LITMIR.BIZ

      Don’s first cabin on Dam Mountain. Here he and Phyllis stand beside the unfinished verandah, ca 1919–1922.

      “I don’t know if I’d ever want to do that – climb mountains, that is. I’d get all scratched and muddy and rip my skirts.”

      “We don’t wear skirts. That would be nonsense. We would have to stay on nice, cleared trails and ramble ever so slowly if we dressed in skirts.”

      “But I’ve seen you on the streetcar on your way back home. Remember last month when you told me you had been up Mount Seymour?”

      Phyl laughed. “Well,” she said. “It’s a better-kept secret than I thought. You don’t honestly think we could get up the way we do and cut trails in a skirt? No, we start off from home in skirts but we always wear bloomers underneath. Some girls even wear britches underneath. Anyway, we can’t be seen with anything like that, so we keep the skirts on over top until we’re past civilization, where we can take them off and cache them under a log or something until we come back. Then the skirts go back on, and we’re all ready for the streetcars and the ferry and for walking into the house.”

      “Well, that makes sense. I couldn’t really figure out how you could do so much.”

      “You know the really funny part?”

      “No.”

      “The worst thing is that when we cache our skirts, we lose our flexibility. We have to come back to the same spot at the end of the hike to collect them. Otherwise we can’t get home! Did you know that it’s against the ferry policy to allow women with bloomers on to the ferryboat? I’ve heard of a girl who had that happen to her. She came down at dusk, desperate to catch the last ferry from Lonsdale or else she would be stuck on the North Shore overnight and wouldn’t be able to get home until the next day Well, do you think she could find her skirt anywhere? She was running out of daylight and she came out of the bush a little west of where she went in, and in the failing light, she couldn’t quite recall where she stashed it. She finally gave up and jumped on the streetcar to get to the ferry dock. But they wouldn’t let her on the ferry. The purser told her that he was unable to accept her as a passenger unless she was appropriately dressed. So without her skirt, she lost her chance to get home that night!”

      “That’s hilarious. I can just see some poor girl who’s miscalculated where she stashed her skirt turning over every rock and windfall desperately searching so she can run to the streetcar and not miss the last ferry. What a world we live in!”

      “That never happened to me, but something really embarrassing did happen just a few weeks ago. We were on Dome¹, and it was a regular club hike. I was climbing over a great big log. It was on a slope, and a little bit off the ground, and as I got over it, the elastic in my bloomers got hooked on a snag and hung me up. There I was, suspended in the air, and I couldn’t reach the ground. I was held up by the leg of my bloomers! Well, the boys all began to laugh, but eventually someone helped unhook me. I still haven’t lived that one down. It will be a while yet until something equally embarrassing happens to someone else and I’ll be out of the limelight.”