“It unrolled slowly, forced to show its colors, curling and snapping back whenever one of us turned loose. The whole land was very tense until we put our four steins on its corners and laid the river out to run for us through the mountains 150 miles north. Lewis’ hand took a pencil and marked out a small strong X in a place where some of the green bled away and the paper changed with high ground, and began to work downstream, northeast to southwest through the printed woods. I watched the hand rather than the location, for it seemed to have power over the terrain, and when it stopped for Lewis’ voice to explain something, it was as though all streams everywhere quit running, hanging silently where they were to let the point be made. The pencil turned over and pretended to sketch in with the eraser an area that must have been around fifty miles long, through which the river hooked and cramped.”

This is the opening paragraph of the novel, which sets the stage for two of the key themes of the novel: The Conflict Between Humanity and Nature and The Relationship Between Images and Reality. Ed and his friends are looking at a map, which is personified as a living thing that can resist the unfurling action of the men’s hands. At the same time, the men see the natural world depicted on the map as an abstraction that they can control. Lewis’s use of the pencil to mark and sketch on the map reveals his hubris in thinking his own “power” matches nature’s force.

“We really ought to go up there before the real estate people get hold of it and make it over into one of their heavens.”

Lewis refers to the wilderness around the Cahulawassee river, which he wants to visit before it is flooded by a dam. He displays distaste for civilization and suggests that once the spot is dammed, the wilderness will be gone forever, suggesting man’s conflict with and ability to control nature.

“The way he went about things was strictly his own; that was mainly what he liked about doing them. He liked particularly to take some extremely specialized and difficult form of sport—usually one he could do by himself—and evolve a personal approach to it which he could then expound. I had been through this with him in flycasting, in archery and weight lifting and spelunking, in all of which he had developed complete mystiques. Now it was canoeing. I settled back and came out of the map.”

Ed describes some of Lewis’s key character traits—in particular, his desire for perfection and his individualism. However, Ed also suggests that despite his perfectionist approach to the activities he undertakes, he starts and then drops the activities on a whim. This foreshadows that he is not entirely prepared for the trip and does not fully understand what it will take in terms of canoeing skill.