stories I’d heard about Joe are true—not to mention the way he’d been portrayed on Ice Pilots—he wouldn’t be inviting me to dinner anytime soon. Even when I lived in remote Arctic communities thousands of kilometres from Yellowknife, people talked about Buffalo Airways and its nefarious founder. Joe was the kind of guy you wanted on your side if you needed a job done—and done now. Hang out socially with the guy? Maybe not. There are stories of new recruits arriving at the hangar on a Friday and leaving for home Sunday morning. Either the TV show has managed to capture every one of Joe’s temperamental outbursts, or they happen with alarming regularity.
Still, I was cautiously confident as we pulled up to the Buffalo hangar. I’d met—and cracked—many tough nuts in my day, so Joe McBryan should be no problem at all. I’d regale him with a few stories about my days in the Arctic to win him over, throw in a bit of the ol’ Vlessides charm, and soon we’d be shooting the shit like we’d been friends forever. He was already on board with the idea of the book, so it was just a matter of getting him to like me. Piece of cake!
Purchased from legendary aviator Max Ward, the Buffalo Airways hangar boasts a concrete floor six feet thick, perfect for withstanding the weight of the aircraft and Yellowknife’s mercurial weather. The hangar houses several aircraft at one time.
As if on cue, I literally bumped into Joe as we walked through the inconspicuous green metal door that opens into the inner sanctum of the Buffalo Airways hangar. I had no trouble recognizing him. His brown hair was slicked back into a neo-pompadour and showed nary a sign of grey despite the fact that he was approaching seventy. His face was not as wrinkled as I thought it would be, his teeth surprisingly white. His clothes were unassuming and spoke to the casual places he’s called home his entire life: dark jeans and a flannel shirt, a red plaid flannel lumberjack jacket on top. He wore his watch backwards on his right wrist.
As Mikey introduced us, I sensed trepidation in my guide’s voice. “Dad, this is Mike. He’s the guy writing the book.”
“Book...” Joe growled, eyeing me suspiciously. “What book?”
Uh-oh.
Mikey’s phone rang and he turned away, now deep in conversation with pilot Devan Brooks.
Joe’s suspicious look bore holes into my skull, out the other side, and through the fuselage of the DC-3 lurking behind me. “I never agreed to no fuckin’ book.”
Oh boy.
I was drowning, my hands stretched helplessly toward the disappearing surface above. The light was fading, my watery grave becoming darker.
Joe broke the silence as I tried to mumble something intelligible.
“Do you have an aviation background?” he asked.
“Well, not really. But I have flown a bunch of times, if that counts for anyth—”
“Then it’s gonna be tough writing that book,” he cut me off. “I’d strongly reconsider it if I were you. I don’t have time to educate people, especially non-aviation people.”
“Actually, this book is not really going to be a technical manual, but more of a story about—”
“You go in that office of mine, and every book on the shelf is an aviation book,” he continued over me. “I read a lot of books to see how accurate they are and how they spread the credit and the blame around. And every one of them is a piece of shit. I buy the books only for time, places, and data.”
Mikey must have seen the beads of sweating forming on my brow, because he finally ended his phone conversation and turned back to throw me a life preserver. Joe took no notice.
“I’m very busy right now,” he continued, “and there aren’t a lot of people helping me. They’re finding me a lot of problems to solve because they can’t handle them themselves. So I’m not really in the best mood to be writing a book.”
Mikey joined me in mumbling and fumbling, trying to explain things to Joe. “It’s really about timing,” Mikey said. Joe had turned on his heels and was heading for the far side of the hangar. Clearly, he’d had enough of our conversation. “Just think about it!” Mikey called after him.
An uneasy silence hung between us as we watched Joe march away. “That went well,” Mikey said. “Better than I thought, actually.”
Great Slave Lake
Given its English name by the British explorer Samuel Hearne, who first crossed the lake in 1771 and named it for the Slavey people native to the area, Great Slave Lake is the fifth-largest lake in Canada and the ninth-largest in the world (27,200 square kilometres or 16,901 square miles). The lake is 615 metres (2,000 feet) deep in some places, making it the deepest in North America. It’s icy cold and frozen for eight months of the year.
There are seven communities peppered around the lake: Yellow-knife, Fort Resolution, Hay River, Behchoko (formerly Rae-Edzo), Lutselk’e (formerly Snowdrift), Dettah and N’Dilo (both located just outside Yellowknife).
THE INNER SANCTUM
Having temporarily removed Joe from my list of potential interview candidates, I was faced with more free time than I had originally bargained for, but at least it gave me an opportunity to explore the inner sanctum of Buffalo Airways.
I’d never been inside an airplane hangar before, and the sheer volume of the place bordered on overwhelming. The hangar itself stretches 45 metres by 45 metres (150 feet by 150 feet), enough to house half a football field. The roof soars more than fifteen metres (fifty feet) overhead, curving slightly higher from its east and west walls to the highest point directly in the middle. On either end of the hangar are adjoining buildings that house Buffalo’s offices, various parts and storage rooms, the passenger waiting room, and the small but wildly successful shop that sells Buffalo merchandise.
Huge though the place may be, one thing becomes immediately apparent: Joe McBryan runs a tight ship. The hangar is the picture of efficiency, a testimony to a near-obsession for Buffalo Joe: safety. An assortment of racks and stands peppers the hangar, each neatly festooned with a variety of airplane parts. Everywhere I looked, men were perched on rolling stands, elbows deep into the guts of an airplane. The walls were dripping with racks of belts, parts, and papers, all organized into tidy little rows for easy identification.
Two enormous steel doors, each twenty-one metres (seventy feet) wide and fifteen metres (fifty feet) high, guard the entrance to the hangar. A series of windows near the top of each door flooded the room with natural sunlight. The place was abuzz with activity: bright, lively, and full of purposeful energy. Everybody, it seemed, had a job to do, knew what it was, and got to it without hesitation or question.
As if trying to absorb the variety of strange and wonderful sights bombarding my eyes was not enough, I couldn’t help but notice that my olfactory system was also doing jumping jacks. The smell is not bad by any stretch of the imagination. But it is distinctive. It’s a smell of oil
