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| Wheels, Skis and Floats - Sample Chapter |
One elder told me, 'Big bird, not much meat,' and another said that, 'The lazy white man always want to sit down to walk,' laughed Burton, who felt warmly toward Canada's northern Natives. He treated them with dignity at a time when not every traveler could be counted on to do so.
After a few trips, the arrival of government airplanes became festive occasions. Crowds of Cree and Objibway flocked to touch the wood and fabric flying canoe. Sometimes, they did what one pilot called a possum jig to the accompaniment of leather drums and fiddles. The only solemnity occurred during the money presentation on Treaty Day when each man, woman and child received four dollars as agreed upon during historic signings between Her Majesty's representatives and the Indian peoples.
The airplane changed the lives of everyone in the north, Burton recalled. Aerial freighters hauled in trade goods and medevac flights became common as hundreds who had been shot, trapped or burned were taken to hospital within hours. One Sioux Lookout pilot returned to base ahead of schedule with an injured passenger who he believed needed immediate treatment.
We secured the airplane to the dock, heaved the man out of the cockpit and set him down on a stretcher, Burton said. He was a big man with one leg wrapped in a large bandage of sacking. He groaned and rolled his eyes, rocking back and forth as if he was really hurting.
An OPAS mechanic dashed to telephone the local hospital; someone ran to the cookhouse and brought the injured man a cup of coffee; another hurriedly readied the Green Hornet, as the OPAS called its base utility motorboat, to transport him to town, leaving the man alone for a few moments. Burton ran back to the dock just in time to see him get up and race into the bush, abandoning the sack and bandages. The so-called accident victim had wanted only a ride to civilization and he got it.
The introduction of H-boats greatly hastened the ability of forest surveyors to cover more territory. Timber stand surveys by hardy bushmen on foot with cumbersome measuring chains, as the heavy tapes were called, was time-consuming work. The OPAS had proven an airplane covered more country in a week than a team of men could inventory in a whole season.
Burton often took ground parties into the wilderness, waited until they selected their random wood samples, then returned them to base. With identification completed in the field, observers settled into the H-boats' cramped front cockpit and finished the count aloft. Wind-burned, watery-eyed and had frozen, they quickly learned how to read tree characteristics and values from high altitudes. Jackpine, they said, appeared blurry and spruce trees looked dark and pinlike when viewed straight down. Budworm devastation changed the lush forests to dry, flame red tracts ready to ignite in the first lightning storm.
With nothing to obstruct their arm movement nor any form of intercom between the cockpits, observers signaled by hand and expected the pilot to turn to the appropriate compass heading. At midday, they landed at on of the twelve strategically located refueling stations beside the railway tracks. On warm days, the crew found themselves roaring at full power to the end of the lake only to be unable to take off. In such cases, Burton closed the throttle, shut down the cantankerous Liberty and waited for the afternoon heat to dissipate. Once airborne, turbulence sometimes prevented legible sketching. There was nothing to do except to turn for home and endure the odors of hot oil, sagging fabric and water rotted wood wafting into their nostrils another day.
At seaplane bases, life was never dull. When fog, high winds or rain stopped all flying, pilots gathered together to pass the time. On one occasion, Burton returned to base after a side trip in the Green Hornet to Sioux Lookout for mail. In the pouch, he discovered a thick, official-looking envelope addressed to Schiller and bearing the imposing black lettering of a lawyer's logo. He handed it over to the famous pilot who immediately ripped it open.
Inside were two large checks from a New York legal firm, one for Schiller and the other for mechanic Al Cheesman. Schiller, a natural raconteur, launched into the story of how the checks found him in Sioux Lookout. The men relaxed and listened on their boxes and crates in the warmth of the humid office a few yards from a pair of tethered H-boats.
Before signing on with the OPAS, Schiller and Cheesman bootlegged whisky from New York harbor. Using a decrepit war surplus HS-2L, they flew to ships anchored beyond the legal three mile limit and returned with loads of illicit liquor. Out of . . . . . |
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