PROFILE
Bill Mason: Remembered By Ken Buck
AS BILL MASON slips his canoe into the early morning calm, the canoe cuts silently through the water and is swallowed up by the mist. The sun is just breaking over the horizon and beginning to create a diffused light, giving suggestions of details along the shoreline. Soft silhouettes of trees take shape overhead. This is not a shot in one of Mason’s famous canoe films. For Bill Mason it is just another day at the office, or to be more precise, his commute to the office. It is 1958 and Bill has just moved to Ottawa to work for Budge Crawley as an animator. It was Bill’s plan to rent a cottage at Meech Lake, but none was available, so he set up camp on the north side of the lake and commuted by canoe and car to Crawley’s every day for about six months. This was Bill’s idea of heaven—to have to commute to work by canoe. Fortunately, one of Mel Alexander’s log cabins came up for rent and Bill could move under a roof for the winter. Actually, he would have been glad to stay in the tent, but he also married Joyce Ferguson in 1958, and he needed a home. They lived at Meech Lake until Bill died in 1988.
Bill went on from Crawley Films to become one of Canada’s most prominent documentary filmmakers. Through his films he became a powerful spokesperson for the growing environmental awareness in Canada, and indeed the world. His two documentary feature films, Cry of the Wild and Waterwalker, are among the most successful feature length films ever made in Canada. It’s been 14 years since Bill Mason died of cancer at age 59. The fact that his name, and his films, and his influence have endured is a testament to his lifelong effort to protect the natural world from careless and destructive exploitation. His ideas, provocative and progressive at the time, have proven to be wise and insightful. Most of his ideas underpin our collective sense of environmental ethics. His first concern was protection of Canadian natural resources, but his scope was global and universal. Bill knew the power of story telling, especially through film, and it was through his stories that he put Canadians in touch with the Canadian wilderness. Few people have had the influence that Bill Mason has had in shaping the Canadian identity. His films, produced at the National Film Board of Canada, have been mainstays in Canada’s schools for the last fifty years. Educators have used his films—Paddle to the Sea, Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes, Wolf Pack, Death of a Legend, Path of the Paddle, Face of the Earth, and many others—to introduce two generations of students to Canada’s wilderness and the concept of environmental stewardship. Bill’s vision of the wilderness as benign, beautiful and precious effectively offered an alternative to the predominant cultural perception of wilderness as something to be feared, to be conquered and to be exploited. Because many of Bill’s films were autobiographical, he was in them and he became a familiar face to many Canadians. Bill acquired a profile of iconic proportions in his role as an environmentalist and outdoorsman. This profile has become legendary since his death. Few know the whole story behind the famous filmmaker and environmentalist. 28
Ottawa Outdoors Summer
