Crabbe

Mary gives the pipe to Crabbe in “Journal: 13” to help him manage his craving for alcohol, a bad habit he brought into the wilderness with him and one that prevents him from becoming the person he wants to be. According to Mary, one of the carvings on the pipe is a yin-yang symbol, used to “express a certain basic philosophy of life and existence that emphasized the unity of life and the harmony of inner peace” (107). Hand-carved and made of fine briar wood, the pipe is in stark contrast to the pipes of Crabbe’s father, described as littering the house and coming in so many colors and in such quantity that they must have been mass-produced (105). The care with which this unique pipe has been made, its decorations, and the wood of which it is made reflect the values that reshape Crabbe’s identity, especially connection to nature, while the pipes in Toronto represent the materialistic values of Crabbe’s father. The pipe is also symbolic of the mentor-student relationship between Mary and Crabbe, the means by which Crabbe eventually achieves his autonomy. Finally, the pipe also represents the mystery of Mary’s life before the wilderness and likely belonged to her deceased husband.

In “Journal: 3,” Crabbe describes the candelabra as “a quirk” of his parents and “a great, ponderous imitation Something-or-Other that clutched three white candles. It wasn't even impressive. It was just silly” (31). At dinner on the night of his escape from Toronto, Crabbe describes the candelabra as an impediment to his interactions with his parents, especially his father. He sat at the table, he says, “trying to read Father's mood through the arms of the stupid contraption” (32). When he returns home from his trip to retrieve the car from the wilderness, he says that his “father had removed that silly brass candelabra,” which is just the encouragement he needs to be more forthcoming with his parents (191). As an imitation of a more expensive material possession, the candelabra represents the conventionality and materialism of Crabbe’s father; that it is a fake suggests that the values Mr. Crabbe espouses are unworthy ones, inhibiting his relationship with his son. His removal of the candelabra is a good faith effort to meet Crabbe on his own terms, a change that allows for a shift in their relationship.

Crabbe first mentions the backpack in “Journal: 11,” when Mary yells at him for accidentally going into the backpack. He mentions it again at the end of “Journal: 14,” in the context of his fear of angering Mary and his willingness to respect her wishes by leaving the pack alone. As such, the pack represents a boundary she draws within their relationship. Crabbe’s respect for this boundary is an indicator of his maturation in the wilderness. Its appearance in the novel reinforces the theme of his quest for identity, in this case because of his relationship with Mary. In “Journal: 18,” after Mary’s death, he finally opens the pack, an action that allows him to grieve for Mary for the first time. In going through the contents in the pack, he gets a sense of the giving nature of both Mary and her husband, “[t]wo decent people who loved each other, and certainly others, and were good at spreading their love around...[t]hey lived their lives looking beyond themselves” (144). When he contrasts the exemplary nature of their lives with the nature of his own life, he finally internalizes one of the important lessons that Mary attempted to teach him during their time in the wilderness, namely that “[l]ife isn't fair. It isn't even logical” (144). The pack, in a sense, represents the interior life and values of Mary. The rituals of looking over it, piecing together the narrative of her life before the wilderness, and burning it have the practical impact of resolving one of the loose narrative strands of the novel, Mary’s past, and the pack’s destruction marks the end of Crabbe’s relationship with Mary, a moment that underscores his achievement of greater autonomy in the wilderness.

The black bear attacks Crabbe in “Journal: 8,” after Crabbe litters his campsite and tent with food, actions that were bound to attract wild animals and that illustrate his estrangement from nature. Having soiled himself and blacked out during the attack, Crabbe bathes himself in the lake: “At last I sat naked at the edge of a lake, like a newborn baby--weak, scared and dirty. After a few minutes I stood and shakily waded into the cold, numbering water. I washed myself clean of my own filth, sweat and fear” (63). He later remarks that afterward, he felt “new,” and believed that moment of recovery marked “the real start of [his] journey” (64). He also mentions the encounter with the bear at the end of “Journal: 11” as an ordeal that is on par with his near-death experience at the waterfall and his breakdown in front of Mary. He wonders to himself, after all of these experiences, which he compares to the peeling off of layers, who would he be “when the last layer was peeled off? What would be left?” (93). Crabbe describes his epiphany about nature being an indifferent rather than an idealized or savage place at the start of the next journal entry (94). Ultimately, the black bear represents that indifference of nature and the danger a person faces when he fails to respect nature. The encounter with the black bear also underscores the impact that the wilderness has on his identity formation.

Trout Falls appears in the novel in “Journal: 9,” when Crabbe accidentally shoots the falls and nearly dies. His experience at the falls serves to highlight the theme of the relationship between humanity and nature. When Crabbe returns to the falls with Mary in “Journal: 10,” he notes the “feeling of naked power and energy it conveyed as tons of water left to crash in a boiling rage onto the black boulders scattered around the base. [Mary] said that the pool was incredibly deep and a vicious tangle of opposing currents” (84).The falls represent the knowledge that failure to acknowledge the indifferent power of nature can be deadly. Crabbe’s description of the dark and cold underneath the falls and Mary’s rescue of him are also associated with death and rebirth, and thus the falls help to develop the theme of his quest for identity.