Why the Ponds Are Important in Crow Lake

Why the Ponds are Important in Crow Lake

Crow Lake is Canadian author Mary Lawson's first novelпјЊwhich is narrated by Kate Morrison, the second child in the Morrison family. A serious car accident left seven-year-old Kate, her one and half year old sister, Bo, and her two older brothers, Luke and Matt, orphans. Rather than live with relatives separately, they chose to live together and grow up. Luke and Matt made many sacrifices to support their family and they also got many helps from their community. The story took place in Crow Lake, a remote small farming community in northen Ontario.

In Kate’s childhood, Matt and she often visited the ponds near their house. There are many descriptions of the ponds in the novel, which are closely linked to the theme of the story. The ponds represent the childhood and hometown in Kate’s mind, they help Kate decide her career and they are vital bonds between Kate and Matt.

In the first place, the ponds are full of Kate’s memory about childhood and hometown. They are Kate’s favorite places before she grew up. In the prologue, Kate mentioned that “there is no image of my childhood that I carry with me more clearly than that” (Lawson, p.4). Kate remembers her first trip to the ponds. “ I was so small he had to carry me on his shoulders-through the woods with their luxuriant growth of poison ivy, along the tracks, past the dusty boxcars lined up to receive their loads of sugar beets, down the steep sandy path to the ponds themselves”(Lawson, p.4). From riding on Matt’s shoulders to follow Matt to the ponds, they spent “hundreds of hours” (Lawson, p.5) there. Kate cherishes the vivid and sweet memory of the time she spent in the ponds. There, she lie down her stomach and watched into the water learning the natures' secrets from Matt. “Her braids bob up and down in the water, making tiny ripples which tremble out across the surface of the pond. She is “completely absorbed” (Lawson p.5).

In addition, the pond times Kate spent as a child played a significant part in the job she has later in life. The ponds and Matt can be called Kate's first and best teachers in biology. Matt explained many of the wonders of the natural world to Kate while watched the creatures in the ponds. During the times she spent with Matt in the ponds, Kate “came to know the tadpoles of the leopard frogs, the fat grey tadpoles of the bullfrogs, the tiny black wriggling ones of toads” (Lawson p.5). She also “knew the turtles and the catfish, the water striders and the newts, the whirligigs spinning hysterically over the surface of the water” (Lawson p.5). She was “completely absorbed”. It was in the ponds, Kate learnt about the surface tension in the first time which later became her research topic. She said “I knew Notonecta well from my years with Matt” (Lawson p.190). “The interest which Matt had sparked in me had developed by then into a deeper curiosity, and that year I was noticing and wondering about things without being prompted”, so she chose biology as her major in university, which may be Matt’s idea when he was a young boy. “…my choice was inevitable and was set long before….” Kate explained when she selected zoology as her third year branch. After graduation, Kate became a biologist in a university in Toronto.

The ponds are also ties between Kate and Matt. Matt is the most important person in Kate’s life. In the ponds, Matt and Kate spent together much of their good time. At the think of ponds, Kate recollects Matt. Of all siblings, Kate and Matt were exceedingly intimate during her childhood. Matt was the scholar of the Morrison