Alaska! Up North and to the Left

by Steven Swaks

  “Want to come along?” Robert’s voice jerked me out of my envious daze.

  “Sure!” I answered with a ridiculous grin.

  “I’ve already asked Jeb if you can come with me. The weather is going to be down for a while. Just remove the air intake covers on your side and jump in.” Robert was amused by my juvenile excitement.

  I walked to the right side of the aircraft and pulled off two red covers on each end of the engine. One looked like a half moon cushion and perfectly matched the smiley shaped air intake. On the opposite end of the engine, the exhaust cover was more of a giant wine bottle cork and was just pushed in the large opening. I walked to the cockpit door, pulled a large red handle and opened the side door. I climbed a small ladder and accessed the cockpit through a tall door next to the copilot seat. I stowed the covers behind my seat and closed the door behind me. I then sat, buckled up, and took it all in. It was a strange perspective. The Skyvan’s cockpit was fairly high off the ground, but the pilot sat very close to the front of the plane. There was no long nose sticking out like anything I was used to. The cockpit was very large with access to the seats on either side of the cabin and a wide center console between the pilots.

  It was time to go fly. I knew it would not be an instruction flight, I was much too green with the company and I had to prove myself first. Besides, a premature upgrade would have unleashed Randolph’s wrath, lifelong pilot dedicated to the Caravan. Rather, it would be an introduction, a welcome present from Norton Aviation. Robert was in the captain’s chair, I was watching his hands dancing throughout the ancient cockpit. It was still the time of the steam gauges, the large protruding levers and oversized controls. His hands were gliding down the panels from the cockpit ceiling behind us descending to the main panel between both seats. Handles moved, switches activated, and small knobs were pushed. There was a faint noise behind us, a small complaint from a piece of machinery, a fuel pump perhaps. Then it came, a whining sound skyrocketing in octaves, an uncontrollable roar coming from the right engine. I looked behind me as the large propeller came to life, knifing through the air with its enormous blades. The oversized propellers looked like a grotesque shredder ready to swallow anything, bold trespassers or those ignorant enough who dared to approach it. In an instant, the left engine followed its brother, and rattled the entire plane.

  It then dawned on me; I did not even know where we were going. I had been so absorbed by the plane that I had not bothered asking about our destination.

  “Where’re we going by the way?”

  “Tununak.” Robert answered preparing to taxi the plane.

  Tununak was a small Yupik village on the shore lines of the Bering Sea. After Tununak, there was Nunivak Island, and then nothing, the end of the world all the way to a new beginning, the date line, Siberia, and the rest of mankind.

  Our assignment was simple, fly there, drop off two palettes of mail, and pick up bags of back haul… that was it.

  Robert called Ground and received a taxi clearance. Another call to the tower and the beast was cleared for takeoff. Robert slightly pushed the power levers forward and aligned the Skyvan with the runway. Another few feet rolling on the concrete, everything looked fine. Robert scanned the gauges, pushed the levers all the way to the correct torque and unleashed the fury. The two powerful Garret engines launched the plane down the runway towards the vertical dimension. In a gentle rotation, the plane left the earth and entered the heavens, we were airborne. A slight control input and we turned towards the west.

  The flight to Tununak was uneventful, whatever uneventful meant in Alaska, a gray mixture of broken ceiling and fog. During the entire journey I kept glancing at the giant propeller slicing through the air just above my right shoulder. I felt so puny against her. She was in charge; Rob was only showing her the way.

  The Y-K Delta was unraveling beneath our wings. The tundra villages of Atmauthluk, Kasigluk and Nunapitchuk huddled together before the waste emptiness of the delta. The Baird Inlet followed, sort of a vast “T” bone shaped bay. Nelson Island was next; the island was a simple extension of the mainland, owning its stolen independence from a very narrow and shallow river running around part of the island. The rest of Nelson Island’s coast line was legitimately facing the Bering Sea with tall and sheer cliffs. Herds of muskoxen grazed on the rolling hills and hardly looked at the passing bush plane.

  The island was not a deserted slice of mountainous tundra, it was home to three villages, Tununak, Nightmute, and Toksook Bay. Every day, passengers and mail came and left, in an endless ballet with Bethel. In low weather, pilots found their way around the hills and cliffs populating the island, navigating with long acquired knowledge and their shiny GPS in a maze of dead end valleys. Toksook was the largest village on the island and it doubled as the antechamber of a 7 mile flight to Tununak. Seven miles might have seemed insignificant, just like a Sunday stroll through a mine field. On a good day, the last stretch of the flight was straight forward. Pilots followed a valley from Toksook to Tununak, but when the fog or low clouds came to crash the party, the flight became much less predictable. In an Eeny, meeny, miny, moe game from hell, the pilots picked what seemed to be the correct valley. One led to the open sea and Tununak, the other one led to a rapidly rising terrain disappearing into the clouds. The novice pilot entered the narrow valley and flew lower and lower, trapped like a wild animal, unable to control its fate. The terrain rose in a valley too narrow to turn around. The clouds lurked just above like silent witnesses. They hid the mountains and the ice during the winter, accomplices to a murder in the making. In a last minute of agony, the trapped pilot waited to hit the ground in an unforgiving funnel to his tomb.

  Occasionally the visibility was good. If fog receded and left the pilots alone, the restless winds came to cause trouble like a bunch of rowdy boys in a country bar. Bone shuddering Siberian winds, unrestrained by hundreds of miles of Bering Sea came smashing onto Nelson Island. The turbulence unleashed its wrath and turned the island into a wind shear fest, a wild party with planes as cocktail shakers and passengers begging for mercy.

  Today was another much too common day with strong winds swiping across Tununak’s runway. Even if the Skyvan was a brute, it had its weakness. The plane was shaped like a square box with the side of the fuselage acting like a sail to the assaults of the wind, and every cross wind landing was a challenge, a show down with a mad giant pushing the plane away from the narrow runways. Robert kept his legendary calm. Each gesture was slow and calculated; there was no need for stress. The pilot nursed the plane to a safe landing on the rough ground. We taxied and parked the Skyvan at the edge of a small gravel ramp a hundred yards from the shore of the Bering Sea. The wind had played with us on landing, but the still plane was not as interesting, and it returned to the grassy fields around the apron, twirling the long stems in a continuous dance. It carried the scent from the sea and the iodine. A flock of seagulls flew by. I climbed down the short cockpit ladder, and hand rotated the large propeller to evenly cool down the engines. Surprisingly, the very large blades did not oppose any resistance. I walked towards the back of the plane and met Robert who was already with our agent. The bush pilot turned into ground crew, that’s what we did, we kept switching from makeshift customer agents, ground crew, flight attendants, and occasionally pilots.

  Once in a while we flew back haul to Bethel; instead of coming back empty, we accepted freight at very low cost. Usually it was not much. Even on the Skyvan, we only brought back two or three hundred pounds of freight. Today was not different, the agent had gathered a small pile of boxes and two black trash bags. Robert walked towards the pile, looked at me and pointed at the bags.

  “Hey Steven, can you get those bags?”

  “Ok!” I did not think anything of it.

  I approached them and found a hand written address in Bethel. Who would send something in trash bags? What was in there? I tried to pick up the first one. The plastic rose but the content stayed firmly on the groun
d. The heavier weight than expected was surprising. If I picked it up by the handles, I had no doubt the bottom would give under the weight. What was it? I kneeled and attempted to lift it. It seemed there was a single object inside sliding in the plastic bag. I spread my feet apart to get a better footing and scooped it in my arm. It was about three feet long, ovoid, and slippery. My urban background could not, or did not want to comprehend what I was carrying. Then it hit me, deep down, I already knew what it was.

  “Can you put the seals by the rest of the backhaul?” Robert casually asked me. He had just involuntarily dug the dagger into my heart. I did not need to hear those words. Denial was so wonderful, it allowed an escape, a what if, an open doorway to an endless world of possibilities. Now, there was no more doubt, among my multiple hats, just between flight attendant and ground crew, I could add butcher or accomplice to murder… one more link in a horrific chain. I had always considered myself open-minded, and I had always enjoyed trying new food or activities, but this was roaming somewhere over the top well beyond any desired reach. In the anonymity of the trash bag, the lifeless body unleashed wild and monstrous fantasies; my long gone firefighter days were rushing back with the fury of a demented man on a rampage. The thing sloshed in the bag, the thing I was carrying in my open arms felt like a small corpse.

  I was fighting my initial reaction, and attempted to be more open to new experiences. After all, I was in Alaska, and I had to understand the local customs. Seal hunting was very important, and it was still a large part of the coastal village food source. The Yupik used it for its oil and meat. I had once tried dried seal meat. Beyond the initial black beef jerky spoiled for the last two years look, the taste was probably worse. It was hard and overall frankly disgusting.

  The fifty feet or so between the crime scene where I had picked up the seal and the plane turned out to be a long walk to self-discovery. Robert knew better; years in the bush had probably exposed him numerous times to this peculiar freight. I was still a novice.

  “Can you strap it down?” Rob asked with a small smirk.

  “Sure…” I looked at him with a surrendering look.

  The Skyvan had a large cargo bay accessible through a large open door between the tails. I dropped off the seal on the floor and hopped inside. I picked up a yellow strap and hooked it on each side of the gelatinous mass. I then started to crank the strap. It was an odd sensation; the strap hugged the bag in a gentle embrace. I reluctantly continued cranking to secure the seal. The lifeless body squished under the rising tension. I could almost feel the impossible pain on postmortem nerves. I stood up and stepped back from the corpse. I jumped off the back of the plane, my chore was done. It was time to leave.

  I removed the chocks off the main wheels and boarded the plane. A last look to clear the ramp and once again Robert became the maestro and initiated the engine start up. There was no key to twist, but an endless series of levers and switches for a cumbersome starting sequence. The Skyvan was one of those older planes with controls for everything. There was no fancy toy, no computer to warn the crew of any false move. No alarm to announce: “Hey dingbat, you forgot to turn on the fuel pump!” There was merely a shy light to advertise an item’s condition, candidly saying: “Well, if you notice me, you might want to do something about that fuel pump. But, never mind me, after all, I am just a small light, lying in an ocean of switches and knobs. Who am I to tell you what to do?” Robert launched the starter. The roar of the turbine gaining speed increased, the Exhaust Gas Temperature gauge* was coming to life. In a matter of seconds, the indicator showed astronomical numbers, well above 450°F. In a handful of seconds, my right engine went from docile and cool to a screaming giant oven. The temperature was no longer rising and was resigned to stay under control. Norton Aviation had already seen the Skyvan’s engines literally cooking themselves out with temperatures soaring well above 750°F, generating bills the size of a house. The passive pilot had lost control of his battle steed. The overwhelmed pilot (rapidly returning to the passenger status) stayed in his seat, experiencing his own personal career meltdown along with the frying engine. At some point, he had dared to step out of the plane, and faced Jim’s wrath.

  Our starting sequence was not so dramatic, both engines had complied and we flew back home. The plane was a small vessel in another world, a world of sunshine and infinite blue, a world of fantasies over a sea of white. We soared like children in a dream. After what might have been a second or an hour, Robert reduced power and descended towards Bethel and the endless white matter below us. It came closer, in an instant, we penetrated another dimension, the universe of blindness and artificiality, a universe of gauges and self-control. After a while, and after following strict procedures, the ground emerged, a small patch at the time between two gray clouds. It was a fleeting ghostly apparition, promise of a landing to come.

  We passed the five mile pointer to the airport and descended further down. The tundra became a solid layer of brown bushes. Out of the fog, the airport approach lights gradually appeared. Finally we emerged out of the clouds and entered the miracle of depth. A little white ball of light, or rabbit for the pilots, was frantically running towards the runway. The rabbit kept going towards the threshold only to disappear into an invisible tunnel. A fraction of a second later, it was back on the other end rushing again towards the runway showing us the way back home. A last notch of flaps, power at idle, raise the nose for the landing flare, touchdown, reverse thrust and apply brakes. The landing was a flash, a second mental state maneuver in slow motion. So much had happened in a handful of seconds. Robert taxied off the runway, reconfigured the plane, and called ground to park. The flight was over; I was back with the living. The beast was opening up, it was not so wild anymore, but she greatly deserved my respect. Soon, I would tame her. Soon, she would propel me to the heavy iron and the airlines.

  Nyac

  June

  Norton Aviation was like a little child in a school playground hiding a little secret toy in his pocket. His hand stayed on it as he looked down, hoping that nobody would notice. The little boy would have liked to show it to his friends but he was afraid they would steal it. That’s how we felt about some of our dedicated charter destinations, precious metal mines and mysterious Air Force radar sites. We talked about them fondly as if they were our prized possessions away from the beaten path.

  Like the other pilots, I had my own favorite. Mine was a shy and lonely gold mine, desperately trying to hide in the mountains. The Nyac gold mine was like the beautiful girl in high school. Everybody knew about her, some even caught an occasional glimpse of her, but she remained a distant and unreachable ideal for many too shy to even approach her. Luckily elected, we were the only ones allowed to attend the mine, and several times a week we left the common routes and headed northeast to our own private universe. Norton Aviation was Nyac’s link to everything else. Our planes were the umbilical cords full of life saving goods, fuel, tools, simple groceries, and well deserved mail. We were their life line to civilization, their taxis and delivery truck always available to maintain some cohesion within their peculiar industry.

  I might have been flying for two weeks on my own the first time I heard my name associated with Nyac and Jeb’s cringing “Next!” I approached dispatch counter. “There you go, two drums of fuel. The guys are already outside, they’re going to help you load up.” Jeb handed me the flight manifest without looking at me and picked up a ringing phone.

  Randolph had been kind enough to take me there once before and had taken the time to show me the traps the mine was hiding. The flight was wonderful. It was a quick 35 minute hop and the last ten minutes were nothing short of spectacular. Amidst the beauty of the Alaskan mountains, the mine was still a challenge, a praying mantis charming its mate before the kill. Randolph had warned me of the multiple obstacles I might encounter, so it was with due respect that I walked to my 207 on this late afternoon. I had a sense that Jim had a word to say about my first solo flight to N
yac. The conditions were perfect for a first flight up there, the weather was cooperating, and I had no passenger to distract me on the way. Randolph told me that the owner of the mine was rather picky about his pilots and that he did not hesitate to speak his mind if he felt that a driver was not up to the part. I had not met him yet, but I knew I would soon find out.

  The mine had two runways; the so called lower strip, a long 4000 footer for the large DC6 and C130 freighters, and a short and narrow, “S” shaped gravel road, labeled upper strip. The local foreman, Jason, cherished the upper strip because of its proximity to the camp. Pilots on the other hand were not so fond of it. It was the slum of the runways, a step just above the landable gravel bar on the river.

  The forklift hauling two 380 pound, 55 gallon fuel drums met me at the plane. It was not that it was particularly difficult to deal with those drums, but I had an old Norton Aviation Skyvan accident in mind. On takeoff, the single strap tying down six fuel drums had snapped and sent the drums rolling to the back of plane. With a center of gravity completely out of the envelope, the Skyvan had severely pitched up just after leaving the ground before stalling, and crashed right back to Earth, instantly killing the pilot. With his ghost by my side, I strapped my drums like a pork roast and made sure they would not go anywhere.

  I taxied and took off to the northeast. For once, the weather was indeed nice. The wind was only a light friendly breeze, the sky was an unusual crisp blue with a few Cirrus clouds hanging high. The tundra and woods had put on their most beautiful green and even the Kuskokwim River was wearing its best murky brown coat. The summer was finally showing its true colors. At last, the long Alaskan winter was over. Soon, everybody would rush to tackle the salmon and the King would go sizzle on the barbecues. The myriad of berries would offer themselves to the elders, perpetrating centuries old traditions.