In his new biographical book, Canadian journalist Brett Popplewell takes readers into the backwoods of the northern Okanagan, just outside Vernon, where a living B.C. legend occupies a rundown school bus he has called home for over 20 years.
It’s a candid and deep dive into the life of Dag Aabye, an 81-year-old who many consider a founding father of Whistler’s ski hills.
There’s enough written about Aabye today to understand the surface of his life journey, which began in Norway where he was born, orphaned and adopted. (Aabye has his own Wikipedia page.)
In his latest decade of adventure Aabye has taken part in the Canadian Death Race, a 125-kilometre marathon in the Rocky Mountains, where he’s met a handful of journalists and documentarians who have taken an interest in his story, considering the fitness and motivation levels anyone — let alone someone in their seventies — requires to complete the annual marathon.
Aabye was a ski instructor in Britain and was known for performing stunts in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger. He came to Whistler in 1966 to help in the early days of Whistler Mountain ski programs.
“Nancy Greene has called him the world's first extreme skier. He is this legend at Whistler and also at SilverStar as well, so people sort of knew of him and then he would materialize every year to run the Death Race,” said Popplewell.
However, since around age 60, Aabye has lived off the grid in a school bus near SilverStar ski hill and the stories told of him typically explain how, but not necessarily why, said Popplewell.
The “why” is what his book Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past is about, said the author.
Ottawa-based Popplewell, a daily and investigative news reporter now teaching journalism at Carleton University, said he was introduced to Aabye by a colleague when he was working at Sportsnet as a senior writer in 2015.
After several trips to visit Aabye living in his school bus on a friend’s property, Popplewell said he became friends with Aabye and this has shaped the way the book tells the man’s story.
And in some respects, Popplewell has influenced Aabye’s life, as well; case in point how the two embarked on a trip to Norway to seek out Aabye’s biological family roots.
“At the end, I sort of stopped chasing this just as a piece of journalism and got to a point where I was trying to sort of do something for a person that I ultimately consider my friend,” said Popplewell.
“He was an orphan and he was born in 1941 in Oslo. And when I met him, he didn't know really who his parents had been. So that was sort of a big part of the journey that he and I did together — was to try and help to solve that sort of mystery at the core of where he came,” said Popplewell.
And so, Outsider is not just about Aabye but also about Popplewell and their relationship.
“I would say that Dag’s story is the most complicated story that I have ever tried to tell. It's the most consuming story that I've ever told. And it's, at this moment in time, it's the most, well I don't know if it's the most important story that I have told, but it's the most important story to me,” said Popplewell.
“The book is a biography of Dag, but there's also a lot of memoir of myself in it as well. And the reason for that is because at some point in the reporting of the story, the book, the questions that I was posing were what was driving the narrative as opposed to the answers that Dag could provide.
“And it became impossible for me to write the book without putting myself in,” explained Popplewell.
Outsider will speak to some of the other remaining mysteries of Aabye’s life, notably what became of his family in his latter years, after having lived in Squamish and worked in the logging industry to earn a living.
“There was a Sports Illustrated writer named Gary Smith, who once said, 'All a profile is, is finding the central complication of someone's life, and how on a daily basis they go about solving it.' I live by that credo when I'm writing,” said Popplewell.
Outsider is published by Harper Collins and was released on April 25.
