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Joe is not there. He appears then at the top of the sand cliff, running, halting. He yells my name, furiously: if he had a rock he would throw it. The canoe glides, carrying the two of us, around past the leaning trees . . . The direction is clear, I see I’ve been planning this, for how long I can’t tell.

The narrator’s description of Joe casts him as a caveman. The detail of throwing a rock paints him as a sort of frustrated and helpless primeval man. The narrator’s description contains a seed of truth, in that Joe’s simplicity repeatedly prevents him from grasping the narrator’s complex and sophisticated private world. Joe’s insistence on marriage and his one-sided conception of love fail to match the intricacies of the narrator’s conceptions of love and relationships. This passage contains specific words that reflect the narrator’s deepest concerns. She mentions that the canoe carries two people, which is a reference to her pregnancy. After remembering a past abortion, the narrator maintains constant awareness of her current pregnancy. Her new baby becomes a means for salvation from her guilt, and she thinks of the child as a potential solution to the social ailments she sees all around her. Her mention of the sand cliff points to her awareness that the island is eroding. The narrator remains concerned about the impermanence of the cabin, perhaps because she fears that the erosion of the island will erase her childhood. However, the narrator eventually embraces the erosion of the cabin because it signifies the triumph of nature over human development.

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