#bill mason

[vintagecamping]

Portaging is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. It feels good when you stop.

Algonquin Provincial Park

1952

[tigulliosworld]

.Bill Mason

[lioninsunheart]

Painting by: N.C. Wyeth

“The old Lakota was wise. He knew that a man’s heart, away from nature, becomes hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence.” ~Luther Standing Bear 

“It might seem like we own the earth, and we certainly act that way, but I don’t believe we do. I think this lack of sensitivity towards that natural world is a result of our alienation from it. We don’t see, hear, or feel the land anymore. We only see it from the point of view of what we can do with it. We have become so totally committed to changing our environment that we have become oblivious to the fact that the world around us is a creation in itself.” 

~Bill Mason

[jazzerphoto]

Bill Mason at the Canadian Canoe Museum

Bill Mason at the Canadian Canoe Museum

In Peterborough, Canada they have the wonderful and huge Canadian Canoe Museum. This museum was in the old Evinrude Motor Factory and had a very large warehouse of classic canoes and boats from all over Canada. One display had Canada’s most famous canoer Bill Mason’s canoe. Bill Mason was a cinematographer who did films and books on canoeing throughout Canada. This canoe is the most famous…

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[msclaritea]

~A Vampire For Sherlock~

In Pursuing Sherlock, author Bill Mason goes lurking through the pages of canon to find links to vampires, and finds that there are actually very few. As Holmes states in The Sussex Vampire, “The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.”

What does first stand out in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, he finds, are a different sort of vampire, all in the form of women.

The Psychic Vampire

From Barbara Roden, in The Journal of The New Conan Doyle Society, 1993, the definition of a Psychic Vampire: “These creatures who do not resort to such crudites as sucking blood or turning into bats. They do not shun the daylight or sleep in coffins; instead, they appropriate the life forces of their victims by draining them of energy, and, in some cases, the will to live.” The stories with these characters include:

Kate Northcott in John Bartington Cowles She is said to have “a mysterious and evil influenced over her prospective husbands”

Miss Penclosa in The Parasite Uses her powers against a man she is in love with, causing “a malevolent, psychological sapping of will”

Sarah in The Cardboard Box “uses her power and evil influence over her sister Mary and Mary’s husband”

Isadora Klein in The Three Gables “saps Douglas Maberley of his energy and willpower”

Mason goes on to lament the lack of thrilling, evil (see traditional) Dracula-type characters. He refers to Psychic Vampires as not much fun. “Too much Freud, too little Wes Craven.” But, he finds, there is one. There is indeed a vampire figure, and a story in canon that parallels the most famous, and influential vampire of all time.

“A murderous aristocrat from Central Europe, with a history of violence and death behind him, moves to England in search of fresh victims. He leases a large house, which serves as his base of operations. He has unusual power and influence over women; a power he uses for evil. While in England, he destroys one woman and sets his sights on another; a woman of exceptional qualities. His threat to this woman is recognized by her friends and protectors, who are determined to save her. They call on the most knowledgeable and accomplished expert they can find; and he is assisted by a trusted friend, a medical doctor. Despite being a brilliant and totally ruthless foe who has anticipated almost every obstacle in his path, the villain is defeated and his intended victim rescued.“

“This is of course, the plot of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s most famous novel, which was published in 1897…But as Sherlockians, we should also recognize it, because this exact same story, in every single detail, is that of The Illustrious Client, 1924, in which Sherlock Holmes is retained to protect the lovely Violet de Merville from the designs of the murderous Baron Adelbert Gruner.”

There are two references to The Illustrious Client in A Scandal in Belgravia.

Harry, The Equerry “Client is illustrious, in the extreme.”

Sherlock “I’m used to mystery at one end of my cases. both ends is too much work.”

Mason goes on to compare 18 points of similarity between the two stories, comparing characters, such as Holmes and Van Helsing, Dr. Watson and Dr. Seward, plus the sexual subtext that is not only in Dracula, but in every manifestation of vampire mythology literature and popular culture.

Additional Personal Notes on Stoker and Doyle

Abraham “Bram” Stoker (8 november 1847 - 20 april 1912) was an Irish writer wellknown for his novel Dracula. He was a friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was at his marriage on 18 september 1907. In that same year he conducted and wrote an interview with Conan Doyle: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Tells of His Career and Work, His Sentiments Towards America, and His Approaching Marriage.

When Bram Stoker managed The Lyceum Theatre in London, he produced the Conan Doyle play A Story of Waterloo (based on the story A Straggler of ‘15). Conan Doyle wrote in his autobiography: « I had written a short story called “A Straggler of ‘15,” which had seemed to me to be a moving picture of an old soldier and his ways. My own eyes were moist as I wrote it and that is the surest way to moisten those of others. I now turned this into a one-act play, and, greatly daring, I sent it to Henry Irving, of whose genius I had been a fervent admirer ever since those Edinburgh days when I had paid my sixpence for the gallery night after night to see him in “Hamlet” and “The Lyons Mail.” To my great delight I had a pleasing note from Bram Stoker, the great man’s secretary, offering me £100 for the copyright. »

Stoker was a Sherlock Holmes fan. He thought he could use it as a model in a first version of Dracula, as a specialist of psychic research named Singleton, with a policeman named Cotford and a Watson-like history teacher named Max Windshoeffel.

Stoker and Conan Doyle both collaborated with other writers on the serial novel: The Fate of Fenella, in 1892

Pt 2 of a Book Series. Check out Holmes & The Rule of Three

@gosherlocked @sarahthecoat @may-shepard @ebaeschnbliah @brilliantorinsane @simpleanddestructivechemistry @sherlock-overflow-error @consultingidiots @loveismyrevolution @just-sort-of-happened

@devoursjohnlock @thememacat

[vintagecamping]

Bill Mason and his family pause their canoe trip to camp on the shorline for a couple nights. Lake Superior

1978

[vintagecamping]

Naturalist Bill Mason stops for lunch on his canoe trip up Lake Superior in this still taken from his documentary Waterwalker. Free to watch on YouTube if you’re interested.

Ontario 1983

[vintagecamping]

The Song Of The Paddle

Canadian canoeist and artist/Film-maker Bill Mason takes his family on a trip through Lake Superior Provincial Park in the mid 1970s and films the trip for us. This is the ultimate sort of home movie, as Mason explains his philosophy on Canoeing and wilderness travel and why conservation is so important to us as part of nature.

“The singing isn’t as loud as it used to be. But you can still hear it in the wind. In the silence of a misty morning. In the drip of the water from the tip of a paddle. The song is still here if you know how to listen” 

Watch the entire documentary on youtube. Its a real treat...