Disguised as a Log

There is a line in one of my favorite Jim Harrison poems where the poet claims he has decided to finish his “life disguised as a creek.” After a close encounter with a pair of loons the other morning, I believe I would choose to disguise myself as a driftlog.

I had long since cut the engine on the Little Dipper, poured my coffee, put my feet up on the gunnel and was deep into my best impersonation of a drifting log when I heard them — a pair of loons, one on either side of me, plaintively calling back and forth across the water. One would call, that long, lonely sound shaped like the moon rising. Then, silence. Finally, the other would answer. Back and forth, back and forth, as if blowing kisses of sound to one another. And each time they called, I could tell they were getting closer, and closer.

Suddenly, one of the birds surfaced just a few yards from the boat. I didn’t move. The loon looked straight at me … and then relaxed, ignoring me as if were simply an oddly shaped log. And it did the most amazing thing: it tipped its head back and called.

To see a loon - the chessboard of its plumage, the saphire of its eyes - is a kind of feathered joy. But to hear one, to see it calling from only a few yards away on a misty morning, that is a gift without measure.

There is no sound like it in all of nature. Writer John McPhee desribed it best. “The cry is made with the neck stretched forward, and it is a sound that seems to have come up a tube from an unimaginably deep source--hardly from a floating bird… It has caused panic, as it has been mistaken for the cry of a wolf, but it is far too ghostly for that. Every time the loon cry comes, it sketches its own surroundings--a remote lake under stars so bright they whiten clouds, a horizon jagged with spruce.”

To hear the wail of a loon is to know that there is more to the world than the human mind could ever know or understand, and to be content with the existence of mystery.

It is a even enough to make a person ok, at least for one morning, with being mistaken for a drifting log.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).

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