The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  “I will never push them aside because I’m too busy,” she says. “It’s what you have to do. Life is way too goddamn short.” For Kelly, life is not about trips, toys, or material distractions. That outlook likely came at the hands of her great-grandmother Annie, with whom Kelly had an inseparable bond as a young girl. Annie taught her that life was a simple undertaking: focus on kindness and caring, and the rest will come. For Kelly, Annie’s life had a wholesomeness about it that is difficult to match in today’s world.

  “That woman taught me everything I know,” she recalls with a fondness that’s palpable even through the blue haze of cigarette smoke hanging in the air between us and an ever-growing mountain of empty Canadians. “How to can, and how to cook. She taught me about the purity and simplicity of life.”

  Of the myriad stories Kelly goes on to tell me about Annie through the deepening—and ever drunker—night, there is one I’ll never forget. Annie’s husband Jacques was a hangman in Scotland who wanted to make a better life for himself in North America. So Jacques decided to take a boat ride across the Atlantic on a ship called the Titanic. With a few hours to go before the ship departed, Jacques decided to visit a local pub to help pass the time. “He got so fuckin’ drunk he missed the boat!” Kelly said in a roar of laughter.

  With that, we bid farewell to one another. The night had turned dark and cold, the hour was late, and Kelly had to be up in fewer hours than I cared to admit. As I settled into the cab, my arms full of Kelly’s home-canned pickles, beets, and heirloom tomatoes, I fell asleep knowing that Buffalo’s Yellowknife-based cargo operation was in good hands.

  She swears like a trucker (hell, she was one!) and smokes like a chimney, but Kelly Jurasevich is one of the warmest people you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting. She’s also the heart and soul of Buffalo’s cargo operations up the Mackenzie Valley.

  * * *

  Electra Facts & Figures

  ·Capacity: Five crew (three flight deck) and 98 passengers

  ·production: 170

  ·Length: 31.85 metres (104 feet, 6 inches)

  ·Wingspan: 30.18 metres (99 feet)

  ·Height: 10 metres (32 feet 10 inches)

  ·Maximum speed: 721 km/h (448 mph) at 3,660 metres (12,000 feet)

  ·Cruise speed: 600 km/h (373 mph)

  ·Range: 3,540 kilometres (2,200 miles) with maximum payload 4,455 kilometres (2,770 miles) with 7,938 kilograms (17,500 pounds) payload

  ·Empty weight: 26,036 kilograms (57,400 pounds)

  ·Maximum takeoff weight: 51,256 kilograms (113,000 pounds)

  A BUSH PILOT IS BORN

  No matter where you are in the North—from the glacier-scoured hills of Baffin Island to the spruce forests of the Mackenzie River Valley—spring is a glorious time. Yellowknife is no different. The long, dark, cold, and lonely days of winter slowly start to ease their vise-like grip on the land—and on your heart. The black of darkness gives way to grey. Then, with a sudden rush, the golden glow of sunshine charges across the land, and light dominates the days and nights. Believe it or not, warmth soon follows.

  For my young family back in the mid-1990s, spring was a time to enjoy those things that the cold had prevented us from doing all winter. We played outside, went for long walks around local lakes, and—when luck was on our side and we actually had access to a vehicle—went farther afield and took day trips down the Ingraham Trail, a sixty-five-kilometre (forty-mile) road to nowhere that extends east of Yellowknife.

  By April, life at Buffalo Airways had become second nature for me. I was learning the ins and outs of the ramp, knew the hangar and surrounding offices like the back of my hand, and had managed to form relationships with just about everyone who worked for the airline. With one glaring exception, that is. For all my work, charm, and perseverance, one thing continued to evade me: Joe’s story.

  Joe’s story.

  Joe’s story. JOE’S STORY. JOE’S STORY.

  Every time I set foot in the Buffalo hangar, the words cycled through my head like a message on a Times Square billboard. I may have flown in a DC-3 high over Great Slave Lake and chugged Coronas and Dos Equis with Mikey, but what haunted my very being was Joe’s story—or, more precisely, the fact that Joe didn’t seem particularly interested in sharing his story (or any story, for that matter) with me.

  To the contrary, during the time I’d spent in Yellowknife, Joe had seemed increasingly disinterested in my existence, let alone in spending any time with me, opening up to me, becoming friends with me. Maybe he considered me much like he considers new rampies: he doesn’t figure he needs to talk to them until he’s seen them around for a while, in case they quit in the interim—which many do. “There’s always one coming and another one leaving,” he told me once, in a rare conversation.

  If Joe would barely talk to me, that didn’t stop almost everyone else I met from talking about Joe with me. No matter what the topic of conversation, eventually we ended up discussing Buffalo Joe McBryan. And more often than not, those conversations evolved into discussions about Joe’s two very different sides. Joe is cranky. Joe is impossible to please. Joe is unreasonable, stubborn, pig-headed, and sometimes downright mean. Then there’s the part of Joe that is less obvious, but no less talked about by those who have spent any amount of time with him. Joe is kind. Joe is generous. Joe is loyal. Joe is loving, thoughtful, and considerate.

  And if there’s anybody on the planet who can speak to the paradox of Joe, it’s his wife of forty-five years, Sharon.

  Sharon is so soft-spoken and demure that it’s almost difficult to hear her speak. Yet there’s a gleam in her eye that tells me she’s got a feisty side too. It’s little wonder. You don’t last in a relationship with Buffalo Joe McBryan for more than four decades unless you’ve got a tough side.

  Like Joe’s, the chronology of Sharon’s life revolves around the North. She was born in High Prairie, a small town in northern Alberta. When Sharon was twelve years old, her father took a job in Fort Smith, another small town perched on the border between Alberta and the Northwest Territories, but a few years later her father moved the family back to High Prairie. Once there, Sharon found the curriculum very different from what she had grown to love in Fort Smith.

  “I ended up quitting high school and going back,” she said to me one spring afternoon in the confines of the quiet conference room we had ducked into. “I had an aunt and uncle in Hay River, so I went to live with them.” She worked as a teleprinter operator and soon met Joe. The year was 1964. Two years later, on February 5, 1966, they married.

  Their anniversary had recently passed, so I asked Sharon the question burning in my mind: did Joe take her out for dinner or buy her flowers on the big day?

  “Are you kidding? We’ve never celebrated an anniversary! I’ve always thought it would be the last one,” she joked. “So for forty-five years it never happened.”

  Sharon could tell that I was beginning to believe the portrayal of Joe as a cold-hearted son of a bitch, so she stopped me. “Oh, he’s pretty cozy when he wants to be. He’s got a heart of gold.”

  You don’t need to dig deep to find evidence of Joe’s heart everywhere he goes. Peter Magill, the manager of Buffalo Airwear, was the first to give me a clue. Peter was hired by Mikey to run the store, and as such had never met Joe, but had heard—and seen—lots about him. So when Peter showed up for his first day on the job, he was naturally expecting Mikey to show him the ropes. No such luck: Mikey was off in Vancouver doing promotions for Ice Pilots. The first person Peter ran into? Joe himself. Luckily for Peter, his introduction to the big boss went a little more smoothly than mine did.

  “I figured he was a hard-ass because of what I had seen on the show,” Peter told me one day as we sifted through mountains of new items destined for the store’s shelves. “I came in with my dog, and Joe was doi
ng dishes in the kitchen. Well, we start talking, and forty-five minutes later we’re still chit-chatting. That’s when I thought that what’s being represented on the TV show is really not the man himself.”

  Maybe I should have brought my dog with me the first time I visited Buffalo. A chow mix rescued after the hurricane of the same name devastated New Orleans in 2005, Katrina’s big brown eyes will warm anyone’s heart, and Joe’s love of furry four-legged creatures is legendary. Sick pets always fly for free between Hay River and Yellowknife to see the vet. “The SPCA in Hay River probably owes a good chunk of its existence to Joe,” Peter said.

  Dogs are a constant in the fabric of life at Buffalo Airways. Sophie—Joe’s beloved mutt—is legendary around these parts, and seems to have free reign over the hangar and the tarmac. No matter where you’re walking, thirteen-year-old Sophie is there, wandering over for a scratch on her bony rear.

  Sophie is a fixture in the Buffalo hangar, and a very important part of Buffalo Joe’s life. He will often disappear with her for hours at a time, though nobody really seems to know where the boss takes his beloved mutt.

  In fact, of all the aviation memorabilia peppering the walls of the Buffalo offices—and there is plenty—my favourite item is a framed letter from Transport Canada addressed to Joe, dated May 23, 2000. The letter, from aviation enforcement inspector Dan Stelman, informs Joe that Mr. Stelman will be investigating an apparent violation of section 302.10(i) of the Canadian Aviation Regulations. Apparently Joe’s dog was seen running across Runway 27 of the Yellowknife Airport on April 25, 2000.

  How bothered was Joe by the investigation? Affixed to a blank corner of the letter is a picture of Sophie, sitting in the captain’s seat of a DC-3, her head hanging playfully out the window.

  Sophie isn’t the only dog in the Buffalo family. On my first day at the hangar, I ran into Hunter, Kelly Jurasevich’s salt-and-pepper border collie. Kelly was away on a vacation with Juan, and a member of the TV crew agreed to watch Hunter. Yet it was Joe who lavished the most attention on Kelly’s dog, and certainly not just while Kelly was away. Hunter was later killed in an accident, which devastated Kelly—and, I imagine, Joe as well.

  “Joe loved my dog,” she told me one morning over donuts and a smoke. “He came to cargo every day, would do this funny whistle and call for Hunter. All of a sudden the two of them would hop in Joe’s truck and off they would go. And to this day I don’t know where he ever took him. But he always had Hunter, and he was good to my dog.”

  Sometimes, though, members of the Buffalo team struggle to see Joe treat animals so kindly while they bear the brunt of his temper. “I’ll never forget one time I was irritated at work and Joe comes to get Hunter,” Kelly recalled. “I yelled out, ‘I wish I was a dog.’ Well, he was kinda grumpy that day, and glares and me and says ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ and just drives away.

  “Sometimes you get treated better as a dog around here than as an employee.”

  For Inuit who still run dog teams, little has changed since this photo was taken in 1958. Inuit sled dogs are legendary for their strength and stamina, and in decades past were an integral part of northern life.

  Our conversation reminded me of an experience I had when I lived on Baffin Island in the nineties, a time in my life that afforded me the opportunity to see and do things I had never imagined in my former, big-city-boy life. Chief among these was the chance to spend the day with my Inuit friend Esa Paniloo (not his real name), who asked me if I wanted to join him and his dog team out on Baffin Bay to check his nets. Esa set nets under the sea ice throughout the winter to catch fish and seals, thereby providing food for his family and his dogs. He checked his nets at least once a week, and thought I would enjoy the trip.

  It was –40° the morning we headed out, so I donned every piece of warm clothing in my wardrobe. Before long, we were skimming along the undulating snow and then the ice, with nothing but the soft patter of the dogs’ paws to accompany the most profound solitude I’ve ever known.

  And while the cold was deep and frightening, we found moments of respite when our body weight was too much for the dogs and we had to run alongside the sled. That was when we warmed up, and quickly too.

  At one point we stopped for tea and lunch, and I wasn’t surprised to find that my peanut butter and jam sandwich now boasted the consistency of a hockey puck. A bigger shock came when I realized I had to pee, an undertaking that required a fair bit of bravery in the teeth of –40° temperatures. The prospect of frostbite is unattractive no matter where it might strike, but certain body parts were never meant to feel that kind of pain.

  As we sat there, enjoying the infinite glory of a brilliantly clear Arctic day, the dogs decided they had had enough lounging around and took off with the sled, leaving us an uncomfortable distance from town with only our feet to get us back. Esa did the one-kilometre Arctic sprint, though, and eventually caught his renegade dog team.

  Having been raised in a dogs-as-pets society, I thought this was all in good fun. Esa—who was brought up in a culture where dogs were tools—didn’t see things the same way. After he caught them, he beat them. Badly. I remember clearly how he put the lead dog—a massive, powerful beast—in a headlock and punched it in the head over and over again.

  It was the kind of thing I would have frowned upon in my former life, where dogs fit neatly in your lap and wore cute little sweaters. In this world, though, the possibility of being stranded out on Baffin Bay with nothing but the clothes on our backs was so acutely real that it was almost painful.

  “I don’t like disciplining them,” Esa said, “but they have to know they can’t do that.”

  Later, as we headed home in the purple haze of Arctic twilight, I realized that the stark reality of the North is what makes people here so quick to smile and say hello. It took a while to get used to, but I eventually came to realize that friendliness is one of the North’s greatest natural resources. Don’t bother knocking, just come right in. The tea’s over there, help yourself. And as I would soon discover, Joe McBryan can demonstrate that northern friendliness too. It’s just that his soft side is a little more elusive than his hardened shell.

  That’s why you can’t really blame the TV crew for focusing on Joe’s, um, difficult side. If you’re in the hangar, you know when Joe is on a rampage because you can hear it, feel it in the air. Joe’s soft side is, well, softer. So unless you’re right there with a camera, you’re going to miss it.

  But with time, however, Joe’s portrayal on the show has become mellower. And I don’t think that’s because Joe himself changed fundamentally. Rather, the team behind Ice Pilots has come to recognize that there’s more to Joe than meets the eye.

  Joe flies to Yellowknife every morning, then spends his day in mysterious ways. Nobody, it seems, knows what he does between landing at 8:30 AM and taking off again at 5:00 PM (4:30 PM on Sundays), though taking dogs to unknown destinations is clearly part of it. “I can guarantee you he’s thinking about fifteen different things, though,” Mikey told me.

  When Joe gets back home to Hay River every night, he follows the same routine: he goes to his mother and father’s house for a visit before returning to his own home on the banks of the Hay River, and Sharon.

  “That’s Joe’s old-school nature,” says Peter, who also lives in Hay River, commuting back and forth with Joe on the DC-3 every morning and evening. “How many people do you know who visit their mom and dad every night? It touched my heart, actually.”

  Joe’s ephemeral kind streak is not only reserved for four-legged creatures or his parents, though. Almost everywhere you go in Yellowknife, someone has a story about Joe helping him or her out of a dire situation. Peter Magill tells of a Hay River family whose son was tragically killed in a car accident in Edmonton. Without a second thought, Joe fired up his five-passenger Beechcraft Baron and flew to Cambridg
e Bay, some 850 kilometres (525 miles) to the north, to retrieve some of the family members and bring them back to Hay River for the funeral.

  “There’s a thread of humanity that runs through this company,” Peter said.

  Too true. On one of my forays through the Pilots’ Lounge I met pilot Rob Zonneveld, a delight of a man who has been in Yellowknife for ten years, though not always with Buffalo. Rob’s story is a little different from most. After paying his dues on the Buffalo ramp and getting checked out on the DC-3, Rob was almost immediately promoted to flying the CL-215 water bomber to help fight fires during the summer season.

  After four years with Buffalo, though, Rob decided to accept an offer from neighbouring Arctic Sunwest Charters. Then the recession hit and Arctic Sunwest stopped flying the de Havilland DHC-5 Buffalo, the plane Rob had been flying while there. “So I went back to Joe and asked for my job back,” he told me.

  Given what I’ve heard and seen of Joe, I couldn’t imagine that would have been a comfortable situation for Rob. I could picture Joe wielding his power like an iron fist, bringing it down on Rob’s unsuspecting skull in one fell swoop.

  “So, did Joe hold it against you?” I asked.

  “Hold it against me?” Rob scoffed. “When I came back it was like the prodigal son returning. I thought he was going to go kill his seven strongest bison and hold a feast. It was an awesome experience; felt like I was coming back to family.”

  That’s not the only time Joe’s kindness has surprised Rob. As a young rampie struggling to survive in one of the world’s most expensive towns, Rob woke up one morning to find that his tires—along with those of most others on his street—had been slashed during the night.