Crow Lake

“Understatement was the rule in our house. Emotions, even positive ones, were kept firmly under control. It was the Eleventh Commandment, carved on its very own tablet of stone and presented specifically to those of Presbyterian persuasion: Thou Shalt Not Emote.”

As a young child, Kate is already conscious of certain expectations in her family and community. Crow Lake is primarily Presbyterian (the exception being Mrs. Stanovich), and the local culture is one of restraint. This influence will continue to pose issues for Kate, as she has difficulty expressing her feelings clearly to Daniel. By the end of the novel she has gradually started to undo this attitude, opening up to Daniel and hugging her siblings (something they never did as children). 

“I remember being terrified that he would cry. His voice was shaking, and he was struggling very hard with himself, and I remember being rigid with fear, not daring to look at him, scarcely daring to breathe. As if that would be the worst thing; much worse than this incomprehensible thing he was telling he. As if for Matt to cry was the one unthinkable thing.” 

Matt is the one to tell Kate that their parents have died, and her immediate reaction is terror that he himself seems so upset. This passage demonstrates three things: that Kate is paralyzed with terror at her parents’ death; that the Morrisons are typically so studiously non-emotive, it’s remarkable and distressing for Matt to show his own fear and grief; and that Kate relies hugely on Matt to keep her feeling steady and safe.

“And then there was Great-Grandmother’s famous devotion to education—the subject that made Luke’s eyes glaze over. All fourteen of her children finished elementary school, which was almost unheard of in those days. Homework came before farm work—never mind that every mouthful of food had to be wrung from the land. Education was her dream of dreams, a passion so strong it was almost a disease, and she infected not only her own children with it but generations of little Morrisons yet unborn.”

This passage illustrates how Great-Grandmother Morrison prioritized education in her immediate family and set the entire family down the track of pursuing learning. This is why Kate thinks she’s partially to blame for the tension between Matt and herself, tied as it is to their relative educational opportunity. This passage also highlights how opportunities have changed with time: For Great-Grandmother Morrison, it was remarkable for her children to even finish elementary school. During Kate’s childhood, it’s unusual to finish high school; the character of Simon indicates that by the time she’s an adult, attending university has become more normalized.

“I hadn’t been aware that people could change. But then, I hadn’t been aware that people could die. At least not people you loved and needed. Death in principle I had known about; death in practice—no. I hadn’t known that could happen.” 

Kate is stunned by her parents’ death, but she is also stunned by how Luke responds to it. Until this point, Luke has spent a relatively small amount of time with his siblings, but he becomes determined to care for them. Here, Kate processes both of these forms of change. 

“Religious tolerance was a family creed and you defied it at your peril.”

Matt get in trouble with their parents after making a rude comment about Mrs. Stanovich’s Evangelicalism. Along with preaching restraint and the power of education, the Morrisons also take a live-and-let-live approach to religion. This theme will reappear when Mrs. Stanovich begins caretaking for the girls twice a week, and Luke and Matt have to decide whether they are bothered by the possibility she will teach her religion to the girls, eventually concluding it will be fine.

“I am not from a background where people talk about problems in their relationships. If someone does or says something that upsets you, you don’t say so. Maybe it’s another Presbyterian thing; if the Eleventh Commandment is Thou Shalt Not Emote, the Twelfth is Thou Shalt Not Admit To Being Upset, and when it becomes evident to the whole world that you are upset, Thou Shalt On No Account Explain Why. No, you swallow your feelings, force them down inside yourself, where they can feed and grow and swell and expand until you explode, unforgivably, to the utter bewilderment of whoever it was who upset you.”

Kate is prompted to think about her relationship to arguments and conflict when it becomes apparent she and Daniel are having issues. Daniel’s family, by contrast, argues openly and frequently expresses feelings. Kate will need to learn how to share her feelings with Daniel and to be vulnerable with him to protect their relationship.

“Matt had told me—it had been another lifetime—that the male sticklebacks did all the work. They made the nests and courted the females and fanned the nests to keep the eggs supplied with oxygen. Once the eggs had hatched it was the males who guarded them. If a baby strayed from the group, the father sucked it into his mouth and spat it back into the pack.” 

In this moment between Kate and Matt, Matt’s words foreshadow how he and Luke will take up the responsibilities typically associated with wives and mothers to raise their sisters. Although people in their community are skeptical that two young men will be able to do this, this quote is a reminder that gender roles are a product of socialization; nature is not so attached to who raises children. 

“He wouldn’t realize what hard work it is, bringing up a family. It’s a full-time job. You cannot do both that and earn money to support you all.”

This quote is Aunt Annie’s reaction to Luke’s desire to keep the family together and raise Kate and Bo. The “he” Annie refers to here is Mr. Levinson, their father’s lawyer, who has apparently approved Luke’s plan. Aunt Annie is convinced that Luke’s plan will fail when he realizes how challenging it is to take care of children and domestic work. 

“People I love and need have a habit of disappearing from my life. For the same reason, I didn’t let myself think too much about the future—our future. I just hoped for the best.” 

Although Kate loves Daniel, she avoids thinking consciously about her feelings for him or where their life together is leading. This frustrates Daniel, who wants more evidence that Kate is serious about him. Kate must let go of her fear of losing him to move forward. 

“And then I thought, Weren’t we brave! I didn’t mean us in particular; I meant all those who dared to live remote from their fellows in such a vast and silent land.” 

Flying over northern Ontario on her way home from a conference, Kate marvels at the vast emptiness of the landscape. She recognizes that living so remotely takes courage and gumption and that she comes from a family and a community that are rich in both. 

“‘He could've had a real place there, if only he hadn’t fought with all his boys. Farmer needs sons, you know. Girls aren’t worth as much. Well, some of them’s all right, but most just don’t have the muscle. Farming’s hard work. You wouldn’t know that, but it’s hard work.’ This when I’ve been hoeing her garden for two hours in the blazing July sun.”

Miss Vernon, in the middle of telling Kate the story of the Pyes, informs her that the family’s fortune might have been better if Jackson Pye wasn’t so aggressive with his children. This passage engages with the themes of familial destiny, nature versus nurture, and gender roles. It is tonally similar to the moment when Aunt Annie tells Luke that he could not possibly know how challenging it is to raise a family.

“I listened, fascinated, and the dull, heavy rumble seemed to sink into my soul.” 

Young Kate listens to the sound of trains going by and is struck by the noise. Until this point, the trains have been a near-constant backdrop in her life, but here she becomes more keenly aware of the noise and what it means. This moment hints that Kate will begin to consider leaving Crow Lake. 

“That was why Luke found Matt’s teasing so unfunny. Because Sally McLean wasn’t just any girl, she was the daughter of his employers, and Luke was scared. He was afraid that if Sally decided she was offended, if she felt herself to be a woman scorned, she would see to it that he lost his job.”

After Luke rejects Sally’s advances, he hits Matt for teasing him about Sally’s crush. Matt doesn’t know it at the time (and Kate doesn’t fully understand it yet), but this moment with Sally has forced Luke to realize all that he is sacrificing to stay with his siblings. Luke’s fears prove justified, as Sally quickly gets him fired from her parents’ store.

“The idea that we are carried along by fate, unable to resist or change direction, sounds suspiciously like an excuse to me.”

Reflecting on how she has trouble empathizing with people sometimes, Kate acknowledges that there are many reasons people behave the way they behave, including genetics and circumstance. She resists the temptation to say that this means no one has responsibility for their own actions, however—and, in doing so, she suggests that anyone can change their life, regardless of where they come from.

“I didn't know what I was feeling—relief, despair, confusion, the whole shooting match. I’d have liked to be able to tell him the truth—unburden myself by explaining why I hadn’t wanted him to come. But how do you explain what you don’t understand?”

After steeling herself, Kate finally invites Daniel to come to Simon’s birthday. After years of repressing her emotions regarding her family, she has trouble disentangling them all and becomes overwhelmed with feeling. 

“At some stage during the preceding months they had changed the seating plan; Luke now sat at our mother’s place, which was nearest the kitchen, and Matt at our fathers. Bo and I were still side by side.” 

This passage takes place during the conversation in which Matt tells the family that he’s planning to quit school, immediately before he and Luke get into a physical fight and Matt’s shoulder is dislocated. It symbolically demonstrates how the brothers have taken up certain roles that were left unoccupied by their parents’ death and how their roles are a matter of contention (Luke is the eldest, but Matt is sitting in their father’s place, as the head of the family). 

“Love goes deeper than anything else, I guess. It gets to the core of you, and when Daniel got to the core of me I found that Matt and Luke and Bo were there too. They were part of me.”

Despite Kate’s belief that she has moved beyond her family and that they are no longer relevant to her life, her relationship with Daniel proves this to be untrue. The reason she has such a difficult time allowing Daniel to get to know her is because it means she will also have to let him get to know her siblings, and she feels uncomfortable doing so. Through her love for Daniel, she discovers that Luke, Matt, and Bo are still critical pieces of her life.

“Matt thought it was miraculous—no, there is more to it than that. Matt saw that it was miraculous. Without him I would not have seen that. I would never have realized that the lives which played themselves out in front of us every day were wonderful, in the original sense of the word. I would have observed, but I would not have wondered.” 

During one of Kate’s lectures, she has a crisis of faith, feeling that she is not adequately communicating the wonder of her subject to her students. This moment introduces Kate’s internal conflict about whether she should be teaching and reflects how much she believes she owes to Matt.

“We were all bumbling along, the Morrisons and the Pyes and the Mitchells and the Janies and the Stanoviches and all the others, side by side, week in, week out, our paths similar in some ways and different in others, all apparently running parallel. But parallel lines never meet.”

The residents of Crow Lake, as members of a small community, are all inextricably bound to one another—yet it is surprisingly easy for the different families to avoid getting involved with one another’s affairs and therefore surprisingly easy for one family to be struggling without the others offering assistance. Everyone in the community is somewhat aware that things are bad at the Pye farm, but everyone is also consumed with their own issues, meaning no one intervenes with the Pyes until it is too late. 

“People say, ‘You can do anything you want if you want it badly enough.’ It’s nonsense, of course, but I suppose we all work on the assumption that it is true—that life is simple, that effort will be rewarded. It wouldn't be worth getting out of bed in the morning if you didn’t believe that.”

Kate remembers watching Matt studying diligently for his exams, finding the time to throw himself into them even while he worked and helped run the house. She admires his dedication and also realizes that, in reality, hard work alone is rarely enough to merit results. Matt becomes an example of this: Despite his brilliance and effort, his circumstances are what will determine the rest of his life. 

“I thought I would probably die from losing him, but that if I did not, it would almost be worth having lived, to be part of such a glorious plan.”

Kate finds the idea of Matt going off to university almost unbearably painful, but he placates her by sharing his desire to send her to university after him, and for the two of them to work together to send Luke and Bo. Kate embraces this plan as a reason to live, foreshadowing her extreme disappointment when it is not carried out.

“I thought about her brothers and sisters, who had always thought her ‘weird,’ and I thought about Luke’s and Matt’s pride in my achievements. No, we did not come from similar backgrounds. No one had ever suggested that I should not go as far as I could. It had been expected of me, and I had been encouraged every step of the way.” 

While speaking to her student Fiona, Kate is tempted to use her own success as evidence that staying in university is worthwhile. She realizes, however, that she and Fiona do not come from perfectly equivalent backgrounds, even if the landscape was similar; Kate’s entire life has been made possible by the encouragement and support of her family, which Fiona does not have. 

“In later years, when I thought about the similarity between what happened to Luke and Sally McLean, it seemed to me that you could define my brothers’ lives by one moment, and it was the same moment for both of them. With Luke, it was the moment he pushed himself away. With Matt, it was the moment he did not.” 

Kate thinks about her two brothers and the way both of their lives unfurled. Luke, she realizes, could have had an entirely different (and probably, in some ways, more difficult) life if he had accepted Sally’s attention. In that moment, Luke committed to prioritizing his family. Matt, on the other hand, pursued closeness with Marie, resulting in their marriage, the end of Matt’s academic career, and his new life as a husband and father.