Loon Voices in the Distance
I have been homesick lately. Not for any of the nine states, two countries and dozens of towns and cities in which I have lived, but for a particular sound. To remedy this, I have taken lately to lying on the floor in front of a small fan and listening to the sound of loon calls. The internet is a wonderful resource for such random needs. There are loons accompanied by rain and thunder; loons and campfire; loons and water lapping; loons and acoustic guitar—in short—there is enough demand out there for loon-based background noise that I have a playlist nearly twenty hours long dedicated to the aquatic birds. If you have never heard the loon’s call, you will have no idea how particular it is, in the same way that cranes and storks have decidedly distinct vocals. If you do know the sound of the loon, you may be concerned—why would anyone want to spend hours a day listening to so strange and haunting a chorus? Or, perhaps, if you know the loon and share a kindred love of the outdoors, and have spent time among the lakes of the north, you will find their voices a comfort—you too will be reminded of the summers of your youth, and will feel comforted—you will feel as if a dear friend whom you’ve not seen in ages has made an unexpected visit. If I had my copy of Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing with me, I would reread a passage that can conjure up the otherworldly lilt of the red-eyed loon so completely, that I can hear them without needing the assistance of background music:
“We slide back through the gradual dusk. Loon voices in the distance. Bats flitter past us, dipping over the water’s surface, flat calm now, the shore things, white-grey rocks and dead trees, doubling in the dark mirror. Around us the illusion of infinite space or of no space. Ourselves and the obscure shore which it seems we could touch, the water an absence. The canoes reflection floats with us, the paddle’s twin in the lake. It’s like moving on air, nothing beneath us, holding us up; suspended, we drift home”.
One never knows what one will miss—what one will long for when we break ties and set out into the unknown, set out for a new destination. A new home. When I moved with my family from the plains and prairies to the north-east, I missed desperately the smells of dirt roads in Nebraska, and the white birch forests of Wisconsin. When I left California for New Mexico and eventually Colorado, I missed the mineral smell of earth, and the sweet hints of tree sap in the blistering heat of California summers. When I returned to California from the south-west I craved the enticing perfume of juniper, piñon and rain in the desert. Now I am in Portugal, and while there are many birds whose songs are entirely new to me, and many trees whose scents I am coming to know—it is the sound of the loons I want to have in my ears. It is the sound I call up in my mind’s ear as I work or walk or run errands or sit, as I am now, looking out a window, watching people come and go in the steep narrow street below—their difficult, musical language floating up to me—welcome, exciting—intoxicating in its own playful way, but not the music of my beloved water-birds. Not the sound of the northern woods and waters where I left childhood behind and came of age.
I think the first time I heard loons must have been visiting my great-grand parents’ lake cabin in western Wisconsin. So arresting—so mesmerizing was the sound—that I abandoned whatever game my siblings and I were playing and stood at the water’s edge—listening—eyes scanning the lake, the moss and lilies, trying to spot the singers. I am near-sighted, and could not see them, concealed as they were to my eyes by the dark currents on which they floated. I could not see them, but since that day so many decades ago, their song has remained etched into the innermost part of myself—the part where all things sacred are kept.
One never knows what one will miss, and someday it may be the call of the swallows winging above this street as they are right now—bright. Excitable. Dazzling acrobats with short, piercing cries. One never knows what one will miss, and it may be a person we long to embrace; it may be the taste of green chilis or the smell of them roasting in the dry August afternoon; it could be Reese’s Pieces or Cream Soda or funnel cake. We do not know in moving what will reach through the mist of memory—the retrospective of our experience—and summon our soul’s attention. The Sandia Mountains, radiating the color of watermelon after the sun has dipped below the horizon of the high desert, and the last of the light performs on granite peaks that sail two miles above sea-level. It may be the easily missed green and white road signs in Vermont that blend into the lush, verdant landscape of the Green Mountain State. It could be the blue paper cups from which you drink your coffee, picked up in some deli in the rush of a New York City morning, or night blooming jasmine from summer nights when you were young and a dreamer and even east Texas seemed full of promise.
One never knows what one will miss, so it is important to notice. To love. To linger over the simple joys—the small details—because the simple, the small is, at the end of all our questing and questioning and seeking—the real treasure. It is the small things we will long for—what our soul will seek and crave. It is the small details that will prove to be the solace we seek—impossible to replicate—there where we find ourselves when we are feeling homesick. Longing for something familiar, something that cannot be purchased at the store down the street, or found in the landscape you now inhabit.
Someday, I may be far from these narrow streets; far from the fading edifices and cobble stones and the swallows diving as evening makes its slow descent. Someday, I may be far from all of this and find my heart desperate for this view—for this particular composition—the light slanting just so, this elderly lady walking impossibly slowly up the slick, narrow sidewalk. Someday, this may be the only thing that will still my heart and comfort my need for something that was once familiar—that reassured me that I was where I needed to be, that I was safe and the sun would rise again tomorrow. Today I take in this scene for hours—patiently, without rush or greed—and then I turn my eyes away, draw the gauzy curtains—and return, for a few minutes at least, to the loons. In a few hours I will go down to the river and watch the sunset, and drink in the Rio Mondego and the native trees and the swallows—but for now, I return to my northern lakes and light and birds, and know that the sun will, as always, rise again tomorrow—and I am where I ought to be.