The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  “I was bitching about it to the boys, and Joe must have overheard me talking. So he walked me out to the backyard, where he’s got a bunch of old cars laying around. And he told me to find tires that fit my car and take them. They didn’t really match and they were a bit wide, but they got on the vehicle and away I went. It saved me a couple hundred bucks, which was a really big deal at the time.

  “So he’s definitely sensitive to a person’s experiences. But at the same time, when it’s time to work, it’s time to work.”

  Work. For Joe McBryan, it’s always time to work. Indeed, the words “work” and “Joe McBryan” seem synonymous. Working hard is a trait that has apparently been passed on to his children. I wonder how Joe would react to the “Live More, Play More” attitude that defines my current home of Canmore, Alberta, where ten centimetres (four inches) of snowfall sees school kids come down with the “powder flu” and go skiing, and a sunny day is an excuse for hitting the mountain bike trails. If Canmore had a town slogan, it would have to be the one espoused by my good friend Ben Waldman: work is for losers.

  Given the disparate cultures of Canmore and the Buffalo hangar, I chose to keep my love of recreation to myself when in Joe’s company—or anyone else’s company, for that matter. It’s hard enough being an outsider. I didn’t need to further hamstring myself by throwing in the fact that I love to play too.

  I was in the hangar one Sunday morning, and the place was deserted. For the first time I could remember, the inside of the massive, vaulted building was dead quiet. Nobody was yelling, and the sound of the banging of tools had been temporarily hushed. The planes stood watch over the place, silent sentinels resting before the next job took them afield. My footsteps echoed loudly through darkened corners. Even Sophie, who had become one of my closest allies in Yellowknife, had not wandered over to me.

  Soon I was parked in the small kitchen off the hangar, taking notes, enjoying a cup of tea and shooting the shit with members of the TV team who had just arrived, when Joe walked in and seated himself in a threadbare chair beside me. Then, out of the blue, he started talking. Not bitching, not barking, not interrogating. Just talking.

  Joe is talking!

  And when Joe talks, you have to stay on your toes. It takes only a few seconds to realize that he’s not one to linger on a word, sentence, or topic for long. The conversation is fast-paced, almost frenetic, as he jumps from year to year, location to location.

  From what I can gather, Joe grew up as Wilson Claude McBryan in a bush camp on the shores of Gordon Lake, about 110 kilometres (70 miles) northeast of Yellowknife, where his father worked as a gold miner. “When he was born,” Mikey once told me, “there were three new babies at the Yellowknife Hospital: a Joseph, a Josephine, and my dad. The nurses nicknamed him Joey, because there were already two other Joes there. And it stuck.”

  Once little Joe was old enough to go to school, he was sent off to Edmonton, where he lived with a grandmother. “I couldn’t go to public school because my grandma paid taxes to a separate school board,” Joe said, bouncing in and out of the kitchen from nearby offices. He was on a roll, speaking fast and moving faster. It was exhausting to listen to him, let alone to try to keep up with him. “So I had to go to a Catholic school. That was okay, see, because I was born a Catholic but didn’t practise that shit.”

  That didn’t stop Joe from knowing some choice words when he got to school: “Goddamn, Jesus Christ. That’s what you said when you hit your thumb with the hammer!” Somehow, Joe was made an altar boy.

  “The nuns had a lot of fun with changing me around. But I got to know those prayers pretty good. I couldn’t sing, so they taught me Latin. I could say the whole mass in Latin, eh?”

  Growing up in Edmonton without his parents wasn’t always easy for Joe, especially when it came to the parochial world of sports. “There were lots and lots of rinks and baseball diamonds in Edmonton at the time,” Joe said, feasting upon a breakfast of champions: handfuls of Big Turk candies and coffee. “If your dad wasn’t part of the Knights of Columbus, you got no ice time or baseball time. I had nobody in the Knights of Columbus, so I wasn’t picked or chosen or coached to the level I could have been. I could never find a coach to get me from being a bad skater or hitter to being a hockey player or baseball player.”

  The structured life of Edmonton was never a good fit for Joe, and he relished every chance he had to get back up north. Setback after setback proved that school was never in the cards for young McBryan. Joe spent the summer he was thirteen in Hay River, where his family had since moved after leaving Gordon Lake. Late one afternoon, Joe was sitting in the back of a pickup truck when it plummeted over a nine-metre (thirty-foot) cliff at a construction camp. Things did not look good; Joe had a broken pelvic bone and torn ligaments around his stomach, the nearest road was hundreds of kilometres away, and the sky was darkening.

  Frantic, Joe’s father, Red, called one of the few men he trusted enough to hand his injured son to: legendary bush pilot Chuck McAvoy, who would become one of the most important influences in Joe’s life. McAvoy flew Joe to the Yellowknife hospital safely, carrying him into the waiting room wrapped in a sleeping bag “like a kid in a car seat.” Joe credits McAvoy with saving his life that night. And Joe McBryan is not one to forget a good turn.

  The accident slowed Joe’s academic career in Edmonton to a crawl, however, as he was confined to a body cast for the better part of a year. Joe is still astonished when he thinks back on the time he lost, especially given the medical advances that have occurred in the interim.

  “I had a friend hit by a truck down south,” he says between pieces of Big Turk. “When I talked to his wife, she thought he was gonna die. Well, I phone back a couple days later to see how he’s doing, and he answers the phone! I said, ‘I thought you were dying!’ ”

  By the end of that year, Joe had had enough. He quit school in Edmonton and headed back to Hay River, but the truant officer caught up with him and hauled him back. “They said, ‘Ya gotta be in school until you’re sixteen.’ So I had to go back.”

  At sixteen, Joe was out again. “School is a good place to be if you like it,” he said. “But it was not a good place for me.” That should come as little surprise. How can school compete with the feeling of flying, which Joe was doing by the time he was in Grade 10? “How do you fly and go to school at the same time?” Unable to reconcile that conundrum, Joe chose flying.

  “Back then we considered ourselves the same as a kid on a tractor on a farm,” he said. “The kid in the city can’t drive worth shit at sixteen, but the kid on the farm is versatile on everything at ten. For us, there were no roads out of Hay River at that time, and airplanes were more common than cars. So we knew all about airplanes, just like kids in the city know all about buses and trains and subways or whatever.” Not surprisingly, Joe saw an airplane long before he ever saw a car (the road north from Hay River to Yellowknife wasn’t built until 1968).

  That familiarity may have bred a certain level of comfort, confidence, and ability in the young McBryan, but others didn’t always perceive him as competent. “When I was in Grade 10, I flew into Fort Liard [about 400 kilometres or 250 miles to the west] on a charter,” he remembered. “There were no scheduled flights or airstrips back then, so when I arrived on the ice, everyone in town came out to see what was happening.

  “Well, the town cop came out and looked at me and said, ‘What the hell are you doing flying that fucking airplane? I wouldn’t even give you a driver’s licence last year and now you’re flying that goddamn airplane?’ ”

  Perhaps the RCMP officer was unaware of the fact that Joe had grown up in airplanes—literally. When he was just a small boy, a de Havilland Fox Moth crashed not far from the Gordon Lake camp the McBryans called home. Along with Chuck McAvoy, Joe’s father went out with a team of nine dogs to the wreck site. “They stripped the plane of its engine and useful p
arts, and hauled it all back to camp,” Joe said. The fuselage became his playhouse.

  The Fox Moth served a purpose for the adults as well. “I needed a playhouse because they were always blasting for gold and had to get me out of the way. So they’d throw me in the airplane, pull the canopy shut and tell me to ‘fly’ to town for a load of groceries while they were blasting.” To this day, the door of that fuselage hangs in Joe’s Yellowknife office, one of a thousand pieces of memorabilia, tokens of a life well lived, that adorn the place.

  Joe waxes nostalgic when he thinks back on those innocent days of his youth. But not everyone shares his opinion. “There used to be an old prospector in town here—he’s dead now—and he was cranky beyond cranky. I’d see him getting his groceries sometimes, and if I had time, I’d always stop and talk to him.

  “One day he says to me, ‘You still at the airport fucking around with them airplanes?’ ” he said, using a high-pitched voice that hints the prospector resided firmly on the loonier side of the spectrum. “I says, ‘Yeah.’ And he says, ‘Well, you’re crazy, and I know why you’re crazy.’

  “And I says, ‘Well, that’s good. But if I’m crazy, you should tell me why I’m crazy.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, back when you were a little boy they’d take you and put you in than little airplane and they’d shut the canopy and go blast all day. No wonder you went crazy sitting in that plane all day!’ ”

  Although I’m pretty certain that Joe’s not crazy, I can attest to one thing: those early days playing in the Fox Moth set Joe down a path that has carved out a unique niche in Canadian aviation history. With Chuck as his mentor, Joe was an accomplished pilot before he was twenty years old.

  But bureaucracy, it would seem, reared its head even back then, and eventually Joe was forced to get a pilot’s licence, even though he had been flying for years. “At that time, we didn’t learn to fly in flying school,” he said. “We went to flying school for the theory, to learn how to pass the exam. But you learned to fly from the other guys. You flew with Chuck and you flew with Jimmy and you flew with Willy and you flew with Merlyn and you were taught to fly. Flying school was a formality.” Joe’s mentors are now considered the legends of northern bush flying: Willy “The Flying Bandit” Laserich, Merlyn Carter, and Chuck and Jimmy McAvoy.

  Willy Laserich came by his nickname honestly, forging a reputation as a rule-breaking maverick who stuck thorns in the sides of aviation regulators every chance he got. A native German, Laserich moved to Hay River in 1960 with a fresh pilot’s licence in one hand and a new bride in the other. There, Willy would take a young Joe McBryan out flying. Willy and Margaret called several communities home in their early northern years, eventually settling in Cambridge Bay, a remote Nunavut community of some fifteen hundred souls on Victoria Island in the Arctic Ocean.

  Merlyn Carter may have operated on the right side of the law, but he was no less influential in building the landscape that forged young Joe McBryan’s life. A Saskatchewan native, Merlyn got his pilot’s licence in Hay River in 1952 to help his father run their new commercial fishery there. Ten years later, Merlyn and his wife, Jean, started Carter Air Services. All the while, Merlyn was always there to help a young pilot learn the finer points of flying.

  To help pay the bills during those early, lean years of their new company, Merlyn set up a number of camps throughout the Northwest Territories, where he began taking fishermen. Those spots eventually developed into one main camp, which still operates, at Nonacho Lake, some 300 kilometres (185 miles) southeast of Yellowknife.

  Merlyn’s life came to a tragic end in June 2005, when a black bear mauled him to death on the shores of the lake that had been his home away from home for so many years. To this day, he is considered a pioneer of both bush flying and tourism in the North.

  Though Merlyn certainly played a role in young Joe McBryan’s life, it paled in comparison to the influence that Chuck and Jim McAvoy had on the budding bush pilot. In some ways, Jim McAvoy was everything his brother Chuck was not. Chuck was gregarious and loud, Jim quiet and reserved. Yet there was one thing that had Jim and Chuck joined together: they were both incredible pilots who made their mark on the early years of northern bush flying.

  Both also had an uncanny knack for finding lost souls in the remote northern wilderness, regardless of what the authorities told them. In one famous incident in 1957, a plane with three people aboard was forced to land in the Gameti (then called Rae Lakes) area, about 240 kilometres (150 miles) northwest of Yellowknife. Authorities ordered McAvoy not to fly—it was too late in the season for float planes and too early for ski planes—but Jimmy went anyway, eventually rescuing the trio. That heroic effort saw him grounded for thirty days. McAvoy died on November 21, 2009, in Thorsby, Alberta, at the age of seventy-nine.

  Nevertheless, Joe did learn things at flight school that his childhood heroes hadn’t taught him: radio usage, flight planning, paperwork, and log books.

  But the bureaucracy was not finished with Joe. What started then as an aggravating relationship has continued to this day. Don’t expect Joe to be singing the praises of Transport Canada. His song has a slightly different refrain, one learned in those days of his youth. As he explained:

  “I go get a student’s pilot permit, but the permit says you can fly but not haul people. Well, I didn’t want to haul people anyway, so that’s good enough. But then Transport gets all over my ass and now I have to go off and get a private pilot’s licence.

  “Now I go get this private licence down in Edmonton. And I get back and I’m flying again, and they say ‘No, your private licence is only good for 4,300 pounds gross takeoff weight, why are you flying this Norseman [7,000-pound gross takeoff weight]. So now I have to get a special endorsement on my private licence to fly the damn Norseman.”

  As far as Joe and his cronies were concerned, though, the piece of paper did not make someone a pilot. “You never carried it with you, anyway,” he laughed, “because you could either fly or you couldn’t. And if you couldn’t fly, then get the hell outta here. And if you can fly, then the paper doesn’t have any significance anyway.”

  By the time Joe was nineteen years old, he had to get a commercial pilot’s licence, yet another stop in a seemingly endless bureaucratic chain of events. “Chuck said if I wanted to fly on his Fairchild 82, I had to get a commercial licence. So he hands me this little twenty-five-cent book he had and told me to learn everything in there and take the exam.

  “So I roar off to Edmonton to get a commercial licence. Well, I blew that right off the bat. That little book was obsolete as shit.” Undaunted, Joe took the exam again, this time with the proper study materials. He eventually returned north with a commercial pilot’s licence in his pocket. That was June 4, 1961. Less than ten years later, Joe would be at the head of a fledgling airline struggling to make its presence felt in one of the world’s last great frontiers. He couldn’t have imagined then that he would be the focal point of books, TV shows, and websites.

  But that’s certainly no shortcoming on Joe’s part, just a function of who—and what—he is. For at his heart, Joe is a bush pilot, and a damn good one at that. And bush pilots are a special breed. In some ways, they embody everything that Joe is, was, and may yet be. They’re stubborn, pig-headed, entrepreneurial, rebellious, story-telling pioneers who live for the freedom of soaring above the clouds, unencumbered by worldly woes.

  * * *

  Red McBryan, First Mayor of Hay River

  When I first visited Buffalo in January 2011, Joe visited nightly with his mother, Bertha, and father, Wilson Roderick (a.k.a. “Red”), both in their nineties. Red McBryan—the first mayor of Hay River—died on June 30, 2011, at the age of ninety-two.

  Named for the colour of his hair, Red was born on April 26, 1919, and as a youth dreamed of moving to Aklavik, a small community in the Mackenzie River delta. Those dreams came true in his teen years, when he
worked as a deckhand on a trading ship in the area. From there he moved to Yellowknife, where he worked at the Giant Mine and met Bertha. They moved to Hay River in 1949, where Red became actively involved in local politics. He became the town’s first mayor in 1963 and served as a town councillor for forty-nine consecutive years between 1952 and 2000.

  Joe was one of the people who spoke at his dad’s funeral.

  “We could not say goodbye to Red McBryan, or who we called Dad,” he said, “because to say goodbye is to say goodbye to ourselves. So we will not say goodbye, we will instead say thank you.”

  * * *

  Willy Laserich’s Last Battle

  Willy Laserich fought Arctic weather and remoteness for decades, but his toughest battle came in the courtroom in the 1970s, after federal regulators began playing a more heavy-handed role in northern bush flying. Willy tried to play by the rules, applying for an operator’s licence to run a charter air service out of Cambridge Bay, but he was repeatedly turned down. That didn’t stop Willy: he continued flying.

  In 1977, Willy was charged with 205 citations for breaking aviation laws, a process that kick-started one of the longest and most expensive aviation trials in Canadian history. In the end, Willy was cleared of all but one charge, which carried a $250 fine. But the legal fees left him bankrupt. Rather than give up, his family banded together and formed Adlair Aviation, with offices in Cambridge Bay and Yellowknife. Willie died on November 12, 2007. He was seventy-five.

  FLYING THE WILD

  To be a bush pilot is to be an icon, a living mystery, an individual whose essence speaks of the tough, ready, creative, and self-sufficient stuff we all wish we were made of. In a country like Canada, the national identity is still strongly linked to wilderness, and bush pilots have played an important role in settling those far-flung northern regions that most people will never get to see.