Читать книгу Canadian Adventurers and Explorers Bundle - John Wilson - Страница 10

In the summer of 1919 Don and Phyl were on a club hike on Mount Baker in Washington State. There were three of them in a group, and they climbed with an air of confidence – they were not roped together. Midway on the ascent they encountered a section of moraine – the mass of loose rocks deposited by a glacier – on the edge of a steep, washed-out creek gully.

“Aahhh.” Phyl was instantly on alert. The sound came from Don on the moraine above her. She moved instinctively and with remarkable speed. From her position on the upward slope Phyl sprang to place herself several metres below on a rock outcropping, and she braced herself for the impact. He’s going to go over the edge. Please God give me strength to hold on to him. Don’s footing gave away completely and he was tossed out from the moraine slope. His body flipped over in mid-air above her. Phyl reached out to grab him and managed to pull his weight towards her, against the slope, in a desperate move to prevent his certain fall to the bottom of the gully. But just as his feet came down near her, the ground she was standing on broke away as well. As she held Don, Phyl began to lose her balance. Don clung to the rocks beside her and it was enough support to give her the moment or two she needed to rake out tiny ledges with her nailed boots.

Happy honeymooners. Don and Phyl snuggle together

“in the wilds,” 1920.

“Are you stable?” Don asked. “I’m just hanging by a thread,” Phyl replied, as she looked around for a more promising ledge. Together they scrambled away from the gully edge and crossed the moraine upward, towards their companion. Around the campfire that night Don told the story. “Phyl was a marvel. She seemed to know even before I did of the danger that I was into.”

Instinctive action or not, Don was convinced that a bond of communication existed between the two of them that did not require audible language. And thus commenced Don’s courtship. By nature, Don was taciturn, uncomfortable with extended conversation. His face held little expression, and it was difficult to read his thoughts. His outward appearance was the very opposite of Phyl’s; her expressive face could bubble over with enthusiasm. But behind Don’s façade was a romantic soul who composed poems about the beauties of nature and was a keen observer of all living things.

He had loved before and knew love’s joys and pain. When he left for France he left also a relationship. While fighting in the trenches he had plenty of time to muse, but unfortunately, as he wrote, “my thoughts [alas] will return to where my heart is still.” By the time he was back at home in Vancouver, Don was over this love, and then appeared Phyl, embodying in her love of mountains a reflection of his own self. She was the one for him! Phyl, however, was not immediately smitten with Don’s personality. He was very different in character, she more spontaneous and outgoing, he more quiet and soft spoken, and he seemed so intense – but that was a characteristic shared by many men upon their return from war. She enjoyed his company and respected his abilities – he could teach her a lot about mountains and climbing. But, she insisted, she did not feel romantically inclined towards him. Phyl took a while to be persuaded by Don, who patiently bided his time. In the meantime they continued to hike on club-organized events and spent increasing amounts of time together.

When Munday finally completed treatment for his injury, he had not regained the complete use of his arm and hand. He was able to do many things, but certain movements, such as carving a roast or tying his shoelaces, remained difficult. He was forever to travel with a small ball of wadded paper in his pocket. At odd moments he would put his hand in his pocket and roll the paper to keep his fingers nimble.

Munday’s army discharge came in the fall of 1918. Because of his injury he could not resume his previous work as a carpenter but concentrated instead on expanding his freelance writing career. Besides, the typewriter provided good physiotherapy for his injured arm and kept his fingers agile.

In his spare time, Munday served on the executive of the BCMC and for two years volunteered as the editor for the monthly newsletter, The BC Mountaineer. He also contributed much of the content. He wrote up accounts of climbs he, Phyl, and their friends undertook, many of which were first ascents, that is, the first documented climbs to the highest point on a mountain.

On 4 February 1920 Phyllis Beatrice James married Walter Alfred Don Munday at Christ Church, Vancouver. Don’s brother, Bert Munday, and Phyl’s sister Betty McCallum (who herself had married a young soldier in 1914) stood as witnesses. The Vancouver Province reported the event in its social pages, noting: “the young couple are concluding a romance that started with mountaineering some years ago.”

The day of the wedding was uncharacteristically foggy. Phyl had a small apartment on Walden Street in South Vancouver. It was not a long distance to the church, but given the weather, the bride-to-be arranged to leave the house for Christ Church an hour early She was to be there in time for the service at nine o’clock that morning. The groom lived with his widowed mother on 29th Avenue East, just around the corner from Phyl. Despite the worry, everyone arrived on time. The ceremony was attended by many family members and friends, but immediately afterwards, Phyl and Don – much to the chagrin of Beatrice James – exchanged their wedding clothes for hiking ones, picked up their packs, and headed off to catch the streetcar and then the eleven o’clock ferry to North Vancouver. They caught the Capilano streetcar to the end of the line and walked all the way from there over to the west ridge of Dam Mountain, where Don had just finished building a small cabin. Their idea of a honeymoon was to do what they loved best – live in the outdoors away from the city – and to do it together.

The weather was cold, but the cabin had a chimney, and soon a big fire kept the chill out. While Vancouver experienced a week of thick fog and drizzle, above the clouds the Mundays enjoyed clear, bright, glorious February weather. From the cabin they climbed somewhere different every day.

Building the cabin had been Don’s own special therapy, but it made a romantic story at the time of his marriage and caught the imagination of the local press. Single-handedly he blazed a trail, then “every weekend and on holidays laboriously, and with the patience of an ant, stick by stick, stone by stone, piece of furniture by piece, he carried the makings and furnishings of a little hut up the steep mountainside to a cunningly concealed broad ledge with a wonderful outlook on the sea and land. Then he built a comfortable mountain retreat, thinking of the day when he would spend his honeymoon there.”

In February 1920, a few weeks after their wedding, Phyl and Don decided to go to the Rockies for a mountaineering challenge. They had heard so much about these mountains from friends in the BCMC and felt confident in their abilities to climb farther afield. They loaded their supplies on to the Canadian National Railway car and travelled across the province to Mount Robson Provincial Park. Arranging for pack horses proved impossible so they carried their thirty-kilogram packs from the train station by trail to Berg Lake, where they camped. One might have thought that entering a new territory such as this in mid-winter without guides and relying only upon maps and Don’s compass would be daunting. For the Mundays it was adventure. While ascending Lynx Mountain (elevation 3170 metres), they discovered that even the surefooted mountain goat could make a fatal misstep as they watched a young goat fall while climbing a cliff above them. Despite this sad event, the frequent glimpses of wildlife in this park made the biggest impact on their remembrances and were an important turning point in their views about game hunting. The camera would remain the Mundays’ only means of hunting game and their only trophies would be photographic ones.

Phyl and Don Munday also climbed Resplendent Mountain (elevation 3426 metres), and not merely via the route established by legendary guide Conrad Kain in 1911. They pioneered a new route. A sudden weather change forced them to race for their lives to a rock rib when snow on an ice slope began avalanching. Lynx and Resplendent exceeded the elevations of any of the coastal mountains they had yet encountered, and these ascents gave them a taste for something more than what they were used to. Because of their elevations, both mountains presented more ice climbing than rock. Phyl liked climbing on snow and ice, because, as she put it, they are always changing. Rocks were fixed things, so rock scaling did not interest her. But the ever-changing conditions of snow and ice on high mountains created an unstable, evolving landscape and presented a mental challenge to find the best route as well as a physical challenge to withstand the conditions of cold, wind, and the dangerous natural obstacles created by glaciers and avalanches.

Phyl learned a tremendous amount on this 1920 trip to the Rockies. She now had firsthand knowledge of a new mountain paradise and wanted to become involved with the people who climbed there. Applying for membership in the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC) seemed the best way to do so, and together she and Don schemed to facilitate a trip to one of the fabled ACC summer camps in the Rockies.

She had also had the opportunity to see Don in action with his new boots. For years climbers wore leather boots with edge nails. Edge nails – a special type of steel nail with a long spike on it – were ordered in bulk, and then each climber applied them to the soles of the hiking boots by pushing them through the sole. The nails were then clipped over so that the two portions of the edge nail were just on the counter of the boot. Edge nails on the boot soles acted a bit like crampons, but unlike crampons, which were worn using bindings to fit them directly over the boots, these nails became part of the actual boot sole. Edge nails were particularly good on logs and slippery surfaces, but on the ice, they slipped.

Although Don had been wearing his new tricouni nails for a year, Phyl had remained unconvinced of their advantages. Tricounis were not easy to apply, and it was very important that they be pushed directly through the leather and not through pre-drilled holes. The prongs on the nails were so shaped that they spread when driven in and thus locked the nail securely. Only in the Rockies on the glaciers did tricounis really show an advantage. They did not slip on ice as did edge nails and could be worn equally well on rock. During this trip to Mount Robson Provincial Park Phyl came to believe that Don’s boots gave him a big advantage, and she was finally convinced of the merits of tricouni nails. She decided then that she should also switch over, a decision she never regretted.

When Phyl married Don, she did what women of her age and time did, ceased to work and became a housewife. To keep herself occupied she threw herself into Guiding. The Company was now so large and doing so well that Phyl thought she should organize a ladies’ committee to introduce other women, especially mothers of Guide-age girls, to the Guiding movement in a formal way by providing information and training as a means to encourage the creation of more companies. Dominion Headquarters appointed Mrs. TP. Lake to be the very first commissioner for the Vancouver District. Her presence gave structure to the committee, which later came to be called the officers’ council. Phyl was appointed Staff Captain for the district, and a secretary and treasurer were also named. The Guide Company split into two companies of reasonable size, each with its own leader. At the same time Phyl created the 1st Vancouver Brownie Pack, and she herself became their Brown Owl. Brownies, for girls aged seven td ten, was an offshoot of Girl Guides, introduced by Agnes Baden-Powell after much demand for a Guide-like organization suitable for younger girls. Brownies fed naturally into Guides, as did Guides into Rangers. Thus a girl could stay in the movement as she matured.

In the summer following her marriage, Phyl discovered that she would soon have her “own little Brownie.” She was pregnant. As an expectant mother she now had a new role for which social conventions of the times remained quite rigid. Physical activity was discouraged. The doctor prescribed moderate exercise such as gentle walking, but he certainly could not endorse either the vigorous “walking” associated with mountain climbing or the strain of backpacking, which he viewed as potentially harmful to the unborn child and the mother-to-be. I’m fine until the pregnancy shows, thought Phyl. Don and I will just continue as usual, perhaps with a little accommodation, we’ll stick a little closer to home, until I can’t hide my condition.

Phyl continued on with the Guides until just a short time before the birth of her child. She applied for and was granted a seven-week leave of absence from Guiding, and during this leave, gave birth to Edith on 26 March 1921. Within a very short time, Phyl was up and about, little affected physically by the nine months of pregnancy and the labour and delivery of her child. In typical Phyl fashion, she quickly incorporated Edith into her outdoors adventures. The new baby did not deter Phyl and Don from hiking and climbing for long. When she was eight weeks old they began taking Edith to the cabin on weekends, and at eleven weeks Edith travelled up Crown Mountain (elevation 1503 metres) in a cotton sling around her Daddy’s shoulder while Don steadied her head with his arm.

The Vancouver Province featured a large article complete with photos that showed the family on the summit of Crown Mountain. The Mundays and their new baby became celebrities. Vancouverites were captivated by the activities of this novel couple, who projected such a matter-of-fact outlook as they carried on as usual, seemingly little encumbered by the addition of an infant.

One day a few months after Edith’s birth and after their climb up Crown Mountain, Phyl visited her mother and explained Don’s latest invention. “Edith is growing like a weed. She is strong and she won’t be content any longer to travel in the sling. So guess what, Mum? My clever husband has made a very nice little carrier for Edith. The carrier will fit right on to his packboard over top of a small load, and that way Don will be able to pack Edith in a much safer way. She’ll like it too because it will give her a little more freedom to look around. The carrier has a wooden base with canvas on it and a big canvas band, so that when we put her into it, it holds her right around from her hips to under her armpits. It supports her firmly so that she doesn’t slide down into it, and best of all we can put her in, fully dressed, and she’ll be covered up with the canvas. That way we don’t have to worry whether it rains. She won’t get wet. Don has also made a hood to it, so that if it really rains we can pull it over her head. And then, mosquito netting. That will be ever so important in the summer.”

A few days later on the first of July the Mundays packed right through the Seymour valley and down the Stawamus valley into Squamish with Edith. On the way they camped in one of the cabins of the Britannia Mining Company. The cabins were equipped with bunks and a stove for cooking. Phyl, ever resourceful, quickly saw a practical use for one of the monstrous big bread pans that the company cook used for baking. What better bassinet for bathing my baby in the morning? One day while they were still staying at the cabin, three geologists from the mine dropped in for a visit. They were absolutely stunned when they saw a small baby in a bread pan on the oven door.

Later in the same year Phyl and Don went into the Selkirk Mountains to the BCMC camp and took Edith along. It was just shortly before the old hotel at Glacier was closed, and the people there wouldn’t believe there was a baby at camp up the valley. She was contented and seemed to enjoy being out like that, so Phyl and Don just brought Edith with them all the time. Had Phyl been less strongwilled about her love of the outdoors, and had Edith been less co-operative, the young mother would have had to give up her outdoor activities now that she had a child.