were about to experience the true bush flying, alone and isolated from an already scarce human presence. The romantic illusion of the beautiful mountain flying was hitting the reality of Alaska. I had met inexperienced pilots from the lower 48 in quest of adventure and freedom. They envied the beautiful documentaries they saw on television. They daydreamed of the wild, the low level flying surrounded by towering mountains, the waterfalls, and the harmless grizzly bear casually looking at the plane flying by with a stunning cloudless blue sky in the background. At least, that was the beautiful postcard painted by travel agencies. The reality was not so dandy. Bush flying came with heavy baggage and a wide array of plagues worthy of ancient Egypt. If the mountains were there, the horrendous summer weather often came along for the ride in a deadly mix of torrential rains, strong turbulence, and thick fog. Most of the visiting pilots realized their miscalculation and wisely went back home. Others took their chance and gambled with their life. A few lost.

  Today was one of those days with clouds looming over the mountains like an evil presence. It was purposeful, Roman Matic was only one pawn in the grand scheme of flying; he was only one character among others. I was in the second row,
well behind the main participants.

  This mountain flight was intriguing. I had already flown through the Kilbuck chain, but only with good weather on an easy ride with students. I was upstairs in the break room waiting for Roman, staring at my aviation map and strategizing about the best route to New Stuyahok. I was processing the weather and running my finger along the chart analyzing the potential options. An overcast layer at 3500 feet with mountain tops well into the clouds. Not so good. We would probably have to stay south and head towards lower grounds. Let’s see, if the wind is coming from the sou-Roman entered the room like a hurricane slamming open an old window.

  “Let’s go!” His stare fell on me with its load of disdain.

  “Ok.” That was all.

  In a nerdy retreat, I walked down the stairs still computing the different routes possible. There was no need for a confrontation. To the North, an easy pass offered no major obstacle, but the route would be drastically longer. We could always spire straight through the mountains and sneak through several narrow passes, exposing ourselves to be stuck between low clouds and rising terrain. In this scenario, the turnaround might not be possible in a tight valley, and we would be fools to blindly get in and hope for the best. To the South, the coast was waiting for us along with the safety of flat land, but the route also added an extra 40 minutes to the trip. I had a rough idea about what I would do on the flight. I would fly southeast and hug the mountains, while staying over flat land or harmless hills. That way, we would be able to avoid the terrain while keeping a somewhat shorter route. Either way, I was only a guest on this flight and my opinion was meaningless in Roman’s eyes.

  I was eager to find out his plan of action. After all, this flight was a wonderful learning experience, but I knew that my imminent request was facing an avoidable failure. As we walked towards the plane, I cleared my throat and spoke with the most respectful and humble tone I could muster in a vain hope to obtain some kind of answer.