The Great Depression marks a sharp contraction in Breitsprecher-Duke’s fortunes and a turning point in the family’s plans. As strikes and economic hardship weaken the company, James Bardawulf offers Conrad work without a salary; Conrad instead considers reviving Dieter’s small nursery, where a single longtime employee still tends the greenhouses. The episode places immediate family decisions against the novel’s wider account of logging: dangerous work, changing technology, and forests treated as seemingly inexhaustible supplies.

Economic Crisis and the Family Company

After the 1929 crash, the country staggers under economic depression and workers’ anger, while Breitsprecher-Duke begins to lose its footing. The company’s difficulty is not presented as an abstract financial condition alone: it narrows the choices available to the younger generation and makes inherited wealth and family employment newly consequential.

James Bardawulf tells Conrad, recently out of school with a degree he regards as fitting him for nothing, that the company will employ him if he wishes, but will pay no salary. James’s reasoning is that Conrad already has money to live on and the firm is enduring hard times. The offer provides a place in the family business but not an independent livelihood, leaving Conrad to decide whether that role is worth taking under the changed conditions.

Diverging Paths

Conrad does not immediately accept his father’s proposal. He asks for time to think, but his attention turns instead to Dieter’s old seedling nursery. The nursery had been closer to a hobby than a substantial business, with very few clients, yet Dieter had maintained it over the years rather than letting it disappear.

Its remaining operation rests on a specific, modest resource: Alfred McErlane, the sole employee, manages the greenhouses. Conrad’s thought of evaluating the nursery and speaking with McErlane suggests a different response to the downturn from simply entering the established company without pay. The passage ends at the point of reconsideration, before it establishes what Conrad will do or whether he can make the nursery viable.

A Longer History of Logging

The crisis arrives after generations of timber extraction have been shaped by labor, transport, and technological change. Sel family loggers worked across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine, taking on a succession of tasks from felling trees and making booms to river driving, sawmilling, road building, cordwood, pulp, and pit props. The work was hazardous, and river driving was especially dangerous; employers assigned it to Indigenous workers on the assumption that they were suited to violent water.

The production system depended on the river as infrastructure. A camp boss argues that companies seeking logs at the sawmill must accept the expense of the drive because water moves the timber and powers the mills. The image of Mi’kmaq and Montagnais workers guiding logs downriver makes visible who performed this essential, risky work, even as company accounts treated the expense as a business calculation.

Across the Sel family’s working lives, equipment and transport changed the scale of extraction: the poll ax gave way to the double-bitted ax, then to crosscut saws and increasingly powerful mill machinery; oxen gave way to horses, donkey engines, and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads reached forests distant from waterways, trucks and roads displaced river drives. The novel connects these efficiencies to intensified logging, describing technology as enabling the felling of the continent’s remaining ancient forests. Against this longer history, the Depression’s threat to the company does not undo the costs already borne by workers and forests.

Trade, Timber, and the Idea of Permanence

The company’s earlier commercial logic rests on timber’s perceived durability and abundance. In New France, Charles Duquet rejects beaver and other animal commodities as vulnerable to disappearance, disease, overtrapping, and unstable markets. He concludes that the forest offers a resource Europe lacks and imagines timber supplying ships, houses, and heat, with profits that could continue indefinitely. His confidence that the forest would replace itself sets an early pattern for the novel’s larger history of treating forests as permanent commercial reserves.

That outlook eventually reaches across oceans. Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia, and Lawyer Flense meets a buyer interested in a decade-long supply contract and in finding a logging partner in New Zealand for kauri. Elsewhere, the novel shows how overseas timber enterprises skim valuable trees, leave extensive waste, and move on to the next tract. The Depression therefore falls on a company whose reach and ambitions were built through expanding timber markets, while Conrad’s attention to a seedling nursery opens a tentative alternative centered on growing trees rather than only harvesting them. The evidence leaves that alternative unresolved.