The Ice Pilots (19 page)

“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 Cambridge 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.

“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 parts, 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.