Voices
Ingenuity
Video Transcript
Background Description: An old black and white photograph shows about sixteen mountaineers with backpacks and ice axes heading over snow towards the side of a mountain. The title, “Ingenuity” appears.
Narrator, Eric Jamieson speaks: “The mountains are calling and I must go,” wrote the great Scottish-born American naturalist, John Muir.
Background Description: An old faded photographic print with a white border shows a little boy and his medium sized dog with a bushy tail curved up.
Jamieson speaks: Fred Williams wasn’t reading Muir at the tender age of eleven when he was first inducted into the mystery that is the mountains, but he had the same calling.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a smiling young man with cap and backpack, snowy hill in the background.
Jamieson speaks: Not content with just gazing at the backdrop that framed his city to the north, Fred’s initial foray into the mountains was born of curiosity.
Background Description: In a black and white photograph, a couple of skiers can be seen in a snowy hilltop. A few tracks can be seen across the sun kissed landscape.
Jamieson speaks: “There wasn’t much else to do in the Thirties,” he also recalled of the pioneering days of mountaineering on the North Shore.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a man standing in a half build log cabin. The wall is just up to his waste at this point. This fades to an image of two men later building the roof.
Jamieson speaks: There was a problem being an initiate, not the least of which were blazing your own trails and building your own cabins. But it was the paucity of commercial equipment that really brought out the ingenuity of the intrepid adventurer.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a young man straddling a stream lined by boulders.
Jamieson speaks: Discovering that he could make his own gear, he scouted around the North Shore to find and fell an appropriately sized maple tree from which to fashion a pair of skis.
Background Description: An action shot shows Fred showing off in his home-made skis by lifting himself on ski poles and throwing his legs in the air:
Williams speaks: The skis: … down on the Maplewood Flats … I saw a good maple tree, straight and clear, so I went over, packed the tools over and dropped the tree, cut a length and hauled it over … home on my shoulder.
Background Description: A photograph shows Fred sitting having a drink with a couple of pairs of skis stuck in the snow behind him.
Williams speaks: We lived just on the south side of the bridge. I didn’t have many tools but I hacked out a couple of skis. They lasted me a couple of years.
Background Description: Five men and women are seen sitting and standing in a black and white photograph with ski poles stuck in the ground and skis laid out beside them.
Jamieson speaks: There, he split the round in half, slowly carving and steaming a pair of cambered maple boards from the raw wood. “I had to keep them blocked to keep their shape,” he recalled of his first pair of skis.
Background Description: A colour image of old ski poles emerges from a black screen.
Jamieson speaks: Next came a pair of bamboo poles, poles that in addition to being a testament to his creativity are reminiscent of a simpler time when necessity was truly the mother of invention. The poles still lean against the wall of Fred’s living room, reminding him of a youth well lived.
Background Description: We are slowly taken in for a closer look at the bottom of the old ski poles.
Williams speaks: Anyway, I made them; I got bamboo ... but the interesting thing was that the baskets … now, those are cane, and I found that with the old snowploughs they had in Vancouver it was big brushes, you know, and they’d brush the snow; canes would fly off once in a while. So whenever the snowploughs were out, I was out, too, getting these canes.
Background Description: A colour photograph shows an old pack frame made of wood with rope still wrapped around it. This transitions to a shot of the back side of the frame.
Jamieson speaks: Two years later he moved on to another pair of skis, but this being the Thirties, nothing was wasted. Cutting the maple skis that had served him so well on countless winter forays into the mountains, he fashioned his own pack board from the slats.
Background Description: A black and white photograph shows a young woman sitting among skis and stuck in the snow and poles lying down.
Jamieson speaks: Ingenuity and adventure wasn’t all that Fred found in the mountains; love was another by-product. Meeting his wife, Doreen, in the little settlement at the base of Grouse Mountain where she lived.
Background Description: A wedding portrait shows Fred and Doreen with handsome youthful and bright-eyed smiles.
Williams speaks: I went into the village, and by gosh, I ran into this girl who was a neighbour, a neighbour in Vancouver, and she had a cabin, and there were six girls in there, and me. I convinced Doreen to come over to Seymour with her cousin, and, ah, she kind of dropped the rest of the crowd, you know.
Background Description: A faded colour photograph shows a mountain with a depression between two peaks. It looks like a bite was taken out of the mountain.
Jamieson speaks: The mountains would be the catalyst that cemented their life together. As the mystic poet William Blake wrote long ago, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”
Background Description: We are left with a contemporary headshot of Fred Williams wearing his old felt climbing hat.
Acknowledgments: ‘Ingenuity’ was created by Eric Jamieson following a number of interviews with Fred Williams. Fred’s stories, artifacts and snapshots inspired Eric to produce this vignette during a February 2009 Centre for Digital Storytelling Workshop. This was organized with the North Vancouver Museum and Archives as part of the Virtual Museum of Canada’s project. ‘Climbing to the Clouds: A People’s History of BC Mountaineering”. Music: ‘Let’s Dance’, by Benny Goodman.
