C Ihe Ladies c cu. V'VVAN - History and Classics, Department of

XLVITHE LADIES, THE GWICH'IN, AND THE RATput it, to a "deeper understanding of the things that matter most" (Roots 80), wa1the other. Like an epiphany, that experience would take one outside oneself;there, one could comprehend Identity in its clearest personal and extra-hUInandimension. In this second of her two narrative impulses Vyvyan is quintessentiallyidealistic rather than realistic. She writes of the North rather as AntonChekhov wrote of Siberia when, in r890, he journeyed from Moscow toSakhalin, the far eastern prison island. In her autobiography, Vyvyan attributesto Robert Louis Stevenson her awakening to the ideals of" [s] treams and treesand the sky and an unfenced road, the only companions for a perfect life" (Roots39); and when she writes of the recreative power that nature effects on thepaddler, Stevenson's account of his canoe trip through Belgium and France inr876 comes to mind:The central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed itsholiday without disturbance like a Government Office. The great wheels ofintelligence turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist. I havegone on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting thehundreds .... What philosophers call me and not me, ego and non ego, preoccupiedme whether I would or no. There was less me and more not me than I was accustomedto expect. I looked on upon someone else, who managed the paddling .... I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient inpractical life .... This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take itall in all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished. (77-8)The idealist's goal could be pursued with a certain lack of self-consciousness bypeople from the centre of an empire, wielding imperial pens that claim thewilderness for a quintessential "me" I"not me" experience by ignoring anyprevious ventures into it. So the accommodation of this narrative impulse comesat a price.From the beginning of her book, and despite millennia of indigenous habitation(not to mention more than a century of European presence), Vyvyanpresents her readers with a land where people leave no trace on the imagination:"Among all the people that we met I cannot remember any faces ... yet certainrivers, mountains, forests, glaciers, birds and rapids, remain vivid as if! had seenthem this morning" (2). Even in the midst of detailed itineraries offered by theAATC, she assures her reader that knowledge of the region, represented by the