He’s Yellowknife’s Fishin’ Technician, landing lunker trout and charming the pants off VIP visitors. Now if only he could make his mark. By Nathan VanderKlippe
Mike Bryant wants to make one thing clear. He did not call Survivor. Survivor called him. That is, until they stopped calling.
But that part comes later, after one of television’s best-known reality shows started courting the Fishin’ Technician, a man who qualifies for the somewhat lesser standing of being Yellowknife’s beloved fishing columnist and, somewhat by default, one of the Northwest Territories’ better-known personalities.
For Bryant, a rocker-turned-writer whose chance at making it big slipped away in a series of bands that never took off and books that were never written, Survivor was a prime shot at the renown he’d long sought. It seemed a good chance. He was, after all, a dishevelled distillation of every stereotype one could hope to find about the distant Northern frontier. He lived in a tiny wooden cabin with no running water, no heat and no plumbing, in Yellowknife’s shack-filled Woodyard district. He called his place the Mosquito Creek Lodge. He knew how to properly maintain an outhouse. He woke in the middle of the night to stoke his fire. He wore thick flannel woodsman jackets and a coyote fur hat. He showered irregularly, and often had the scent to prove it. He had his own colourful name for those spa-loving metrosexual men who seemed so unlike him: foofers, a word that needed no explanation. And he fished. He ice-fished.
Survivor, he says, was smitten. Producers for the show were ready to bring him down to Los Angeles to meet him in person. “I’d be the only Canadian guy ever, and they were really into the whole shack thing,” he says. He ponders how it might have played out. “I could have caught all the fish, and trapped. And gathered all the grubs and all that stuff that they’re supposed to eat.”
But it wasn’t to be. It was 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush was building a missile-defence system, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin stood up to oppose it. Suddenly, a groundswell of anti-Canadian sentiment swept the U.S. The Survivor producers supposedly got cold feet. They didn’t want to risk their ratings on an anti-missile Canadian. They stopped calling. “That’s what happens, man,” Bryant says. “It’s politics.”
He then admits he doesn’t know how to trap. He did once know how to snare rabbits and squirrels. But it’s been a long time since he caught his last squirrel. And if Survivor tried calling again, they might be surprised that Bryant, Yellowknife’s best-known outdoors guru, is a far cry from the man they tried to woo only four years ago. He now drives a shiny pickup truck. He owns a new boat. His shoulder-length hair is greying. He wears a suede jacket and khaki Levi corduroys. He declines a beer on an afternoon fishing trip. He lives in a house.
“I’ve discovered that I really like having a shower in the morning,” he says. “I like having running water. And I don’t like having to worry about starting up a fire at 2:00 on a Friday morning at 30 below.” There is, however, one thing that hasn’t changed: Bryant still lusts for fame. “I enjoy notoriety to a certain extent, I guess,” he says. “A lot of people kind of want to make their mark doing something. I never figured I’d make my mark with a fishing column. It just sort of worked out that way.”
Bryant, now 38, has always loved fishing. He learned it from his father, a longtime Yellowknife bureaucrat and bed-and-breakfast owner who was so enamoured of the sport that he amassed a collection of fish stamps now worth thousands.
It has never mattered much that the name “Fishin’ Technician” doesn’t match what Bryant writes about. His weekly column in the Yellowknifer is almost always the best item in the paper, but it rarely contains anything technical. It’s more robust comedy, involving Bryant fishing with, and then writing about, a remarkable array of special visitors to Yellowknife, from male nude dancers to the Governor-General to the Tragically Hip. And Bryant doesn’t typically make himself out to be much of a fisherman. Although he can reel in the big ones on personal fishing trips, he once went eight columns without a single catch.
But then, the column is less about fishing than eliciting laughs – and maintaining a spot in front of people, if only a small one. It doesn’t always work as planned. After a decade of seeing his scrunch-faced headshot alongside his column, the people who stop him on the street in Yellowknife still can’t quite remember his name. To them, he’s not the Technician, but That Fishing Guy. “I’ve come to terms with that a long time ago, and I just go with the flow,” he says. “It’s better than being That Jackass.”
Born in Kingston, Ontario, Bryant split his youth between Yellowknife, where he spent childhood days pretending to be a fisheries officer, and Winnipeg, where the fishing impulse was soon drowned by the sound of wailing guitars. He enrolled at the University of Manitoba, but that was just a front. He had already found what he believed was his life’s calling. He’d discovered punk rock, at the time a thoroughly underground music scene. The rock-star life took over. He flunked out in his second year.
He then spent the better part of a decade as a punk-rock vagrant, moving from Winnipeg to Vancouver, starting in Propaghandi (before they got popular, he says), then Red Sugar (“darlings of the indie mags but the band is largely forgotten today”), Small Town Rhino, Sex and Salvelinus – named after the Latin genus for char fish – and The Skinnys, his latest effort.
“Punk-rock is the closest point musically to your tribal soul,” he says. “It’s unpolished, it’s un-fancified by, you know, mannerisms and pretensions and anything like that. It’s powerful and aggressive. It takes no prisoners and it doesn’t make any apologies for anything.”
It also doesn’t pay well, so Bryant worked odd jobs. One summer, he sold Mr. Tube Steak hotdogs on a downtown Vancouver sidewalk. For another, he found work on a Prince Edward Island potato farm. In between, his bands recorded four albums. One of them landed in music stores. It sold poorly.
It began to dawn on him that music wasn’t going to cover the rent. He needed a change. But first he needed to clear his mind. He left on a cross-Canada road trip, without musicians or guitars. He hopped on a Greyhound to Vancouver, then to Newfoundland, where he was so broke he never made it past the ferry dock. He slunk onto a bus to come back. “It was very much like touring, I guess,” he says. “Except it was a lot of smelly drunks.”
On a gusty afternoon on the shores of Great Slave Lake, Bryant casts a $7, number 5 Mepps Aglia lure into the white-capped waters. He hasn’t had a single bite. He admits being the Fishin’ Technician isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. “When I was younger and prettier, some of the ladies may have liked it,” he says. “I don’t know how significant I am right now.”
When his music career shrivelled, he finished his bachelor’s degree in English and returned to Yellowknife to take up residence in the shack. He joined the staff of the Yellowknifer after a neighbour convinced him he’d be good at it. The Fishin’ Technician column came soon after.
But if Bryant’s column still lets him entertain his obnoxious side – “there’s some other fishing humour columns out there, but I wouldn’t call them humour. I’d call them horseshit,” he says – it has also transformed his quest for notoriety into a serious new calling: the newspaper.
Most reporters treat the twice-weekly Yellowknifer, which eschews front-page news in favour of light-hearted fare, as a brief waypoint on their journey through journalism. Not Bryant, who’s worked his way up to the paper’s top ranks. “I don’t want people to think I’m a total fool. I do have a serious job to perform. I have to make sure there’s editorial standards,” he says. “Someone has to make sure that, say, Jan Stirling’s name is spelled right. Because if someone doesn’t, people won’t be able to take us seriously.”
The big dreams haven’t vanished entirely. Bryant has thought about trying to write a book or launch a national fishing TV show, and he still plays punk-rock. A few years ago, he showed up at a Yellowknife gig wearing a short, lacy summer dress. He left his underwear at home. By the time the night was over, he made a point of ensuring that most of those seated in front of the stage knew it.
Still, he’s found something in the North, and in Yellowknife in particular, that may be even more intoxicating than fame: comfort. “I’ve chosen not to really push too far,” he says. “Some people just aren’t meant for big-city life.” He may still have the rock-star hair. But now, he says, he has a different kind of image to maintain. “When I first started the Technician, I was just a lowly cub reporter and I did what I was told. I didn’t have to defend the paper,” he says. “But now I do. And it’s kind of hard to defend the paper if you’re walking around a bar wearing a dress with no underwear.”
Nathan VanderKlippe reports for The Globe and Mail. He, too, once worked at the Yellowknifer.
