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marked by signs for lodges alternately named after long-gone species of tree and Indian tribes. But not today. Everything clamped shut the morning after Labor Day as though from annual news of approaching plague.
    For the first while I share the highway with pickup trucks, occasional semis hauling gravel, farm machinery lumbering along the shoulder. But as the organized fields of corn, beans and dozing cattle yield to outcroppings of rock, bogs coated green with algae and undisciplined acres ofthorny underbrush, the road thins of even this traffic, narrows to two lanes, and leaves me alone. I push the speedometer up to 70 m.p.h. with the idea that increased velocity might move the land behind me more efficiently, but it makes no difference. The engine remains virtually noiseless, and the passing trees roll by in steady blocks interrupted every mile or so by an overgrown lane to mark the line between properties. The deeper I press the gas pedal the less I’m passing through the landscape and the more I’m moving into it, sinking with every curve into its ragged texture.
    Something’s different up here.
    The brush creeps up to the orange line that marks the boundary of the road and reaches across as a territorial challenge. Lone fenceposts push up from the earth like bent thumbs. Occasional signs giving directions to marinas, campgrounds and private side roads that are no longer there. Then even the signs become difficult to see as bugs begin to kamikaze the windshield, obscuring my view with their yellow guts. On go the windshield wipers and I squeeze off a couple good sprays of washer fluid, but there’s something in the insects’ blood that resists easy removal and I’m left to peer ahead through a smudgy haze of horsefly, dragonfly and moth.
    Of course on a map it all looks the same: a vast white space marked by a couple of rail lines, watercolor dabs of small blue lakes, jagged veins for rivers throughout. But when you get here the map might as well be a child’s crayon drawing. The lines are imaginary, nothing relates. You can’t see the lakes or rivers from the highway, and you don’tbelieve a train would have any business passing through such a place.
    No matter where you start from, north is always so close in this country. Almost any exit taken off the main highway along Lake Ontario after the heavy industries, warehouses and nuclear power stations have passed and in only a couple of hours it’s all over you. A place where the ratio of altered to unaltered space gets shifted dramatically in the latter’s favor and there is little more ahead than an interminable expanse of humanlessness. Despite patchy settlement and the logical plotting of county lines the north communicates to those traveling through it what it probably always has: there is good reason why most people on this continent hug the ocean, lakeshores or riverbanks, for those are places where someone might have a clue where they are.
    Of the true character and magnitude of nature I know nothing, of course. I recall novels and poems fed to us in high school which involved lonely settlers and their wives, the difficulties in building a log cabin, and the eventual freezing to death of the protagonist. This, I believed throughout my schoolboy career, was the single plot and full extent of Canadian Literature. And so too of nature. For Barth Crane is no adventurer. At least not of the compass and pup tent variety. Fresh air inspires nothing in me but suspicion and quick fatigue. A city slicker born in a country where the cities are few and far between.
    But here I am anyway. Only a couple hundred miles north of where the six-lane artery from Toronto ends, from well-lit service centers andtowns with hotel and restaurant chains large enough to have network TV commercials and American head offices, from the bedroom communities where the commuting middle-class has staked its claim, wrestles with the mortgage, and in the evenings haggles over which of the