The Ice Pilots. Michael Vlessides
if leaving its luxurious confines made any sense.
The odds seemed slim at best. If I hadn’t met Mrs. Right from among the eight million or so people who call New York City home, how on Earth would it happen north of the Arctic Circle? The overwhelming majority of Fort McPherson’s residents are aboriginal, from families that have hunted, trapped, and fished in the area for generations. Meet my wife? Not unless she was willing to give up a lifestyle that was completely alien to me and spend a little time in the Big Apple.
Yet meet my wife I did. Marty was a nurse in Fort McPherson’s small health centre. I remember meeting her on one of the town’s dirt roads shortly after my arrival in early January 1991. I was walking down the street with my fellow volunteers, headed back to our small apartment for a bite of lunch after a morning’s work. Marty was on a lunchtime stroll with a friend, whose new house we happened to be building.
Though I was smitten with Marty’s smile immediately, I had little idea what lurked under the mounds of clothing she wore to ward off the elements. At –40°, we all looked like pears, so one could only speculate whether someone had a nice one of these or impressive set of those. Someone once told me that getting amorous with someone for the first time up north is a bit like opening a Christmas present, except you don’t really know how much wrapping paper there is.
Wrapping paper notwithstanding, it wasn’t long before Marty and I bid a sad farewell to Fort McPherson and set out on our own adventure together, shuttling from Fort McPherson to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and New York City before returning to the Arctic, this time to the frozen tundra of Baffin Island. A few years later we were married on the sea ice of Patricia Bay near Clyde River, a community of seven hundred-odd Inuit residents. We chose January 21 as our date, the day the sun was set to return to the northern sky (albeit briefly) after a hiatus of more than two months.
After a year in Clyde River we moved southward to the relatively balmy climes of Pangnirtung, another Baffin Island community, but one located about fifty kilometres (thirty miles) south of the Arctic Circle. Our first child, Dawson Orion (named respectively for the Yukon town and the constellation that filled the dark Baffin Island sky all winter), joined our family on March 6, 1996.
Compared with Clyde River, Pangnirtung—or Pang, for short—was a metropolis. The place had two stores, a vibrant arts centre, and even a restaurant, to the extent that a KFC Quickstop counts as a restaurant. Armed with a new work visa and a master’s degree in elementary education (that I’d pick up in New York), I took a half-time teaching position in the local junior/senior high school, the Attagoyuk School.
Teaching Grade 9 students at Attagoyuk showed me how little I knew about northern society and culture. Here I was, trying to foist a Canadian-government-approved curriculum upon a group of people who until recently had lived off the land, a tradition they had held for thousands of years. Sure, the kids in my class, with their Montreal Canadiens caps and baggy jeans, looked like a typical group of fourteen-year-olds. But while I was urging them to memorize the parts of speech, they could have been out seal hunting or riding snowmobiles across the frozen waters of Pangnirtung Fiord—a far more enticing prospect. When spring, and nearly constant daylight, came around, attendance in my class plummeted to single digits. The local kids, I learned, had a penchant for staying up all night and sleeping all day.
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.
Yellowknife’s Old Town strikes an eclectic pose from the air. Like many parts of the city, Old Town has evolved around the outcrops of Canadian Shield that pepper the northern 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.
Yellowknife is the largest and most cosmopolitan city in the Northwest Territories, covering an area of 105.2 square kilometres (40.6 square miles). Actress Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the Superman movies, was born here in 1948.
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,