The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life

The Story

Carl Ericson grows up in Joralemon, a small town whose neatness, thrift, and respectability feel confining to him from the start. He is the son of Oscar Ericson, a carpenter who prizes hard work, order, and shininess, and of a practical mother whose world is sock darning, milk-pans, and breakfast. The house is comfortable enough, but it is airless and overrespectable, and Carl keeps escaping to Eddie Klemm’s billiard parlor, a place he likes because it feels alive. As a boy he likes play-acting, soldiers, and the sense of being a “soldier of fortune”; as he grows, the same restlessness turns him toward stories of daring, machinery, and public fame.

In adolescence Carl’s imagination begins to split between ordinary social life and grander possibilities. He is drawn into the company of the “bunch at Eddie’s,” and he also begins to notice girls, especially Gertie Cowles, whose status in the town gives her an importance he half desires and half mocks. When he is invited, however briefly, into her circle, the experience flatters him and makes him more conscious of rank, romance, and exclusion. At the same time, his mind wanders toward early aviation. A magazine article on gliders opens a door in him: flying seems like the perfect blend of invention, danger, and escape. Even before he has any real training, he imagines himself designing machines, flying past ordinary life, and going wherever the air leads.

That dream carries him out of town and into labor. He joins a telephone-wire crew and discovers the pleasures of open country, rough companionship, and practical work. The men joke, tramp, loaf in haystacks, and talk from Winnipeg to El Paso; Carl, who has been suffocating in Joralemon’s polish, experiences this as a first glimpse of the larger life. He also falls under the spell of Bone, a fellow dreamer whose talk opens to him a world of freedom and beauty. Yet the pull of social ambition remains. His attachment to Gertie, and his desire to belong, tug him back toward the town’s structures even as he vows to escape them.

At Plato College, where he goes next, his impulses take on sharper edges. He gets involved in student life, fraternities, football, and campus talk, but the decisive event is the Frazer affair, in which the lecturer Frazer is treated as a radical troublemaker for exposing inconvenient truths. Carl’s response is a mixture of sincere loyalty and confused idealism. He wants to stand with the lecturer and against empty respectability, but he does not yet know how to translate feeling into action. The episode reveals how eager he is to take sides, how quickly he is stirred by public causes, and how awkwardly he handles moral seriousness when it asks for more than enthusiasm.

After Plato, Carl drifts and works. He reaches the point of leaving with almost no plan, carrying only a few dollars and the conviction that he cannot remain in place. He tries New York, imagining that the city will reward initiative, but the grand promise collapses into hunger and humiliation. He cannot find the job he expects, and soon he is reduced to a few cents and the charity office. The failure does not cure his appetite for motion; it sharpens it. He takes whatever work he can find, moving through motoring and mechanical jobs, always hoping for the next opening, the next machine, the next field.

His great chance comes in aviation. At Bagby’s flying school he enters a mixed company of students and instructors: hard cases, wealthy amateurs, military men, and practical mechanics. The school makes plain that flying is not a dream of pure glamour but a dangerous craft learned with grease, weather, muscle, and risk. Carl throws himself into it anyway. He flies in conditions that terrify and exhilarate him, including a long over-water flight in fog where the landscape disappears and he feels horribly alone. The loneliness matters as much as the danger. Flying gives him what he has wanted since boyhood—motion, height, the sense of being separate from ordinary life—but it also strips away illusion. He is isolated in the sky, dependent on skill, nerve, and luck.

As he becomes known as an aviator, the world begins to label him a hero, though he does not fully accept the role. His diary shows how much the life costs. Friends are killed in accidents; good teachers burn to death; the profession itself looks precarious, commercial, and perhaps temporary. The romance of flight persists, but it is shadowed by fatigue, grief, and the fear that the age of exhibition flying may not last. Still, Carl goes on, not because he has solved the problem of life but because he cannot imagine doing otherwise.

New York returns in a different form when Ruth enters his life. Ruth is lively, intelligent, socially fluent, and dissatisfied with the roles available to her. She and Carl talk with unusual frankness, and what begins as witty companionship becomes a courtship grounded in mutual recognition. They walk together, discuss class and custom, and discover that each resists the narrowness of conventional success. Ruth is not merely a love interest; she has her own restlessness, and she refuses to be reduced to “the bride” or “the little woman.” Her settlement work, her interest in labor issues, and her impatience with social pretence make her a strong counterpart to Carl’s roaming ambition.

Their relationship moves toward marriage, but the book does not treat marriage as an ending so much as another experiment in living. Carl and Ruth argue, reconcile, and learn how to make room for each other’s seriousness. He wants activity, invention, and motion; she wants freedom without surrendering the possibility of commitment. Their marriage is tested by work, money, and temperament, yet they come to see themselves as partners in motion rather than as settled possessors of one another. By the spring of 1914 they are still building a life together in New York, with Ruth pursuing interests of her own and Carl devoting himself to work for the Touricar and then the VanZile Motor Corporation.

In the final movement, the book carries them beyond the United States. By February 1915 they sail for Buenos Ayres, where Carl is to manage the Argentine business. The voyage is both literal and symbolic: they leave snow for summer, the old restraints for a new market, the familiar world for one more frontier. Carl quotes verse about being “back once more on the old trail,” but the real point is that he and Ruth are still making a trail rather than finding one. The ending does not resolve every uncertainty. It leaves them moving, together, toward an open future, with the happiness of the moment tempered by the book’s awareness that all such hopes depend on motion, appetite, and the willingness to begin again.

The People

Carl Ericson wants escape, excitement, and a life that feels larger than the tidy habits of Joralemon. He is restless from childhood, then increasingly drawn to work, speed, aviation, and public recognition. What stands in his way is not lack of energy but his own dividedness: he wants adventure and belonging at once, freedom and approval, movement and home. By the end he is less a boy pretending to be a hawk than a man who has learned that freedom is inseparable from labor, risk, and loneliness.

Ruth wants a life that is intelligent, active, and self-directed. She rejects the ornamental role expected of a young married woman and keeps her own interests in settlement work, labor politics, study, and social observation. What stands in her way is the pressure of convention, as well as the emotional risk of being fully known. She ends not absorbed into Carl’s life but joined to him in a partnership that preserves her energy and independence.

Oscar Ericson wants order, industry, and a respectable household. He is not cruel, but his values make Carl feel boxed in. He stands for the solid, unromantic life of work for its own sake. He does not really change, but his presence defines the world Carl must leave behind.

Gertie Cowles wants the kind of social importance that goes with approval and status. Carl’s early fascination with her comes from his longing to be recognized. She matters less as a full separate plot than as one of the first figures through whom Carl measures the distance between his life and the town’s social ladder. She gives way to larger attachments as the book goes on.

Bone, along with the telephone crew and the later aviators, represents another kind of companionship: rough, practical, and dream-saturated. Bone especially is a figure of half-articulated freedom, someone whose talk helps Carl imagine a wider world. He stands in the path between domestic respectability and actual wandering.

Forrest Haviland matters as a model of conduct and integrity. He gives Carl a “religion” of sorts: discipline, seriousness, and a kind of honorable work that is not empty pose. His death deepens Carl’s sense that the people he admires are mortal, and that skill and courage do not protect anyone from loss.

In Its Own Voice

Carl’s hunger for another life appears early, when the calm of his home cannot hold him and he turns toward places that feel less polished and more alive. As the narrator says of Eddie’s billiard parlor:

“the ‘bunch at Eddie’s’ were among the few people in Joralemon who were conscious of life.”

That eagerness for motion later becomes nearly physical when he leaves town with almost no plan. The arithmetic of departure is blunt and urgent:

“92.00 out of bank 2.27 in pocket about .10 at room”

Ruth and Carl’s affection finally grows into a statement of shared purpose rather than mere romance. Their most serious hope is also their simplest:

“We won’t be afraid to be free.”

What It's Really About

The book keeps returning to the tension between seriousness and play, freedom and institution. Carl is forever tempted by forms of life that promise release: boyhood games, billiard parlors, telephone crews, college rebellion, flight, city wandering, and later the open route of business travel. Yet each of these adventures turns serious as soon as he enters it. Work has weight. Friendship demands loyalty. Love requires negotiation. Flying, which first seems like pure exaltation, proves to be bodily, technical, and fatal for many of the men in it. The title’s comedy is not about making light of life; it is about the mismatch between the grand motions people imagine and the awkward means by which they actually live.

The novel is also about American mobility at the moment when the country is changing speed. Joralemon stands for settled small-town order; Plato College for ambition and social sorting; New York for the magnet of modern work; aviation for the new romance of technology; Buenos Ayres for a global market opening beyond the old horizon. Carl keeps moving through these worlds, but the movement is never abstract. It is tied to labor systems, class aspiration, machinery, and the stories people tell about success. His life is shaped by the age’s faith that one can keep beginning again, and by the equally strong fear that such beginnings may be unstable, contingent, and short-lived.

Ruth sharpens the book’s thinking because she is not simply the answer to Carl’s wandering. She has her own standards and her own resistance to cliché. Through her, the novel questions the ordinary assumptions about marriage, femininity, and domestic success. She and Carl want a partnership that does not erase either person’s mind or appetite. That makes their courtship and marriage a test case for a broader question: can love survive when both people insist on being alive in the full, modern sense of the word?

The book also distrusts public labels. Carl is called a hero, a rebel, a fool, a worker, a lover, an aviator, and at times a “Dethroned Prince,” but none of those names is stable. The same is true of the townspeople around him. The novel keeps showing how social language flatters, mocks, and simplifies people, while their actual lives remain unruly. Its deepest argument is that ambition is never pure, and happiness is never complete. People keep wanting more than their place allows, and the book does not judge them for that. It watches the wanting itself.

Why Read It Today

It will appeal most to readers who like novels of movement, apprenticeship, and changing American landscapes. Its pleasures lie in the textures: small-town Minnesotan domesticity, the roughness of odd jobs, the early aviation world, the talk of college and city life, and the gradual making of a marriage between two strong-minded people. If you enjoy seeing a character grow not by becoming settled but by becoming more aware, this has a lot to offer.

The book feels of its time in ways that matter. The social assumptions are early twentieth-century assumptions: about class, gender, ethnicity, and “respectability.” Some of the period’s slang and mannerisms are part of the texture, and the book occasionally leans on types and local color rather than deep psychological interiority. That said, its best stretches are still vivid because they are alert to motion, surfaces, weather, work, and the odd mix of vanity and sincerity that drives people.

What stays with you is the double vision. Carl’s life is full of striving, but the novel never lets striving become simple triumph. Even the happiest ending is provisional, a voyage rather than a destination. Ruth and Carl do not solve life; they keep making it. That restraint gives the book its shape and its lasting interest.