Free The Ice Pilots by Michael Vlessides Page B

great unfolding story. What could be better? The planes, the Arctic, and the people who fly them.”
    Imagine yourself working at Buffalo Airways in spring 2008. You’re trucking along, doing your job every day in blissful anonymity, trying to survive the unpredictable rigours of the cold, the dark, and Joe’s temper. You think you’ve got it all worked out. Sure, you’re working your ass off and sometimes Joe tears you a new rectum, but the place feels like home, the characters like family. Life reaches a comfortable stasis.
    Then, without warning, a couple of strangers show up, one of whom is carrying a serious-looking video camera. You’re told that your work life is now going to be immortalized on film and broadcast to millions of people in Canada and around the world. And (this is a big and ) every move you make, every word you say, every screw-up you commit—large or small—is going to be documented, logged, and potentially made the focus of a TV show episode. How would you feel?
    If you answered “really friggin’ uncomfortable,” you’re not alone. And chances are, you probably would have made your discomfort known to the strangers now skulking around the hangar, sticking a camera in your face at the most inopportune moments and asking you pointed questions about your life and your work.
    That is where I found myself in January 2011, when I walked into the alien world of Buffalo Airways, immersed myself in its daily rhythms, and shared the triumph and defeats of the people who work there. Sure, I had faith in my abilities. I had always managed to make people comfortable enough to share the most intimate aspects of their lives with me. But I knew that gaining people’s confidence, trust, and friendship would not come right away.
    In those early days, I hung around—a lot. People looked at me suspiciously, wondering what the hell I was doing in their lives. Either they wouldn’t talk to me, or they simply offered blunt, unemotional responses. Sometimes (though thankfully rarely) they were downright hostile. I felt like an outsider because, frankly, I was an outsider. Sure, I had Mikey to act as my buffer, but I still felt the stares, heard the questions. As Joe so bluntly put it at our first meeting: “Book—what book?”
    Eventually, I managed to make progress with even the most leery Buffalo employees, but Joe was staunchly resistant to the idea that I even existed. Usually when I asked him a question he grumbled something as he hurried to another part of the hangar. Sometimes his responses were accompanied by a glare that would melt Yellowknife permafrost.
    One time I gauged Joe incorrectly, fooling myself into thinking he was in a talkative mood, and asked him about the airline’s genesis, hoping for some historical context. “You gotta know this shit,” he scowled. “All you gotta do is go on the computer, Google it, and then you get all that information and write that shit up.”
    “I just think the book could use a bit of historical context, so I was wonderi—”
    “Well, if you’re writing an article on Ice Pilots, I’d be very careful about getting into too much detail. Number one, I ain’t gonna do an autobiography. And number two, I ain’t gonna do a history of Buffalo Airways.”
    It helped my ego to know that the TV crew had found itself in the same boat just a couple of years earlier; ever suspicious, Joe wanted nothing to do with them. He would say things like “I don’t know why you guys are following me around—this is Mikey’s movie.”
    Joe’s ire over the show—and the intrusion into his personal and business life—only grew when he heard the name proposed by the TV production company. “Honestly,” Mikey told me conspiratorially, “we all hate the name Ice Pilots. It’s the worst name ever.”
    But Mikey understands the logic behind the moniker. As he tells it, the producers wanted the name to max out at eighteen letters, so the entire title could fit on a