Where the Crawdads Sing: Chapter 22 Summary & Analysis

Now 19, Kya sits on the beach and hears voices, so she slinks into the woods. From her hiding place, she sees Chase and his friends. Watching them from afar, Kya feels as if very little has changed since she was a child, when she observed this same group whenever they came near. At one point, the football that Chase and his friend have been throwing lands near the tree line, so Chase jogs over to retrieve it. Just before he throws it back, he looks up and sees Kya. After tossing it, he turns and looks directly into Kya’s eyes but doesn’t say anything. For a moment, they simply peer at each other, and Chase almost smiles before turning around and rejoining his friends. In the days after this encounter, Kya returns to the beach in hopes of seeing Chase.

Kya starts going to Jumpin’s more frequently, hoping to encounter Chase. When this finally happens one morning, Chase introduces himself to her. He speaks slowly, as if she is perhaps unable to understand English. Eventually, he invites her to go on a picnic that weekend, and they arrange for him to pick her up in his boat. On her way back home, she recites several poems in her head, recalling one by an obscure poet named Amanda Hamilton, whose poetry was recently published in a local newspaper. This particular poem is about how love must be “free to wander.” It makes Kya think of Tate. 

What Kya doesn’t know is that Tate actually did come to see her. He was unable to come on the Fourth of July because the professor who gave him a job in the college’s biology lab invited him to go birding, and he felt he couldn’t say no. Several days later, though, he motored through the marsh toward Kya’s shack. On his way, he saw her in her boat, so he turned off his motor and watched her, knowing that this is something she often did to him in the past. He observed her as she quietly looked for shells on the beach, but then she suddenly went stiff, listening to something Tate couldn’t hear, though he soon identified the soft hum of a distant motor. In response to this sound, Kya crept into the tall grass, obscuring herself and peering out like an animal.

Unnerved, Tate can’t help but think of Kya’s behavior as odd and deeply out of the ordinary. He then considers the fact that his studies will lead him to a life as a research biologist in a lab, and though he knows that Kya’s intelligence would fit into such an atmosphere, he can’t imagine her actually fitting in anywhere except the marsh. Whispering that he’s sorry, he turns his boat around and leaves, cursing himself for being too cowardly to give her a proper farewell.