1 2 [email protected] www.tundracub.com 218-744-2003 3 NOTES This is a book of non-fiction. A few liberties were taken with the sequencing of events, but all of them actually happened. The northern natives that we once called "Eskimos" prefer the word "Inuit," the Inuktitut word for "the people." To convert Canadian costs to U.S., subtract approximately one third. In keeping with our antiquated U. S. system of weights and measures, temperatures are given in Fahrenheit, and volumes are listed in gallons. 4 This book is dedicated: To the Bernoullis, a family of 17th century scientists who fled to Switzerland to escape from persecution by religious zealots. Daniel Bernoulli discovered the principle that helps lift our wings to the sky. To Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Charles Darwin and their many contemporaries who, often at great risk, opened our eyes to grandeur and advanced the sciences that provide our many comforts. To Orville and Wilbur Wright, two independent thinkers who, in 1903, achieved the world's first successful, powered, piloted, heavier-than-air flight. (The local paper didn't consider the event worth reporting. The United States Army later called the use of airplanes a "crazy" idea.) To the bush pilots who bring supplies and human contact to remote corners of the world, and to all who seek new horizons. 5 Preface The room where I write overlooks the tea-tinted waters of a northern Minnesota lake, a view that I share with a common loon. When I taxi my seaplane to and from our pier, the loon parallels me, yodeling a raucous theme while he performs his water-walking act. Convinced that he has once again decoyed my rumbling yellow bird away from his sanctuary, the loon settles low in the water, then gracefully slips beneath. The loon and I share an interest in my Cub, but we do so from our own perspectives. Where the loon sees only an annoying interloper, I behold a magic carpet, the realization of a long-held dream. As a boy, I'd dash to the end of our log crib dock whenever I heard the stuttering start of a neighbor's seaplane. Ensnared by its reverberations and slow pirouettes while its engine warmed, I'd fidget in anticipation of power and spray. With one hand gripping our spruce-tree flagpole, I'd hang out over the water, my imagination riding co-pilot as the aircraft bounced from the waves and cleared the trees - then return to reality as it faded from sight. A lifetime later I write in a small, birch-bordered cabin overlooking the same log crib dock, thrice rebuilt. The wall to my right bears charts of Canada and Alaska, each map webbed with flights from my past, for the dreams that I dreamed at the end of the dock have changed from fiction to fact. Rows of Kodachromes decorate the wall to my left: a crescent tundra beach where Sand Hill cranes cavort and cry, a herd of ten thousand caribou caught in mid-step as they clatter past, and a Super Cub standing vertically on its prop and float tips at the edge of a northern lake. The shelves above my desk hold stacks of books, clippings and travel notes. Some of the notes are neatly typed. Others, set down in a bobbing seaplane among the reeds of a mist-laden 6 bay, are a barely legible scrawl. Still more settled into spiral notebooks beneath the canopy of a nylon tent or in the tar paper austerity of an abandoned arctic mission - its priest long missing, undoubtedly dead. When I work with my notes, I often drift back to another time and place - to the turquoise waters of the Coppermine Gorge, or to the banks of the Great Whale River, where arctic char played between my floats while I worked on a damaged engine. My 90 horse power, Piper PA-11 is a transition model between the famous J-3 Cub and the beefier Super Cub - a descendant of the ornithopters envisioned by Leonardo da Vinci, the 15th century scientist who saw birds not as fluff and feathers, but as an "instrument working within mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements." Equipped with long range tanks, the light and dependable Cub is ideal for lengthy tundra tours. On its cowling and on the vertical plates that cap the tips of the wings, its name is written in navy blue script: Tundra Cub. The name is appropriate. The Cub has traversed the Yukon and measured the tides of Nome. Skimming the margins of Hudson Bay, it has dipped a wing to polar bears, and delivered me to the banks of the Thelon River, where fifty yards into the bush I performed a nervous pirouette, surrounded by the shaggy descendants of worlds long past – musk oxen. Now, with our long Minnesota winter just a memory, it's summer once again. The former Yugoslavia is still in fractured ferment. Inter-religious strife, overpopulation and hunger soil a globe beset with theologies of breed and the realities of greed. 7 Having written my legislators and paid up my dues, I will seek renewal in the sights and sounds and scents of the North, in its people, stories and myths. Flying a course determined by weather and whim, I'll return to the rotting cabin of three travelers who starved to death in the Thelon Sanctuary, and visit the Nahanni River's Headless Valley, where two brothers literally lost their heads in a fruitless search for gold. Though I've no room to spare, I'll fly with Bernoulli, who supports my wings, and with centuries of his peers. In a 50-year-old aircraft born of their contemplations, I'll return to the North, escorted briefly by a common loon. 8 Chapter One Minnesota to Ilford, Manitoba "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote." Herman Melville It's the third week of July. Soft summer winds have finally swept aside Lake Vermilion's amber pine-pollen veil. Rising from the depths, schools of whitefish lip watery ringlets where the last of the mayflies flutter down. As Sagittarius prowls the night-time skies, fireflies twinkle in our evergreens, and it's Christmas once again. Far to the north, the lakes of the Northwest Territories have finally shed their sheaths of ice. On Great Slave Lake, a diesel-driven barge is fighting a cold, northeasterly wind as it struggles toward a tiny town called Snowdrift and an even more remote weather station named Reliance. Riding low, the barge is laden with machinery, building supplies, appliances, three- wheelers, groceries and a fifty-five gallon barrel of aviation gas that bears my name. In years past, I've been accompanied on my northern flights by a passenger, or occasionally by another aircraft, but this trip will be different, for the unforeseen has removed my companions, and I'm facing a solo flight. A month ago I was one of four pilots eagerly reviewing maps and fueling sites, but appendicitis, loss of employment and a threatened divorce have removed the other three. Though I regret their difficulties and will miss their company, I'm buoyed by my freedom to choose destination and course without consultation, with only myself to please. 9 Flying alone doesn't worry me. I trust my equipment, my training and common sense. Solo travel, of course, has its hazards, but what good are dreams if you lack the courage to follow. Now, with its floats riding deep in the water, the Tundra Cub awaits. A mountain of gear has disappeared into its small baggage area, the back seat and compartmented floats. Beneath my seat, I've packed four books: Diane Ackerman's artful A Natural History of The Senses, Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World, and Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, which the London Times proclaimed the "best educational book of the year." The fourth is an old friend, Vilhjalmur Stefansson's The Friendly Arctic, the intriguing book that first turned my thoughts to the north when a shattered leg delivered a vacation from high school. A five pound packet of sequenced maps lies atop the books. Removing the Winnipeg chart, I lay it over the cameras, bug dope, notebooks and pens in the makeshift aluminum tray that hangs beneath the Cub's instrument panel. Before leaving, I bend a two foot length of clothes hanger wire into a precise right angle and set it upright on the pier beneath the noon-day sun. I point the horizontal arm directly north, then file a nick in it to record the length of the shadow cast by the vertical arm. Packed away in one of the float compartments, my wire will emerge in a few days at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. There, with the two-thousand-year-old logic of Eratosthenes, I hope to measure the earth as he once did, with the shadow of the noon day sun. Pushing away from the pier, I set the Cub's throttle to idle, flip the magnetos to BOTH, prime its engine with a few shots of fuel, step to the front of the float and give the prop a spin. The magnetos snap crisply. Another spin, another snap. "Now," I say to myself, for the Cub always fires on the third swing. Her engine snorts, then steadies to an even rumble. As I settle 10 into my seat, the Cub and I embrace each other.