And the more I came to know this man, the more I realized that he needs to do this. He needs to fly, needs to be behind the controls of the aging World War II beauties to which his name is so closely linked. But he also needs this kind of relaxed, gentle human interaction that he seems to find so difficult at other times during the day. Because while he is loath to show it to the outside world, Joe McBryan is really an ol’ softie at heart.
You certainly couldn’t tell by his work ethic, though. Buffalo has been offering its scheduled Yellowknife–Hay River service continuously since 1982. Joe flies each one-hour (200-kilometre) leg across the belly of the great lake, leaving Hay River at 7:30 every morning and returning home at 5:00 every evening. That’s twelve flights each week, or 624 flights a year. So between 1982 and 2010—give or take the odd missed flight for weather—Buffalo Airways’ daily DC-3 airline passenger service flew 17,472 times. Joe McBryan was at the helm for almost all of them.
It makes me wonder if he ever looks forward to a day off or (God forbid!) a vacation. “Why would I go on holiday?” he snapped at me when I asked him when he’d last taken a break for a little R & R. “So I could sit on my ass?”
* * *
The Buffalo Airways Fleet
Buffalo Airways is the proud owner of fifty-two aircraft, forty-nine of which are registered to the airline and three to the Buffalo School of Aviation, which hasn’t run courses in several years.
1Aeronca Champion: C-FNPJ
2Beechcraft Baron: C-FULX, C-GBAU
3Beechcraft King Air: C-FCGE, C-FCGH, C-FCGI
3Beechcraft Travel Air: C-GIWJ, C-GWCB, C-GYFM
7Canadair CL-215: C-FAYN, C-GBPD, C-GBYU, C-GCSX, C-GDHN, C-GDKW, C-GNCS
1Cessna 185: C-FUPT
2Consolidated Vultee (Canso): C-FNJE, C-FPQM
1Consolidated Vultee (Convair): C-GTFC
3Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando: C-FAVO, C-GTPO, C-GTXW
1Douglas C-47 Skytrain (a military variant of the DC-3): C-FCUE
13Douglas C-54 Skymaster (a variant of the DC-4): C-FBAA, C-FBAJ, C-FBAK, C-FBAM, C-FBAP, C-FIQM, C-GBAJ, C-GBNV, C-GBSK, C-GCTF, C-GPSH, C-GQIC, C-GXKN
9Douglas DC-3: C-FDTB, C-FDTH, C-FFAY, C-FFTR, C-FLFR, C-GJKM, C-GPNR, C-GWIR, C-GWZS
1Fleet Canuck: C-FDQJ
3Lockheed L-188 Electra: C-FIJX, C-GLBA, C-FIJV
1Noorduyn Norseman: C-FSAN
1Robinson R22 helicopter: C-FNEO
* * *
Douglas DC-3 Facts & Figures
·Capacity: 2 flight crew and 21–32 passengers, depending on seat configuration
·Production: 16,079; 10,655 in the United States
·Length: 19.7 metres (64 feet, 5 inches)
·Wingspan: 29 metres (95 feet)
·Height: 5.2 metres (16 feet, 11 inches)
·Maximum speed: 346 km/h (215 mph)
·Cruise speed: 240 km/h (150 mph)
·Range: 1,650 kilometres (1,025 miles)
·Empty weight: 8,300 kilograms (18,300 pounds)
·Maximum takeoff weight: 12,700 kilograms (28,000 pounds)
THE KNIFE
Taking Joe’s words to heart, I made it a point not to sit on my ass, particularly when I was in his presence. Even when I was on my own, I relished the opportunity to explore Yellowknife.
Set on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake some 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of the Arctic Circle, Yellowknife is as colourful as it is cosmopolitan. For every government bureaucrat walking its streets in a suit and tie, there’s a miner, prospector, drunk, or raconteur (sometimes all wrapped up in the same body) regaling some newcomer with derring-do stories of gold hunted, fortunes made, loves lost, and blizzards survived. Aboriginals have called the lands around Yellowknife home for thousands of years (the city gets its name from the local Yellowknives Dene peoples, who made tools from copper deposits in the area), but the city’s modern era began in the 1930s, when gold mining became its primary commercial focus.
The discovery of gold in Yellowknife is widely attributed to a prospector named B.A. Blakeney, who was on his way to the Klondike gold rush around Dawson City, Yukon, in the late 1890s. With the frenzy surrounding the riches being unearthed in the Klondike, people paid little or no attention to Blakeney’s Yellowknife discovery. Little wonder: since 1896, when Skookum Jim made his serendipitous discovery of gold along Rabbit (Bonanza) Creek, more than 385,000 kilograms (850,000 pounds) of gold have been taken from the Klondike. There may have been gold around Yellowknife, but nobody seemed to care.
Flying changed the face of prospecting—and of Yellowknife—forever when, in the late 1920s, aircraft were engaged in the search for precious metals across the globe. When uranium and silver were unearthed at Great Bear Lake, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) northwest of Yellowknife, the hunt began in earnest.
In 1933, prospectors Herb Dixon and Johnny Baker found gold in two small lakes near Yellowknife. One year later, gold was found on the east side of Yellowknife Bay, leading to the construction of the Burwash Mine. Though Burwash did not have a particularly long life, the establishment of the mine helped put Yellowknife on the prospecting map. The long-lived Con Mine soon followed. Yellowknife became a full-blown boomtown. Southerners flocked there for both work and adventure.
By 1942, Yellowknife had five gold mines in production. After the lull induced by World War II, the Giant Mine uncovered a significant gold deposit on the north end of town, a discovery that led to yet another staking rush in the area. Before long, Yellowknife was the economic hub of the Northwest Territories; it was named capital in 1967, the centenary of Canadian confederation.
Prospectors braved the ravages of weather and loneliness for a chance at the gold the North was rumoured to hold. Here prospector Curtis Smith searches for the motherlode in the bush around Prairie Creek, Northwest Territories, 1952.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, Yellowknife’s precious-metals era had begun drawing to a close (the last of the gold mines shut its doors in 2004), only to be replaced by an even more desirable product. In 1991, diamonds were discovered a few hundred kilometres north of the city, and the second boom was on. The Ekati Diamond Mine—one of the most prolific on Earth—began operation in 1998. Today, Yellowknife serves as a hub for industry, transportation, communications, education, health, tourism, commerce, and government activity in the territory.
Coincidentally enough, my first experience of Yellowknife occurred the same year that diamonds were discovered at Lac de Gras, though profit was the farthest thing from my mind. Eager to carve out my own simple niche in the world, I wanted nothing more than the twenty-dollar weekly stipend Frontiers Foundation afforded me, as long as the organization continued to provide room and board. So after a three-day drive across some of the most remote and unpopulated regions of Canada, I glanced up from the passenger seat of a mid-1970s Chevy Blazer and saw something I never thought I’d see this close to the Arctic Circle: a skyline.
Dozens of small communities pepper the lands that stretch across the 60th parallel. Settled and built almost exclusively by the Canadian government, most of these hamlets boast cookie-cutter homes and a few roads, surrounded by thousands of square kilometres of wilderness.
Any urban dweller worth his salt will tell you that Yellowknife’s profile is a far cry from New York’s. But for me, I’ll never forget the moment I laid eyes upon the buildings of the Northwest Territories’ capital rising from the frozen subarctic landscape. Three days later I was on a flight bound for Inuvik, itself a four-hour drive from Fort McPherson. As our pickup rumbled down the gravel bed of the Dempster Highway toward our destination, my path became clear: with six months of construction experience under my belt and full of the piss and vinegar of young adulthood, I would meet the North head
-on and throw all my energy into my volunteer work. And if that meant pounding nails into the side of a house as outside temperatures dipped low enough to freeze my eyelids shut, so be it.
Yet as fate so often has it, the Arctic had other plans for me.
“You’re going to meet your wife up there,” one of my Park Avenue colleagues had said to me as I packed up my things and took one last walk around the Major League Baseball office, still wondering if leaving its luxurious confines made any sense.
The odds seemed slim at best. If I hadn’t met Mrs. Right from among the eight million or so people who call New York City home, how on Earth would it happen north of the Arctic Circle? The overwhelming majority of Fort McPherson’s residents are aboriginal, from families that have hunted, trapped, and fished in the area for generations. Meet my wife? Not unless she was willing to give up a lifestyle that was completely alien to me and spend a little time in the Big Apple.
Yet meet my wife I did. Marty was a nurse in Fort McPherson’s small health centre. I remember meeting her on one of the town’s dirt roads shortly after my arrival in early January 1991. I was walking down the street with my fellow volunteers, headed back to our small apartment for a bite of lunch after a morning’s work. Marty was on a lunchtime stroll with a friend, whose new house we happened to be building.
Though I was smitten with Marty’s smile immediately, I had little idea what lurked under the mounds of clothing she wore to ward off the elements. At –40°, we all looked like pears, so one could only speculate whether someone had a nice one of these or impressive set of those. Someone once told me that getting amorous with someone for the first time up north is a bit like opening a Christmas present, except you don’t really know how much wrapping paper there is.
Wrapping paper notwithstanding, it wasn’t long before Marty and I bid a sad farewell to Fort McPherson and set out on our own adventure together, shuttling from Fort McPherson to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and New York City before returning to the Arctic, this time to the frozen tundra of Baffin Island. A few years later we were married on the sea ice of Patricia Bay near Clyde River, a community of seven hundred-odd Inuit residents. We chose January 21 as our date, the day the sun was set to return to the northern sky (albeit briefly) after a hiatus of more than two months.
After a year in Clyde River we moved southward to the relatively balmy climes of Pangnirtung, another Baffin Island community, but one located about fifty kilometres (thirty miles) south of the Arctic Circle. Our first child, Dawson Orion (named respectively for the Yukon town and the constellation that filled the dark Baffin Island sky all winter), joined our family on March 6, 1996.
Compared with Clyde River, Pangnirtung—or Pang, for short—was a metropolis. The place had two stores, a vibrant arts centre, and even a restaurant, to the extent that a KFC Quickstop counts as a restaurant. Armed with a new work visa and a master’s degree in elementary education (that I’d pick up in New York), I took a half-time teaching position in the local junior/senior high school, the Attagoyuk School.
Teaching Grade 9 students at Attagoyuk showed me how little I knew about northern society and culture. Here I was, trying to foist a Canadian-government-approved curriculum upon a group of people who until recently had lived off the land, a tradition they had held for thousands of years. Sure, the kids in my class, with their Montreal Canadiens caps and baggy jeans, looked like a typical group of fourteen-year-olds. But while I was urging them to memorize the parts of speech, they could have been out seal hunting or riding snowmobiles across the frozen waters of Pangnirtung Fiord—a far more enticing prospect. When spring, and nearly constant daylight, came around, attendance in my class plummeted to single digits. The local kids, I learned, had a penchant for staying up all night and sleeping all day.
And while those were simple, carefree days, Dawson’s birth forced Marty and me to consider what our future lives would look like. After months of introspection, we realized that Baffin Island—where thousands of kilometres separated us from our families—might not be the ideal place to raise a child.
So when Up Here magazine offered me its editorship, I could not refuse. It was an opportunity to take the reins of one of Canada’s finest—yet most anonymous—magazines. Published eight times a year, the magazine chronicles the ins and outs of life north of 60, and does so with an eye toward humour, irony, and intrigue. It was, and remains, one of the best reads in the country. Better yet, the offices of Up Here were located in Yellowknife, capital of the Northwest Territories and home to around twenty thousand people (good god!). It sure as hell wasn’t New York City, but after two years on Baffin Island, it may as well have been.
Yellowknife hasn’t changed all that much in the years since I last called it home. The city still manages to elegantly blend its frontier history with its cosmopolitan present. Everywhere you look, old and new stand side by side and somehow manage to work together.
The city is perched atop and around the two primary geographic elements that define its boundaries: rocks and water. Frame Lake forms the unofficial centre of town, and many of the city’s most significant downtown buildings—City Hall, the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, and the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly—share its waterfront views. Jackfish Lake, Niven Lake, Kam Lake, Range Lake, and Rat Lake all add to Yellowknife’s watery landscape.
Yellowknife’s Old Town strikes an eclectic pose from the air. Like many parts of the city, Old Town has evolved around the outcrops of Canadian Shield that pepper the northern landscape.
Yet for all the lakeside views the city may offer, it’s ultimately the gritty but smooth grey rock that defines the place. No matter where you are in the city, you’ll find random outcrops, often in the unlikeliest places. Intrepid developers and homesteaders have tried to tame the rock, blasting it into a more manageable shapes and sizes, but usually the rock prevails, forcing them to come up with unique designs so their domiciles will fit over and around the lichen-flecked stone.
Yellowknife’s pioneer roots lie in Old Town, which sits on a small, rocky peninsula jutting out into Yellowknife Bay, a protected arm of Great Slave Lake. For me, this is the city at its most interesting. Turn one way and there’s an old, weathered cabin that speaks to decades of hardworking people trying to scratch a living from a land that does not easily yield its secrets or riches. Turn the other to find a modern, funky home designed by a local architect and perched high on a rock, its spacious deck overlooking the lake. Visitors are always delighted by the frontier feel of Old Town’s Ragged Ass Road; at some point in the town’s colourful history, three local fellows enjoyed some refreshments at the Gold Range Hotel and decided to rename their street as such, erecting a hand-painted sign that very night. Soon afterwards, Ragged Ass Road was adopted as the street’s official moniker.
Aptly enough, New Town is the more modern part of Yellowknife; its settlement began after World War II, when Old Town became overcrowded. Since then, the city has continued to expand outward, and what was once New Town is more commonly regarded as downtown. This is the commercial hub of the city, and where you’ll find most of its larger buildings.
From New Town, Yellowknife sprawls. Maybe that’s why it sometimes feels more like suburbia than the subarctic city it is. Here you’ll find most of Yellowknife’s modern-day amenities, such as its pool, recreation facility, and even a Walmart. Most Buffalo employees live in that sprawling—and more affordable—part of town. The McBryans live in Old Town.
As I continued my reacquaintance with Yellowknife in earnest, I realized that despite any cosmetic changes that may have occurred since I left, the heart and soul of the place is the same. A few subdivisions weren’t here back then, and some of the buildings had changed shape and purpose, but the heart and soul of Yellowknife was the same. And at its core, Yellowknife is a hard-working, hard-playing, hard-living town. For Buffalo Airways, it’s the per
fect place to call home.
Yellowknife is the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the Northwest Territories, covering an area of 105.2 square kilometres (40.6 square miles). Actress Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, was born here in 1948.
Mikey McBryan understands well that few other places on Earth could support an airline like Buffalo. From Yellowknife, Buffalo can serve the entire Northwest Territories, all 1.17 million square kilometres (450,000 square miles) of it (not to mention the 2.1 million square kilometres, or 810,000 square miles, of neighbouring Nunavut). There may be only 42,000 people living in the Northwest Territories, but half of them are scattered over a land mass twice the size of Texas. And for many of those people, there’s only one way in or out: by air.
Here, on the Earth’s last frontier, mavericks are still free to set their own course and dictate their own fate. It’s a perfect milieu for someone like Buffalo Joe, who runs his business according to a simple mantra that rings true throughout northern Canada: get ’er done.
Since Joe founded Buffalo, the airline has made a name for itself by connecting people living in remote northern communities with the goods they need to live. Up here, the company serves as a lifeline to the North. Take Buffalo out of the picture, and precious food and supplies wouldn’t reach the many northern communities that are otherwise cut off from the rest of the world. Although Buffalo delivers freight throughout the year, its effect is most acutely felt during the long, dark winters.
The Ice Pilots Page 4