The Ice Pilots (7 page)

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.

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 perfect place to call home.

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.

There is no way to characterize a day in the life of Buffalo as “typical.” I watched Mikey arrange flights to carry heavy equipment to remote mining camps, deliver massive diesel generators to Inuit communities that rely on them for electricity, ensure a group of bureaucrats would make an early-morning meeting in Whitehorse, and move a single man and his dog to a distant town to start a new life. In other words, if it needs to be moved, Buffalo can move it—and likely already has.

The backbone of Buffalo’s winter freight operation is its so-called “valley run,” a trip that sees the Curtiss-Wright C-46 fly the 1,700-kilometre (1,056-mile) round trip up and down the Mackenzie River from Yellowknife to four communities that can be accessed only by air nine months of the year: Déline, Tulita, Norman Wells, and Fort Good Hope. Several times each week, the C-46 starts its engines and soars over the valley. And if I was impressed by the DC-3 when I first laid eyes and hands upon her beautifully dimpled frame, I had no idea what lay in store for me when the C-46 was moved into the hangar. It is nothing short of a massive, yawning beast.

The Curtiss-Wright C-46 Commando
made a splash when it was introduced to the world at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It was heralded as the latest and greatest in high-altitude pressurized aircraft, ready for the enjoyment of the flying public.

The plane was not formally released until two years later, just as World War II was taking over the global stage. The designers of the C-46 may have envisioned it as a glamorous passenger airplane, but fate turned it into a bare-knuckled military aircraft. Instead of carrying passengers to the far corners of the globe, the C-46 played host to war supplies, paratroopers, ammunition, artillery, and wounded soldiers.

A total of 1,430 C-46s were built, a far cry from the more than 10,000 DC-3s that dominated the skies during the war. But the C-46 offered benefits that the DC-3 couldn’t even touch. Known by a variety of nicknames to the flyboys who manned her controls in both the European and Pacific theatres (she was called the “Killer Whale,” the “Curtiss Calamity,” the “T-Cat,” or “Dumbo,” after the flying elephant she resembles), the Commando could fly at high altitude and carry massive payloads, two of its most important traits.

The twin-engine C-46 was helped by the addition of its power plants, the newly invented 18-cylinder Pratt & Whitney R-2800, each of which delivered 2,000 horsepower. They were so powerful that they could keep a lightly loaded C-46 in the air even if one engine failed, an attractive characteristic at a time when bullets were routinely screaming through the skies. When both engines were firing, the plane could carry as much as fifteen thousand pounds of cargo.

Though the 46 made its presence known throughout the war, it was perhaps best known for its role in the China-Burma-India theatre, where it carried supplies over the jagged peaks of the Himalayas from India and Burma to troops fighting in China. The C-46 wasn’t the only plane to serve this role, but it was certainly the best.

After World War II ended, military service continued for the 46, essentially dooming its potential as a passenger aircraft. Its presence was still felt around the globe, though in far more covert ways. The CIA used the plane to support French forces fighting communist insurgencies in French Indochinese countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and in Thailand. The 46 also played a part in clandestine anti-communist campaigns of the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as supplying Chiang Kai-shek’s troops while they battled Mao’s Communists. In 1961, the C-46 operated in the Bay of Pigs Invasion. The planes even served in the early years of the Vietnam War before being officially retired from active combat duty in 1968.

Life for the C-46 did not stop there. The aircraft’s rapid climb rate and high service ceiling made it ideal for flying over the Andes in countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, and Chile. It easily covered vast stretches of South American jungle where roads did not exist. Today, a handful of C-46s are still in use throughout the world, transporting goods to otherwise inaccessible regions from Alaska to Kenya.

Buffalo Joe likes the C-46 because the aluminum alloy aircraft is virtually indestructible and can take off and land on small airstrips, making it the ideal candidate for the valley run. The way Joe sees it, the C-46 must be a great plane if it’s still working regularly around the world. As he says, a lot of planes have come and gone since then. Rod McBryan, director of maintenance at Buffalo and Joe’s eldest son, agrees. As Rod says, given the weather conditions in the north, the 46 is the only logical choice to be running tons of goods up and down the Mackenzie Valley.

Despite its rich history and legendary status in the aviation world, the C-46 is hampered by one significant drawback: it’s a bitch to fly. With its wide fuselage, broad tail, and small rudder, the C-46 is extremely vulnerable to crosswinds and is only rated to land in a twenty-two-kilometre-an-hour (fourteen-mile-per-hour) crosswind. Compounding the issue is the fact that most of the aircraft’s weight is located behind the main wheels, which means the back end can swing around if the plane’s not landed straight. And as Buffalo’s former chief pilot Arnie Schreder says, a C-46 tail that starts to swing on landing will continue to swing on landing. “If you look around the Arctic, there are C-46s strewn all over it,” he says. “And those crashes were always due to wind.”