Sample chapter - Papa X-Ray

Chapter one / Air taxi

"Just pull the truck up to the hangar. We’ll unload it on the floor there first and then into the plane," a young ramp man shouted to my open window.

I drove up to the Simpson Air building next to the gravel air strip and we created a neat pile of suitcases and boxes on the hangar floor.

"Now, what about the freezer?" I mused.

"The freezer?" He was startled.

"No, no, I don’t mean the whole freezer," I laughed, "just the three or four hundred pounds of meat, milk and other stuff in it. Frozen."

He jumped into the big GMC’s box, opened the freezer door, looked in, dropped the lid, jumped out and pointed at the aircraft.

"Two loads," he pronounced. "No way we’ll get you there in one load." Seeing my look, he added, "Don’t worry, the Department of Education will pay for the move. It’s part of your contract. Now who and what goes first?"

I thought for a few seconds. "Mary and Johnny go first with the frozen goods. The food would just thaw out here while we waited for your return trip. Let’s get the goods into the freezer at Nahanni Butte as quick as we can…okay?"

Mr. Simpson Air nodded. "Okay. And, by the way, it’s pronounced ‘Nahanni’, to rhyme with granny. You don’t want to sound like a southerner, eh?"

A southerner! I pictured dozens of campsites from Red Deer to Regina, Dallas to Los Angeles, Guelph to Edmonton – mental postcards from our years in the music business. And now, August, 1985, the period at the end of our nomadic sentence: Fort Simpson. Who’s he calling a yokel?

After more than two years on the road, our son Johnny was a veteran traveler. He was weaned, potty-trained and spoke his first word, "Babu!" in our 32-foot Glendale travel trailer. I was glad he was too young to feel any sense of loss when we’d unloaded the amplifiers, speakers, cases, light stands and boxes, all stenciled, "Lang & Ackroyd Band." Our sound equipment would not be coming with us on this gig. This time my audience would be a gaggle of elementary school students in a place called Nahanni Butte in Canada’s Northwest Territories and Mary’s would be an audience of one.

"Oh, boy, Johnny! An airplane ride! I can hardly wait!" Mary bubbled as she bundled Johnny into the Britten-Norman Islander and took her place in the right seat while the ramp man continued loading our boxes. Trim, athletic and ready for any new adventure, Mary fairly beamed with excitement. A proper husband would likely have taken this moment to be grateful for being blessed with such a fine mate. And I would have too, had I not been transfixed by the prospect of getting a ride in this lovely airplane. I felt a strong pang of envy.

"You Jim Lang?" a woman shouted from the office. "You got a telephone call!"

I ran into the Simpson Air waiting room and took the phone. It was Margaret from the Department of Education office up the hill from the strip.

"Jim, I just talked to the store in Nahanni and they’re hoping you could fly in some pop they ordered."

"No problem, Margaret, let ’em know I’m bringing it in!"

Pop for the kids! That would get me off on the right foot. I visualized their grateful faces, no doubt starved for the exotic soft drinks that I will have ferried in more than a hundred miles by air – just to make them happy. I scooted back to the plane and helped the ramp man finish piling in the last of the cross-rib roasts.

"Say, do you have some pop that’s supposed to go to Nahanni?" I asked, glancing into the hangar, innocently.

"Yeah, there’s some here, I think."

"Let’s throw it on, whaddaya say? I said we’d bring it in."

He stopped and eyed me coldly. Oops, I thought, I think I’ve crossed some kind of line here. But, what could the problem be? This was a big plane with a little room left and, well, a few cans of pop shouldn’t be a problem.

I followed him as he walked over to the hangar and pointed to twelve flats of no-name cola and orange soda.

"I see," I said.

He turned to me and in that moment I realized that he was not only the ramp man, he was also the pilot. This was the north, after all, where pilots still got their hands dirty.

"I don’t want to be rude, but let’s be clear here," he said coolly. "I say what goes on the plane and what doesn’t. Pop is heavy. It goes with your trip, not this one." He smiled a forced smile and strode off toward the plane.

Yikes, that hurt! Just like some over-zealous fan in the music business days. I yearned to be an "airplane groupie" and now that I was about to get a ride in a plane, the pilot had to put me in my place. Ah, well. I sat down on the GMC’s tailgate to watch the Islander line up for takeoff. I could see Mary’s smiling face through the windshield and Johnny strapped in behind her, his head rotating like a periscope. The offended pilot applied full power and with prop-blasted gravel spraying behind the two engines, the high-wing twin roared down the strip, climbed out, arced to the west and flew out of sight.

I looked at my watch. Hmmm. Two hours to kill. I might as well head back to the Department of Education office and get some more orientation. It had been ten years since I’d set foot in a classroom. I couldn’t very well get up in front of my students next Monday and announce, "And now here’s a little tune we stole from Charlie Daniels…hit it, Mary!"

It was a short stroll back up to the ugly, two-story, corrugated steel government building. Function obviously spoke louder than form up here – at least when it came to industrial construction. I took in the community as I sauntered up the hill. There were small, pleasant houses, Honda trikes, dogs barking and occasional evidence of the thirteen hundred souls who inhabited Fort Simpson. Of these the Dene formed the largest group. The Dene had called this land home for more than ten thousand years…ten thousand years.

To the east, I could see the sun glinting on the mighty Mackenzie River, fat with silty water from the Liard and Nahanni Rivers, flowing north to Inuvik and the Arctic Ocean, thousands of miles away. As broad as a lake, it was a huge river, which was likely why the Dene called it Deh Cho – "Big River." It was the ribbon that bound dozens of bands throughout this part of the Northwest Territories. Altogether they numbered fewer than 15,000 people. Their villages and towns dotted a mass of land larger than most countries on Earth, this great northern land – Denendeh. I took a deep breath of the cool clean air. I had a very good feeling about our decision to move here.

Link to Jim Lang’s web site: www.jlang.com