The Ice Pilots

by Michael Vlessides

  If Joe was touched, it certainly didn’t show. He chose not to attend the event, instead leaving those responsibilities to Mikey and Sharon. So when the president of the Chamber introduced the coin and waxed poetic about the positive impact that Buffalo Airways has had on Hay River, it was Mikey who stepped up to the microphone and made the requisite thank-you speech.

  Mikey regaled the crowd with stories of Joe’s disinterest in appearing at such events, telling them how he’d rather visit his mom and dad down the street than have to socialize with a crowd. It struck me that Mikey is growing into his celebrity. He swears he’s not a public speaker and is terrified at the idea of “performing” in front of people, but as he held the crowd in the palm of his hand and hammed it up for the Ice Pilots cameraman a few feet away, I found that difficult to believe. He was in his element.

  As the party wrapped up, Mikey disappeared with some friends. From what I could gather, they were off to the local sports bar for a Hay River night on the town. I had a rampie morning waiting for me the next day, so I opted for an early evening, the idea of another night drinking with Mikey was too much for me to handle.

  Sharon drove me home in her fancy new Ford F-150, a rig that doesn’t fit her demure personality. But I didn’t argue with a free ride on this –30°C (–22°F) night. We headed straight for Buffalo’s staff residence, a house the company keeps there for its Hay River rampies, overnighting pilots and truckers, and anybody else doing business with the company who needs a place to crash. It was nearing midnight, and Sharon asked me if I would prefer to sleep in their guest room, since the boys in the staff residence were likely all asleep. Somehow, I couldn’t see a bunch of twentysomethings calling it an early Friday night, so I kindly declined.

  Truth be told, the idea of spending a night in Joe’s house was more than slightly discomfiting to me, especially given the events of earlier that evening, when I’d waited in his living room as Mikey got ready for the big gala. Joe had walked in while I chatted with Sharon and two members of the Ice Pilots crew, and the look on his face when he saw me in his home was enough to make me shiver in my boots. Bad enough that I’d invaded his work environment; now I had to show up at his house too? Anyway, I’d been promised the “Captain’s Room” at the staff house, an invitation I might never receive again. Sure enough, the lights were on when we arrived, so I bid goodnight to Sharon.

  As I made my way up the stairs of the house, though, I couldn’t help but reflect on Sharon, a woman who has played such an important role in the lives of all the McBryans, but manages to fly so low under the radar. In some ways, she reminds me of the women who have made their mark on the fine art of piloting in the remote northern wilderness.

  Of the countless women who have flown bush planes in Canada over the past century, none resonated with me quite so much as Lorna (Bray) deBlicquy, a trail-blazing spirit who stepped out of the shadow of a stereotype and into the life of adventure she had always craved.

  Born in Blyth, Ontario, on November 30, 1931, Lorna grew up in an era when it was not fashionable for women to do anything other than stay at home and raise a family. But she had other ideas. At fourteen she decided she wanted to fly, and soloed for the first time at fifteen. She took up skydiving at sixteen and became the first woman in Canada to make a parachute jump.

  Lorna and her first husband, Tony Nichols, spent time in Thompson, Manitoba, and Sudbury, Ontario, where she flew bush planes and earned her instructor’s licence. Her second marriage was to well-known Canadian bush pilot Dick deBlicquy, whose travels took the couple to several spots in Ontario, as well as New Zealand. Along the way, Lorna had a baby girl, but she never stopped flying and teaching. In fact, the adventure bug kept biting Lorna, and the salve she found was in moving her family to the tiny hamlet of Resolute Bay, Nunavut (then part of the Northwest Territories), on remote Cornwallis Island in the Arctic Ocean, where she flew scientists to their camps on the tundra. Needless to say, in a place populated almost exclusively by men, where darkness settles for half a year, Lorna was very popular.

  On one occasion, Lorna was scheduled to fly into the scientific research base at Eureka. At the same time, Canada’s new prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, was visiting the Arctic. Trudeau had just left Resolute Bay and was on his way to Alert. As it turned out, weather prevented Lorna from landing in Eureka, so she made her way north to Alert. Word soon got out of her impending arrival.

  The prime minister landed before Lorna, and with his entourage was soon on his way down to the barracks-like room where a modest reception was to be held on his behalf. When he arrived, Trudeau noticed a cook quickly doing up the buttons on his white shirt.

  “Oh, you don’t have to do anything special for me,” Trudeau said. “Just be yourself.”

  Quickly gathering himself, the cook countered, “But it’s not for you, sir! Lorna deBlicquy is flight-planned here!”

  Any nostalgic ideas I may have had about bush flying evaporated as soon as I opened the staff house door in Hay River. The scene that met my eyes was a combination of Animal House, Porky’s, and Top Gun. Mikey’s house may have struck me as reminiscent of a college fraternity, but it had absolutely nothing on this place. As I entered the living room, I was greeted by four guys strewn across various tattered couches and chairs in the living room, all watching in rapt attention a movie being projected onto one of the room’s blank walls. Giant chip bags and booze bottles were cast willy-nilly around the scene.

  But it was no movie I’d ever seen before. In fact, it wasn’t a movie at all. They were watching a live Internet feed from a bar in Saskatoon. Seems a young woman who until recently tended bar in Hay River had moved there to ply her trade. They were intermittently joking, texting her, and taking swigs from their bottles.

  “You guys realize you’re probably the only people on Earth watching this feed, right?” I asked. Nobody seemed to care; they were having too much fun. Adopting the when-in-Rome philosophy that has allowed me to see and do things my taste otherwise argues against, I sat down and grabbed a bottle. The movie didn’t hold my attention, though, and before long I was asking where the Captain’s Room was.

  Jules, a Buffalo rampie who had just taken a job elsewhere and was enjoying a few glorious days of freedom before moving on, showed me to the room. If I was expecting to be ushered into the lap of luxury, I was wrong. Dead wrong.

  An upturned mattress was propped against one wall, and a variety of boxes and largely unidentifiable piles of clothing crowded the floor. Sure, there was a bed, end table, and lamp; it just wasn’t that easy to get to them.

  “Don’t run one of those CSI black lights over the bed,” Jules joked. “You won’t like what you see.” Perfect.

  The bed had no sheets, just a lone blanket crumpled in a corner. The pillow’s stuffing was falling out of it. So Jules led me down to a linen closet in the basement, where I grabbed a sheet that seemed like it’d do the trick.

  I lay the single sheet gingerly in the middle of the double bed, rested my head on the pillow, and promised myself not to move an inch all night. As I stared at the ceiling waiting for sleep to come, I turned to check out the reading material on the end table. It had been a long, long while since I’d read Penthouse Letters. But when in Rome...

  Pilot Lorna deBlicquy was a tireless advocate for women in aviation. Here she flies a de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver in 1967 on Ellesmere Island, then part of the Northwest Territories. She died on March 21, 2009, at the age of seventy-seven.

  My alarm rang at four-thirty in the morning. The cobwebs in my head reminded me that not nearly enough time had elapsed since I closed my eyes, but I was happy nonetheless to bid a fond farewell to the captain’s bed.

  Though I was still bleary-eyed, it was difficult to overlook Tyler Sipos as he pulled together his breakfast in the kitchen. Tall, thick with muscles, and sporting a model’s good looks, Tyler is the anchor of the Hay R
iver operation, a hard-working rampie who knows what it takes to get ahead in Buffalo Joe’s world.

  “Basically, Joe likes hard workers and wants hard workers around him,” he told me between mouthfuls of cereal. “And that was one thing I always made sure I did: when he wanted something done, I always got it done right away while some of the other guys spent their time kissing up to his wife and daughter.”

  Then Tyler threw something at me I would never in a million years have expected to hear come out of his mouth. He started quoting ancient Greek philosophers.

  “I think it was Aristotle who said, ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.’ So I wanted to make hard work a habit.”

  Hold on now, big boy. It’s not even five o’clock in the morning, I’ve just rolled out of the captain’s bed, undoubtedly with some rare form of communicable disease stuck to my body, and you’re quoting Aristotle? Really?

  But Tyler, I soon realized, is not like everyone else up here. He is Buffalo’s golden boy, a strong, hard-working, no-nonsense young man, with a single focus: to dedicate himself to his work. His drive has not gone unnoticed. Once Jules announced he was leaving, Tyler learned he was getting moved to Yellowknife. Though two other rampies had more seniority than he had, Tyler was leaping ahead of them, skipping flight attending and going straight to first officer.

  “It’s a pleasant surprise,” he said, “because I guess it doesn’t happen very often.” In some ways, Buffalo Airways is just like any other business: If the boss likes you, you advance more quickly than those around you. And Joe likes Tyler.

  A graduate of flight school in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Tyler wasn’t kidding when he talked about hard work. He starts at five o’clock every morning and doesn’t usually call it a day until fourteen hours later, at seven in the evening. The scope of his work largely mirrors that of his compatriots to the north: prepare the DC-3 for the scheduled morning flight to Yellowknife, which includes filling it with all the cargo that is shipped up by truck from Edmonton overnight, and run courier stops all over Hay River, dropping off parcels. Once that is done, Tyler and the rest of the Hay River crew get creative. “After that we have to do whatever needs to get done,” he said as the other members of the residence slowly emerged from their rooms in greasy coveralls, grunting and grumbling their way to the refrigerator before they headed outside.

  “We fix pretty much everything, because it’s all old and needs work.” Afternoon is the time to do pick-ups for the courier service, followed by paperwork. “Then you come in and get ready for the sked to land. The plane comes in, you put it to bed, and offload whatever freight there is.” By then it’s seven o’clock in the evening; the start of the next work day is only ten hours away.

  But there is a light at the end of the tunnel: “On Saturdays,” Tyler continued, “we get half a day off. Sunday you can work on whatever you need to work on, but you have to be there when the plane comes in at night.”

  “So your free time never tasted so good, right?” I asked.

  “You spend it recovering and resting, mostly,” he said.

  But when the alternative is working as a bouncer at a bar in Barrie, Ontario, fourteen-hour days in the dark and cold of Hay River, Northwest Territories, doesn’t seem that bad after all, especially when you’re chasing your dream.

  Rookie co-pilot Andrew Weich joined us in the kitchen. Andrew had flown as Joe’s co-pilot on the sked the night before, and would be doing the same on the return flight this morning. Andrew seemed reasonably well rested, a testimony to the fact that he had graduated from the ramp to the cockpit. For Andrew and the rest of the Buffalo pilots, partying when you’re flying is a serious no-no. “Legally, there has to be eight hours from your last drink and flying,” Andrew said. “But our company operations manual states twelve hours.”

  If anything, it’s reassuring to know that the guys behind the controls are sober when they’re flying seventy-five-year-old planes.

  There’s no rest for Buffalo pilots or rampies. Winter or summer, snow or sun, the planes are as much a fixture in Hay River as they are in Yellowknife. And when winter descends, the purple haze of northern twilight makes a perfect backdrop for these gloriously simple aircraft.

  After breakfast, it was dark and cold on the runway of the Hay River airport, and we were trying to stay warm in the aging Buffalo vans while waiting for the freighter to come in. A particularly heavy load was coming up on the truck from Edmonton that morning, and it wouldn’t all fit on the sked, so an extra DC-3 had been dispatched from Yellowknife to carry it all back. While we were waiting, Doug Durrant arrived in his rig.

  Doug has been driving for Buffalo for a little more than nine years. Every night at seven he leaves Edmonton with a truckload of goods bound for various destinations around the North, courtesy of Buffalo Airways. He drives through the night, then spends the day sleeping in the staff residence. Doug and two other men are responsible for starting the chain of events that keeps Buffalo’s courier service in business. As Doug said: “One goin’ up, one goin’ down, and one off. So one left here last night at about six-thirty. I passed him halfway down.” Whoever comes up on Friday night gets to spend the weekend in Hay River.

  But this was not some twentysomething. Doug is a grown man, and I was struggling to see how he handled life in Alpha Beta Buffalo. “That’s why we’ve got the master bedroom,” he laughed. “It’s actually quite comfortable in there. We’ve got a TV, VCR, PlayStation.”

  Despite the surroundings, Doug knows that his part-time roommates come by their frat-boy living conditions honestly. “Most of these are young kids who are living away from home for the first time.”

  The DC-3 touched down with the yelp of rubber and a cloud of snow smoke. The props had barely stopped spinning before the place turned into a whirlwind of activity. Pilot A.J. Decoste and co-pilot Graeme Ferguson, both looking alarmingly awake given the hour, popped open the plane’s cargo doors, and the loading began in earnest. My buddy French Larry was there too, looking decidedly less fresh.

  Unlike the unloading that takes place in Yellowknife—where pallets piled high with boxes are unwrapped and individual packages tossed from van to van—the loading in Hay River has a different groove. Entire pallets weighing hundreds of pounds are hoisted from the truck onto a dolly. From there the dolly needs to be heaved, pushed, and cajoled uphill from the loading doors to the front of the aircraft. It’s exhausting and back-breaking work. And if I’d ever wondered how the rampies manage to stay fit while working sixty-hour-plus work weeks, the mystery was solved. Their work is their fitness.

  The plane loaded, I started walking back to the darkened terminal to wait for Joe’s arrival and take my place in the sked back to Yellowknife. As I was walking away, A.J. called after me: “Hey, Mike! Wanna ride with us?”

  My first reaction was to turn him down. After all, Joe would be flying the sked this morning, and who knows, he may be in a chatty mood. But as I was walking toward the terminal, a change of heart washed over me. Why should I wait around for something that may never happen? So I turned on my heels and ran after Graeme as he disappeared into the belly of the beast.

  That was a good call. Larry was kind enough to offer me his place in the jump seat, an auxiliary fold-up seat in the cockpit directly behind the pilot and co-pilot. In retrospect, Larry probably could have kept the seat, since I spent so much time out of it, standing and looking out at the world before me with newborn awe.

  “Where are you gonna sit?” I asked as Larry rifled through a closet in front of me, pulling out various down parkas, engine tents, and engine donuts and placing them in the only patch of open floor space on the overstuffed plane.

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said, tossing the items in a heap on the floor, curling up on it, and closing his eyes. When you work as hard as a Buffalo rampie does, you don’t miss an opp
ortunity to catch up on your sleep.

  Still, I’m amazed that he could slumber through the cacophony that followed. Take-off in a DC-3 is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, even though I’m a fairly seasoned traveller. The engines roared to life with a throaty growl, then burst into a mechanized frenzy as A.J. gunned the throttle. The DC-3 rumbled down the tarmac like a runaway train.

  The plane was bouncing, shaking, and creaking, and for a minute I thought to myself, this may be this particular DC-3’s last flight. Then, with a grace that belied her age, the “3” lifted gently off the ground. We were airborne.

  The flight from Hay River to Yellowknife clocked in at around fifty minutes, but time stood still for me that morning. Until that trip, I had been strictly a sidesaddle rider in aircraft, occasionally looking outside at the landscape beside me. Sure, you get to see the world outside, but it’s almost like looking at things in the past tense.

  And even then, I don’t think I’m much for looking out plane windows anymore. These days, getting on a jet is a chance to catch up on some reading or to get ahead in my work. Looking out the window to marvel at the sights, particularly the ethereal vastness of the morning sky? A thing of the past.

  But to be in the DC-3’s cockpit and look at the world as it unfolds in front of you is to be thrown upside down in time and space. This is looking at the world in the future tense, a chance to see and feel the limitless potential humankind holds in its hands. No wonder Joe rarely misses a chance to fly.

  And while it’s pure heaven on the other side of the metal tube, the inside of the DC-3 is all business, a dizzying array of knobs, dials, levers, and switches. To my untrained eye, there were very few electronic instruments. Maybe that’s why A.J. and Graeme never took their hands off the yoke or stopped fiddling with things. Their confidence was palpable, their expertise obvious. I was in good hands.