“Go north, young man, go north”

“Go north, young man, go north” is a repeated imperative that makes the Green Lady—and later the Yellow Lady—a directional presence in Michael Noonan’s world. Its force shifts from an uncanny suggestion during a lakeside walk to a sign that persists when Michael finds himself in the past, joining landscape, memory, and dislocated time without fully explaining them.

First Appearance on The Street

Michael encounters the Green Lady while walking north along The Street after deciding to think over what Bill Dean and Bonnie Amudson had told him. In the evening light, he can make out that the apparent figure is only a birch tree with a half-dead pine behind it; one branch of the pine resembles a pointing arm. Yet the natural arrangement seems to direct him north, and the imperative gives that impression a voice-like clarity.

The perception is unstable rather than simply supernatural. Michael studies a face in the bushes and sees the breeze make what is nearly a mouth seem to sneer and grin. He is confused and begins to feel unwell, but his attention is also turning toward Jo: he now suspects she may have written something, perhaps explaining why her old typewriter was in her studio. The northward suggestion coincides with his resolve to search the studio carefully, placing the phrase at the threshold between an ordinary walk and a consequential investigation.

Return as the Yellow Lady

The phrase recurs when Michael, in a dream or vision, finds himself in an earlier period. The Green Lady has changed into the Yellow Lady, her leaves now autumn-colored, but the bare pine branch still points the way and repeats the same northward direction. The altered season changes the figure’s appearance without changing its gesture: the landscape preserves its instruction across Michael’s temporal displacement.

The surrounding scene makes that continuity striking. Michael recognizes a birch associated with the drowning sensation he experienced before, but the sensation does not return. Sara Laughs is present in a reduced form, without its later wings, second story, or Jo’s studio, because those parts of the house have not yet been built. The ladybirch and the birch by the lake have travelled back with him from 1998; other features belong to the earlier landscape. Against this mismatch of times, the unchanged pointing branch becomes a recurring landmark rather than a reliable explanation. Michael asks the Yellow Lady where—and then when—he is, receiving no answer.

Function and Ambiguity

The imperative joins two moments in which Michael is moving through uncertain territory: first, toward Jo’s possible written evidence; later, through a landscape whose older form reveals that he is no longer in his own time. The first scene gives the phrase the shape of a beckoning instruction, while the second makes its recurrence evidence of persistence across the time shift. In both, direction is clearer than destination: the words urge northward movement but do not disclose what Michael will find there.

The transformation from Green Lady to Yellow Lady also lets seasonal change coexist with an unaltered pointing gesture. The figures can be recognized as trees, yet their almost-human faces and repeated message resist being reduced to scenery. The phrase therefore sustains a productive uncertainty: it may be read as Michael’s interpretation of natural forms, as a sign within his uncanny experiences, or as both at once. Its narrative importance lies in that tension, turning a simple direction into a thread that links the search for Jo’s hidden writing to the story’s unstable boundary between present and past.