Bush Pilot: Reflections on a Canadian Myth

4 years ago, Rob Bamp had a secure job at the Royal Bank. Today he is a

pilot

who lives a childhood fantasy of him in a World War II plane. Flying an airplane is like being a solo violinist at Carnegie Hall. You have to do your thing. right then and there you have to do it right and the degree to which you do it right or wrong is very, very critical, there is a sense of satisfaction that is much greater than having made an A2 loan or a $300,000 loan, you know? I worked at the bank since Marco Polo went east looking for spices to kill the taste of his flesh.

Europeans have been obsessed with extending outwards in the process. We have created

myth

ical heroes in our own time. The

myth

has settled on the jungle

pilot

, more than alone. an airplane driver, a

bush

pilot, is history itself pushing the northern border, but on a stormy day on the north shore of Lake Winnipeg, history seems very far away, it seems that we are going to get terribly wet if we don't get out of here . very soon we are going to get very wet, I want to get an enurement now because you don't want to get wet, you are going to take me to the right, sure where you want to go at the south end of the lake.

Winnipeg, where Farmland ends and Bush begins, is Northway Aviation's base of operations for Rob Bamp and the airplanes he flies. Northway Aviation began 25 years ago when a fisherman trapper named Gary Johnson decided that flying over

bush

was better than walking through it, his son Jim brought him along. in the world of mountain flying does not share Rob B's romantic view of the Bush pilot's job. To a large extent he is a taxi driver or a bus driver if you are a pilot Char you are a taxi driver. If you're a schedule pilot, you're a bus driver, it's as simple as that, almost finished Rob to the first aviators who flew north after World War I, the north looked much the same as it did when the first Europeans arrived three centuries earlier, in 1690 Henry Kelce canoed up the Hayes River in 1920 the canoe was still the universal means of summer transportation the North The North was a harsh and treacherous crucible Larger than life it was also full of wealth and so safe like there was gold in the ground There would be men who would come north to dig it up, of course the dirty work was rarely done by those who became rich.

Harry Gimr has been a prospector since he first came north in 1928, in the days before diamond drills and motor boats, when a site was all summer. The work and tools were a pickaxe, a shovel, a wheelbarrow and even the blacksmith's forge. They would have to pack all that stuff from the p to the Siskin River and go through Cumberland House, which is one of the oldest fur trading posts in the country and I packed it all here by hand and, uh, it was a lot of work and then, as far back as I can remember, when I first went out into the bush on the Churchill River, all they gave me was a tent and uh, that was, it never had toilet paper, never, ever, not even good, the Old timers would laugh at you if you carried a magazine and used it, they used to use grass or something and then after they started getting the plane you didn't do it.

You didn't have to pack all those things and then you started living better. The plane was ideal for life in the bush. Every lake or patch of snow was a landing strip. The impossible mosque became a landscape. Northern concepts of speed and distance were transformed. I'll never forget my first plane ride from Shis Lake to the Churchill River and, uh, Cap Stevenson, he was the pilot who was named after or later after the Winnipeg airfield. We're flying, let's go. I don't know. 75 80 M per hour, but I thought, boy, that was going a little bit and the window was open a little bit.

I thought that if I took my finger out, I would go too fast to take my finger off, oh, but young, I thought. I would take the risk. I took out my finger. Nothing happened. I took out the whole finger. Nothing. I took out my hand. Nothing. Soon I flew along with my whole arm moving up and down and then I looked down and started yelling at the pilot. Hey, look. I looked at the duck down there and just then the duck came out of the water and shook its body and its antlers about 4 feet across oh there was a moose yeah if I could go back 40 or 50 years and start flying then that would be it." Be just cool, be duck for me.

I'd really like to go back. I'm at the wrong time. I think in those days it was even. It was a lot better to be a pilot because it was kind of a pioneer, you were doing something that was totally new and. you were learning while you were doing it I admire a lot of the old guys more than anything I guess I admire them for the ability to operate in severe cold in the winter in 40 50 below with a crappy line, well I don't think the. Today's pilot has nowhere near the problems that those who came before us had, for example, we have pretty good radio equipment, never again 15 20 or maybe half an hour from some form of civilization, at least other people that we can land and communicate with, that our problems are known, if we have any in the old days, it was not that simple, you would take off and go away maybe for a while. 2 or 3 months your base wouldn't know where you are or anything well, with the equipment we had it was a little difficult sometimes, we didn't have a plane with a clock and we flew in temperatures as low as 55 below zero without heaters or anything. others and passengers were almost as uncomfortable as we were in 1960 Hank Parsons had logged 18,000 hours over the north.

He had started out in the depression when he and his brother with a second-hand B plane headed north to look for work. The next morning they went up to svant. Lake with $25 in our pocket with a full tank of gas and we discovered that it was not such an easy way to make a living, it was not close to the business we expected and the fact that it was a depression for anyone with a plane would go anywhere. place where they thought they could make a few dollars the plane was an idea whose time had come Harold Farington made the first commercial flight to the Red Lake goldfields in 1926 that summer Red Lake was the busiest airport in the world in 1928, Dickens reached the Arctic Ocean, bringing mail, newspapers from Edmonton, and fresh oranges from Florida.

The isolation of the north was coming to an end and the men who were finishing it were becoming legends just by doing their job they would start in the morning, well, typical. The day would be maybe 5:00 in the morning and we would have to go get some fishermen or a bunch of fish or get out a diamond drill and then we would come back and there might be an emergency call for a seriously injured or sick person. on one of these Indian reservations or mining camps and we ended up there the next day, it could be a report of a forest fire, so we never knew when we went to work in the morning what was going on.

During the day we could be doing three or four different types of trips, so where do I go? We're going to Pap River, yeah, Three Lakes, there's six guys and probably two canoes, yeah, so you might have to make two transfers between then. I go back to Black River and then come here, oh okay, that should be the story and I'll go to Lewis Lake Three Lakes and come back, it's been 50 years since Hank Parson learned to fly and hit. Dickens first arrived at the ark, but the pilot of Mt. North is still a frontier and the frontier is reflected in his team and his attitude.

If I'm going to fly, I really enjoy flying, but the milk run type of stuff I really dislike, like the Air Canada Pacific Western type of stuff I could never do. do that why not working in the bank is the same you wear a white shirt and tie yes sir no sir you know you are sitting at a desk an autopilot is doing all the flying for you and when you are not flying the first officer It is That is why I feel very satisfied with what I have been doing for 300 years. The Scottish fur traders brought the Indians the iron tools that would make their lives easier and make them forever dependent on the products of Europe today on their weekly visit to the communities around Lake Winnipeg.

Rob Bamp supplies that dependence, as well from the trader of furs, blankets, guns and axes, this modern Voyager's carts include lumber, frozen meat, fresh vegetables, civil servants and disposable diapers, while Rob Bamp supplies the communities on the shores of Lake Winnipeg, his boss. Jim Johnson heads inland toward the remote lakes of eastern Manitoba. His job today is to find scattered native groups harvesting wild rice among these lakes and buy as much rice as possible for a merchant in Chicago. This is the traditional role of the Bush pilot. Among the representative of southern society, who must confront the north on their own terms and persuaded to give up their wealth despite their outboard motors, the Soo people of Ponassi gathered wild rice in the same way they have. done for centuries.

It is here in this land where the roads still do not work that the ancient relationship between the white trader and the native producer still remains their ancestors made the decision to trade peacefully with the Europeans a decision they could never reverse today these are the lucky ones still They have something the white man wants and they can still wait for the highest bidder how much does a pound get for rice now $2 a pound that's it, yeah, how much do you pay for a pound Lots 2 and a wh and a wh and $2 in a quarter, yeah, where did you do it? buy Did you buy somewhere already in two days?

Jim Johnson will spend $10,000 on behalf of dealers in Chicago to do it and do it right. He has spent his entire life learning and adapting to the north and the people of it. It is an eternal scene like the old one. Trade itself reflects a high degree of mutual respect and understanding, but increasingly it is a scene that belongs to the past, today as always change in the north revolves around the pursuit of wealth, but in the 20th century the The wealth of the north is not found in its lakes and forests, but beneath them, 300 miles north of the rice.

The harvest is from the city of Thompson company to the inco. Metals emerge from the undergrowth like a suburb without a city. Thompson is the future of the north, a future that began 30 years ago. Years ago, in the mining boom that followed World War II, in the feverish activity of rebuilding for peace, minerals played a key role. Mining stocks soared as eager investors poured money into the search for copper, lead, zinc, nickel and gold in the northern salad days for the bush. The pilots, the searchers, went to the mountains with the cargo of the plane and with them, the diamond drills, the crews, gasoline, oil, food and supplies for the camp.

There were often not enough planes to do all the work. Jack Lamb and his brother Greg, flying from Pal Manitoba, spent these years supplying. camps all over the north, you'll be gone for 3 or 4 months, that's great, but those are 200-250 hour months, all you want to do is finish that trip and get your money, go on to the next trip as a job. In 1956 it all paid off: he discovered vast nickel deposits in northern Manitoba using the full power of post-war technology and the immense cash reserves of a multinational corporation. Inko set out to build a mining town that would be unlike any previous mining town, the new town would be named after John Fairfield Thompson, the mining executive who controlled Inco from his office on Wall Street.

Thompson, a generation later, is a community of 20,000 with no downtown but four shopping centers. centers where any southerner can feel at home today the need to adapt to the north to meet it on its own terms and change with it no longer exists in Thompson, the north of the Bush pilot, the fur trader and the Indians have simply been phased out and now no new Bush planes are being produced anywhere in the world the planes that replace them will need runways, they will carry bigger loads but they won't land here, whether we call this progress or just an obsession with growth depends entirely from our point of view.

Look, the white man, you know, thinks you're always doing good by putting roads where roads don't belong. You know, if every place in the world should have a path, they should put a path to the top and on the top for the people who want to climb there so they don't have to work so hard. It is unfortunate that governments do not see this. There are areas that people simply should not have a path to in order to do the things they want to do: floating. the plane will never leave a mark on the water, a canoe doesn't roll, all you hear is the sound, you see the ripple in the water and in a few minutes it all disappears.