This is among the most recognizable images in Canadian art. The clashing binaries of nature and machine, order and chaos, the waking world and the world of nightmares, are all at play. The moment depicted is frozen at its point of greatest tension, contrasting an individual against the mechanized weight of progress—a bleak prospect, as Colville knew all too well from his wartime service. Hopeless or not, he has placed individual will in opposition to collective, historical, mechanical inevitability.