For the Loons in Maine

December 8th, 2024

Writer: Jackson Zuercher

Editor: Naiya Mainigi

Every summer since I was a baby, my family goes to a resort in rural Southwest Maine. Imagine all of the activity of a Jewish summer camp, but your grandparents are also there, and 85% of the staff hail from performing arts colleges. With limited WiFi, fantastic food, and activities like waterskiing, volleyball, or sending your little cousins flying off the raft dock, boredom is practically impossible.

If you go to a lake in Southwest Maine every summer of your life, you tend to take its loons for granted. You forget that many people in your everyday life may have never even heard of a loon. They are beautifully tuxedoed birds, truly remarkable — water birds that only emerge onto land to lay their eggs, yet when in flight can reach speeds up to 70 miles per hour. Their calls echo across the lake at night; layered, piercing, haunting.

I spent this past summer working at the resort as a member of the Beach Crew. During my three months of employment, I wore a white tank top that gradually turned yellow from the sun as I hauled countless kayaks and righted numerous sailboats — Baywatch-style. On particularly windy days, my friends and I would closely watch the sailboats that hovered on the horizon. Secretly, I wouldn’t mind when they tipped over; there was an adrenaline rush in throwing my shirt off, grabbing a radio and the life jacket I had set aside for this exact emergency, and sprinting down the dock in front of guests and staff alike. It was terrifying, it was exhilarating. My buddy Ramiro would gun the engine of the little rescue boat and we’d be off. As the baby of Beach Crew, it was almost always my job to jump into the cold water, brace my feet against the bottom of the hull, and fall back to settle the boat upright. Once I’d confirmed that the sailor was alive and unhurt, the situation started to feel a little less tense and, oddly, kind of fun.

I expected more of an adjustment when transitioning from being a guest at the resort to working there.  Any entitlement to the guest-specific amenities had been quickly wiped away after the first few days of hauling, raking, twigging, and deep cleaning cabins and boats. Hospitality is not for the weak, and if you’re going to do it, you'd better be ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

This being said, there were times when I wished I could keep the loons to myself. I’d let my new friends claim any other part of the resort they wanted to ground themselves in their new reality. Sometimes I thought that, inexplicably, I could hear the loon calls from hundreds of miles away in Philadelphia. That had to mean something, right?

I was seven or eight when my dad kayaked with me to a tiny rock island and I had first been within arm’s length of a loon. I was sixteen when my Maine community — those who blurred the line between family and friends — took me down to the edge of the outcropping shoreline, my gentle initiation into the undercurrent of our own constructed nightlife. We told stories while we listened to the loons speak to each other in the night. We would jokingly imitate the calls. I’m sure the loons could tell the difference. But they would probably still call back. 

I had grown up listening to the soundtrack of those loon calls, so I couldn’t help thinking they might be for me. Everyone who has heard them probably thinks that. Nostalgia is a funny thing. What’s funnier is that the loons don’t care.

The loons don't care when you get too close to them. Even if you’ve managed to breach their peace, they know you are a piece of the lake, too, waddling slowly around them in silent sunset-colored plastic boats. The loons will see and hear and sense the motorboat coming towards them, its sharp propellers cutting through the water, leaving a white-capped wake in the distance. But no matter how obtrusive, the motorboat is just another piece of the lake. The loons don’t question it. They just move out of the way in the nick of time. Every time.

The loons on Lake Kezar remind me that some parts of nature are simply, sempiternally untamable. You will never provide the loons a life better than the one they currently have — they simply wouldn’t care. For all that we think we have in this world, we will never be loons swimming along the gentle crests of a lake in summer. The loons know how to live, and what to live for, and it’s rarely more complicated than that. They have the confidence to simply exist in the present and follow their instinctual paths. They are brave in the way that humans want to be brave. 

If you can, go to a lake in Maine at night. Close your eyes and listen to the loons, and maybe you will think they are calling to you. They won’t be, but maybe there are worse things to believe in.