the Walnut Diary

In an English text a few years ago I came across Margaret Laurence’s Loons, which traces the loss of innocence of two Canadian girls. The title draws the reader into the story, but all the loons get to do is sit at the end of a lake and hoot.  Nevertheless, Laurence uses the birds to evoke a vague bond with nature.  Their extinction in the story she uses to show the girls’ loss of innocence and youth.

The author of the text fawns all over these mythical loons.  The spectre of their impending doom works achingly into every note.  From this prompt a student can hardly fail to generate even more fatuous hand‑wringing over the fate of the loon.

Instead of the fine art and variety of Lampman, Johnson, and Mowat, our renewed awareness of nature has left us stuck with the silhouette of a Loon plastered onto a million sweat shirts, coffee mugs and coins. The loon has become the inflatable doll of ecological guilt.

I would suggest that the real loon is a creature quite different from the popular symbol. The real loon doesn’t choke on the acidified air of Algonquin Park.  He thrives on the Rideau Lakes with his brood, and screams the night away to the delighted anguish of caffeine‑soaked cottagers.

The real loon is no ecological wimp doomed to extinction from boat wakes.  Newboro Lake loons bob merrily among the tidal waves thrown up by passing Sea Rays, Bayliners, and Dorals as the annual spawning run of Quebec boaters arrives.  Biologists quake in horror, but the loon families calmly nest on sides of islands away from raucous boat traffic. Loons didn’t get this far without the ability to adapt.

Real loons can be a bit of a nuisance.  What fisherman can tend his line when a dozen or so loons are conducting a Sunday morning church service, swimming in a large circle in that eerie dipping ritual?

I’m not so sure about their mythical fish‑finding abilities either, because if the boats out trolling start to cluster in one location, the loons are soon on the scene.  I’m waiting for one to ask to use my depth sounder.

On the water they are good company, if they’d only stay there.  You’d think that with all that water, and fish everywhere, loons would be content to stay wherever they happened to be.  But no: about quitting time they start yakking back and forth to each other, sometimes from a mile or more away.  Try talking to anyone while this is going on.  Worse, they decide to switch lakes, or get together for a drink.  This involves several minutes of confusion for everyone, as they taxi, take off, yell at each other, land again, and finally depart.  They’re a little awkward when entering and leaving the water, and they tend to distract boaters from more appropriate activities such as crunching ice cubes and polishing Tupperware.

Then comes morning.  Loons love to sneak up on anchored yachts.  I think they like the smell of coffee and bacon.  (No morning skinny dips allowed in Loon Country.)  Anxious dogs must be rowed ashore, or else lost to a morning of loon‑tag.

Honest.  Loons try their best to separate dogs from their boats.  I have photos of three of them trying to entice my spaniel off our swim platform. Once Patch joined them in the water, they’d see how far from the boat they could get him to swim.  They’d take turns.  They’d let him get dangerously close, only to speed up, just out of reach.  If I’d call him back, they’d come too.

Loon mug in hand, the reader will insist that loons are only protecting their nests when they do this.  Since when do loons nest a half‑mile from shore?  I think they came to our anchorage because they’re bored.

The only good thing which I can say about loons is that they don’t beg handouts.  Unlike the mallards and sea gulls of the area, the loons ask nothing but an occasional bushel of splake or bass fingerlings from the Ministry of the Environment stocking program.  Apart from that they are sufficient unto themselves.

Perhaps loons are good symbols for the writer.  They do have an other‑worldly aura.  They don’t bunch up and litter docks and beaches the way Canada geese do in cities.  Loons stay wild without the help of birdshot.

Perhaps loonies are useful coins.  Northern Reflections shirts and Algonquin Park promotional materials could contain less pleasing logos.

Perhaps I should join the trend, rather than laugh at it.  For Christmas gifts, what would be better than loon slippers? Just think.  You wake up at night.  You want to raid the fridge, but must not click that light switch and wake the family.  You shuffle into your new loon slippers and begin the trek to the kitchen.  You get there without mishap, because last night the sleeping spaniel found himself on the receiving end of a loon slipper, and he’ll never lie at the top of the stairs again.  He now sleeps on his back, snoring in disgust, between the magazine rack and the fireplace. No more loon slippers for him.