Chapter 14 - Dings and Dents
Mishaps and Quick Recoveries
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When the work slowed in October, it didn’t come as a surprise to Walter. He had become used to the rhythm of life that followed the hours of daylight in the North. He was surprised, though, when Bob asked him to stay until December. His season would end when he went back to Kelowna for Christmas. Bob invited Walter to move his truck and camper into the hangar, where the overnight temperatures were much warmer. It was a kind gesture, and saved Walter from having to rent a place in Fort Smith once the nighttime temperatures became uncomfortable in the camper.
With fewer hours of daylight, Walter and the other pilots who were staying on spent more time around the base. Joe, in particular, brought a good deal of entertainment; he was a tremendous storyteller, never running out of new material. His stories turned what could have been long, boring days into a boisterous good time.
Soon enough December rolled around, and it was time for Walter to drive south. He didn’t mind long drives though he far preferred to fly, but he knew this particular drive was going to be rough. A blizzard was blanketing the region, and it didn’t look like it would pass through quickly. He would just have to drive through it. In preparation for the winter roads, he bought two new Bridgestone tires for the backend of his truck and had them installed. He didn’t want to take any chances with safety.
He set out in whiteout conditions, slowly making his way along the Fort Smith Highway, before turning south at Enterprise, onto Highway 2. When the storm eased and he could finally see the road ahead, he began to relax.
He was lost in thought when he felt a tug on the steering wheel and the truck swerve. He pulled over immediately and got out. One of the brand-new Bridgestone tires had completely shredded – he could see the black debris scattered along the highway behind him. He put on his coat and gloves, and got to the miserable work of removing the ruined tire and replacing it with his spare. So much for the investment in new tires.
With the spare installed, he carried on, being even more cautious on the winter roads. Finally, he was within an hour of his destination and anticipating a warm welcome from his parents. He was approaching Falkland, a small community about an hour north of Kelowna, when he once again felt the steering wheel tug, and the truck veer hard on the road. His first thought was that the spare tire had blown. He pulled over, and got out to look. The spare was fine, the remaining Bridgestone tire had blown.
Now he was seriously annoyed, standing in the dark, the second tire spread all over the road, and his only spare already in use. He figured the new tires must have had a manufacturing fault in them that caused them to delaminate. He had bought them for safety, and instead they had put him into two precarious situations. And now, this second problem was a bigger one, because his spare was already on the truck. He had to flag down a passing motorist and make arrangements to get another tire.
By the time he arrived at his parents’ house in Kelowna, he felt as though he had just worked a week of peak fire season. But after a good night’s sleep, the experience was behind him, and he had a story to tell as he reconnected with his parents and siblings.
Over the Christmas holidays he relaxed with his family. He enjoyed all the treats and familiar foods being baked and cooked in the kitchen, and the company of his siblings and their kids as people came and went over the holidays. His parents were delighted when Walter asked if he could stay with them until he went back to Fort Smith in the spring. They had a five-bedroom house, and only Bobby was still at home. They had plenty of room, and it didn’t make sense for Walter to rent a place when he’d only be around for a few months. His parents welcomed the chance to spend more time with him – it had been a long time since he had been home for more than a few days at a stretch.
After the holidays, his brother-in-law Corny had work for him. Corny had fine-tuned his house-building operation since Walter had last worked with him. There was still a serious building boom in the Okanagan, and Corny was now a subcontractor to a developer who was buying up large blocks of land and subdividing them into big housing developments, many with fifty or more lots. Corny built houses on the lots; other trades – plumbers, electricians, finishing carpenters, and roofers – followed and made them move-in ready, and the developer sold them.
There some aspects of the construction that Walter thought were compromised to keep the price down, like the roofing materials. There was a company that came in an put shingles on the new houses. The colour choice for the shingles was black – they were all black. That was the cheapest shingle available, and the company would install them for less than you could buy the shingles for at the lumberyard. The roofing crews had a couple of trucks with elevator decks that lifted the entire load up to roof level, so they didn’t have to carry shingles up ladders. Each crew could do two houses a day.
It kept costs down, but they were lousy shingles – black was a poor choice for roofs in the Okanagan where summers were stinking hot. They attracted all the heat. Walter doubted those roofs would last ten years, before the shingles curled up in the heat and needed to be replaced. Still, the finished houses sold for $12,000.00 to $15,000.00, depending on the floor plan, and were move-in ready. The homes were a decent size, usually with two or three bedrooms, and reasonably priced for the times. Walter enjoyed the rhythm of working with Corny and seeing the results as they moved through a subdivision, putting up one house after another.
March came quickly, and Walter was soon heading North for another season with Bob Gauchie. He would miss his parents and his brother Bobby, who he had enjoyed spending more time with over the winter, but he was also looking forward to getting back to Fort Smith, where every day brought something new.
Although there were eleven hours of daylight in Fort Smith when Walter returned, it was still winter. He was glad the invitation to parking his camper in the hangar overnight was still open. The aircraft were on skis, as the lakes had not yet thawed. It was also the time of year when trappers were returning from their traplines, bringing their bundles of furs – and their sled-dog teams – back to town for the summer.
Walter had learned a thing or two about hauling sled dogs in bush planes. Getting them loaded could be quite a performance. Once on board, the fun was just beginning – every dog wanted a window seat, and they were willing to fight for it. They could really tear up the inside of a plane. Still, they needed the ride, and Walter obliged.
One day, he was sent out to pick up a trapper he knew from a location about 150 miles out from Fort Smith. The guy had a sled-dog team that regularly won races when they weren’t on the trapline. On this day, he met Walter on the frozen lake with big bales of furs, but no dog team – just a single animal on a rope. As Walter got closer, he saw it wasn’t a dog at all, it was a wolf. The trapper explained that he had live-trapped the wolf over the winter and had been working to tame it. He’d already moved his team to town, and now he was taking the wolf down, intending to breed it with his dogs to improve them. Walter doubted either of those goals would go smoothly, and had serious reservations about loading the animal into the Beaver. The trapper said he’d thought it through and had a plan, so they got to work.
They loaded the furs into the Beaver first, leaving a small space behind the bales against the rear bulkhead, where the trapper wedged the wolf. It stayed there quietly until they were airborne. Then, suddenly, things got exciting as the wolf came scrambling over the bales of fur, snarling and clearly unhappy. The trapper spun around onto his knees in the right-hand seat, straining to beat the panicked animal back so it wouldn’t attack Walter. With some help from the turbulence Walter deliberately stirred up, he finally managed to get the wolf under control, and it retreated behind the bales of furs.
“It nipped me!” the trapper said. Walter looked over and saw the man’s bloodied hand. He turned his attention back to flying, tense, waiting for the next outburst.
When they reached Fort Smith, Walter landed the Beaver on its wheel-skis, taxied to the apron, parked, and walked away, leaving the trapper to unload his own cargo.
Charters were picking up, and the first few fires of the season flared around the North, but some days there was still a bit of downtime around the base. One afternoon, Bob asked Walter if he would take Kevin Coyne up in the Aztec, give him a bit of time on a multi-engine aircraft, and help him get ready for his endorsement. Walter was happy to do it. After going over the basics to see what Kevin already knew, he reviewed safety consideration, and described the procedure for a dead-engine check, covering the main points his own flight instructor had emphasized.
They took off and flew for awhile to let Kevin to get the feel of the aircraft, before practicing a few turns. Kevin was doing well, and Walter thought it was time to move the lesson along. He cut the fuel supply to one of the engines, and it quit. He waited to see what Kevin would do. Kevin knew he needed to do a dead-engine check – but he did it on the wrong engine, feathering it in the process.
Walter watched as Kevin struggled with the rudder pedals, fighting to keep control. “This thing really doesn’t perform well on one!” Kevin said.
“Well, it would perform a lot better if it had one.” Walter said.
Kevin’s face paled as he realized his mistake, but he restarted the engine and got it unfeathered – they had enough altitude that he had time to do it. The Aztec was a very forgiving machine, which made the incident amusing, rather than deadly. Walter was pleased at how quickly and capably Kevin handled the situation once he realized the problem. The dismayed look on Kevin’s face signalled to Walter he would not make that mistake again.
Back at the base, Bob still had the downed Norseman on his mind. One day, when there were no charters for the guys, he asked them to go to the crash site and bring it home, “Take some wheels, go up there, put them on, and fly it home,” he said.
By this time, Walter and the rest of the crew had read the accident report published by the DOT, and it didn’t seem feasible that a set of wheels would bring the disabled aircraft home. But Bob was the boss, and the guys didn’t have anything else to do. They loaded a set of wheels into the Beaver, and Walter set off with a mechanic, and another pilot, to see what could be done.
They didn’t even need to land to know they wouldn’t be bringing the Norseman home that day. They could see the front struts were busted, the nose of the airplane was lying right on the floats – wheels weren’t going to fix that. They landed and got out to look more closely. It was a mess: the cowling blown off, windshield smashed, propeller lying on the ice. The cylinders had filled with water and cracked when they froze; their tops stuck up an inch above the rest. Walter couldn’t see any way that thing would ever fly again – but at least it was a nice sunny day, so it wasn’t bad being out on the ice.
The next time Walter was sent out to a frozen lake to retrieve a disabled plane, the weather wasn’t so agreeable. Just a few weeks later, Kevin was flying over Great Slave Lake in the 206 when the engine failed. He safely performed an emergency landing on the frozen lake, called in his location, and someone went to pick him up. Bob immediately began looking for a replacement engine. He phoned a company in Edmonton, and sure enough, a new six-cylinder engine, weighing well over 200 pounds, arrived in Fort Smith on the very next flight.
The next morning, Walter, Kevin, and a mechanic loaded the engine and tools into the Beaver and flew up to Great Slave Lake, landing near the disabled 206. The weather was foul – cold, with gusting wind. Walter and Kevin supported the weight of the old engine while the mechanic undid the bolts, then they lowered it to the ground. They unloaded the new engine, lifted it into place, and held it steady while the mechanic bolted it in. It was a tremendous strain – the wind was blowing, and Walter and Kevin could barely adjust their stance as they held the heavy engine overhead. Snowdrifts formed downwind of Walter’s boots. Just as he thought he was at the end of his endurance, the mechanic announced the engine was secured. The guys gently released their grip, and sure enough, it was firmly in place.
Kevin and Walter set to work loading the disabled engine into the Beaver, while the mechanic finished connecting the new one. At his signal, Kevin climbed into the 206 and fired it up. It was a relief to hear it roar to life. The flight back to Fort Smith would serve as a test flight – there was no reason to prolong their time out on the ice. Walter waited until Kevin was airborne and on his way before following in the Beaver. It had been a rough morning, but the job was done. Back at the base, Bob signed off the engine replacement, and they were back in business. It was just one of those things.
In early June, Bob added another plane to the fleet – an Otter, tail number CF-QOR. The Otter had been a military asset before Bob got hold of it. It had been stripped of the military gear – except for the compass – back east before being sent west for civilian service. There had been serious delays getting the approvals to transfer the plane, and finally Bob had enough. He picked up the phone and called Don Jamieson, the federal Minister of Transport at that time. Not the office of Don Jamieson – Don himself. Walter again marvelled at the connections and sway his boss had. A few days later, the paperwork was resolved, and in June 1971, a pilot flew the aircraft to Fort Smith to deliver it. The same pilot checked Walter out in the Otter before catching a flight back to Edmonton. The Otter became Walter’s main ride for the rest of the season.
The Otter had many great features – not the least of which was the military bomber’s compass that had been left in the plane when it was rebuilt for civilian service. They were same kind the bombers used in WWII to find their targets over Germany, so Walter figured they must be pretty good. They operated with greater accuracy inside the area of compass unreliability, which made them a coveted safety feature for bush pilots in the Arctic. The closer you get to the North Magnetic Pole, the less reliable ordinary compasses became.
The Otter also had a few quirks. It was a big plane, and was underpowered for take-off. If the pilot pulled the nose-up too quickly, the Otter would stop climbing and actually sink back down. Walter knew this – he’d read the accident reports – but he didn’t realize how easily it happened.
He taxied out on Instant Lake, powered up to take off, then lifted the nose to climb. The Otter immediately began losing what little lift it had. Instant Lake was small, and was disappearing fast as the aircraft continued to sink. The Otter touched down roughly on the far shore, and Walter was headed for the trees. They were small, brittle trees, ones that looked like pipe cleaners, but taller than the plane. The noise of the Otter sheering through them was startling. When the plane finally stopped, everything fell silent.
Catching his breath, Walter opened his door and looked around. He was really in the sticks – at least forty feet in from the shore. Somehow, though, the Otter wasn’t seriously damaged. It had a few dings and dents in the wings where it had busted through the little trees, but otherwise it was fine. It seemed it was a pretty tough aircraft – sitting there on its floats, relatively unharmed, a good forty feet into the bush.
Getting it back onto the lake, though, was going to be a project. By the time Walter had clambered through the brush to inspect both wings, he heard the whine of the outboard motor from the tin boat that was always tied to the dock. Someone was on their way to check on him. Walter started down the track of broken trees toward the lake and met Don, the dock boy, at the shore. Don had a chainsaw, and he passed it to Walter. He hadn’t come to offer a ride back to the dock, rather, he was there to help problem-solve.
After surveying the scene together, they came up with a plan. Don would go into Fort Smith, collect sections of the wooden boardwalk – ten-foot lengths of the raised sidewalk—and they could use them to make a track for the Otter back to the lake. He took off in the tin boat, leaving Walter with the chainsaw to clear the debris between the Otter and the shore.
After an hour or so, Walter heard the outboard again. This time, the boat was towing sections of the wooden boardwalk, strung together like barges. Don had recruited another fellow to help, and Walter worked with them to haul the heavy sections ashore. Together, they dragged the chunks of boardwalk up the cleared track. After several trips, a wooden pathway stretched from the shore to the Otter’s floats.
Walter had been thinking about how to get the aircraft turned around. He’d cleared away all the brush from the right float but left some around the left, figuring that, when the Otter was powered up, the drag on the left float would cause it to pivot, and he was right. Once the plane faced the lake, the guys butted sections of boardwalk up against the floats, and soaked the planks with water to reduce friction. Then, under power, the Otter hauled itself along the makeshift runway and slid back onto the lake. It was quite a sight.
It had been a serious amount of work, and only once the Otter was back at the dock in good condition did Walter allow himself to relax. He knew he wasn’t the first to drive an Otter off the end of a lake – they were notorious for it – but it still stung. At least now he knew precisely what the Otter was and wasn’t capable of. He never heard a word from Bob about the incident; it wasn’t Bob’s way to comment on such things. Besides, at Buffalo there wasn’t a lot of time to dwell on a rough flight, there was always something new to get working on.
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Author’s Notes:
N.B.1: We often see our parents through the lens of their roles in our lives— caregivers, disciplinarians, cheerleaders. Perhaps they are our role models or mentors, but who were they before they became these things to us?”
To better understand who my parents were before they were, well, my parents, I set about interviewing them about their lives before marriage and kids. I started with my mom, and you can read her story here, and now, “Learning to Fly” is the story of my dad.
Walter Harms was the oldest son of Mary and Jake Harms, Mennonites who fled to Canada in search of safety and the hope for a better future. He was a curious child, always interested in the land they lived on, and how things worked. As a young man, this curiosity led him to respond to an advertisement for flying lessons, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Walter is my dad, and this is his story, as told to me in a series of interviews in 2024-25. The story is pieced together from Dad’s memory, photos, and documents. As we all know, memory is fallible. In the telling of this story, some names have been changed, either because they could not be recalled, or to protect the privacy of the person.
N.B.2: The town of Fort Smith is located within Treaty 8 Territory, and encompasses the traditional homelands of Salt River First Nation, Smith’s Landing First Nation, and the Indigenous Metis people of Fort Smith.
Another great chapter! Your Dad was pretty amazing.