Crabbe

The wilderness plays a key role in the novel, especially in terms of setting. As a symbol, it does even more important work. Crabbe first mentions the wilderness in “Journal: 3,”via Ithaca Camp, the developed edge of the wilderness that he visited with his father years ago. His plan is to go downriver from that camp, vanish, and thus cross “a magic threshold into a myth” (23). The wilderness in this early chapter represents nature as an escape from time and responsibilities. Crabbe thus describes himself as “almost happy” and “sort of free” (54) as he begins his journey. His belief in the wilderness as a space of freedom is one rooted in Canadian culture. Like the American West, the Canadian North is associated with freedom, rebirth, nonconformity, and the figure of the coureurs des bois (“runners of the woods”), colonial trappers who explored the wilderness and made fortunes by trading with indigenous people. This mostly mythical North is generally represented as empty land waiting for exploration by people of European descent, a contrast to the longstanding indigenous cultures that predated the Anglo settlement of Canada. His actual experience of the wilderness—the difficult landscape, the presence of wild animals, exposure to weather—convince him by the end of the novel that the nature represented by wilderness is simply indifferent to human existence.