Thus far, I’ve used my “perch” to  pon­der and com­ment (OK, pon­tif­i­cate) on strife, con­flict, suf­fer­ing and human fol­ly. Now it’s time for a break, to fol­low the dic­tum of “Desider­a­ta”, the ide­al­is­tic poem we ‘boomers’ taped on our bed­room wall: “Go placid­ly amid the noise and the haste…”.

 The best time and place I know to do that is ear­ly morn­ing, wedged into my kayak.

Invent­ed by the Inu­it of Green­land, the basic kayak design has remained unchanged for mil­len­nia, a text­book exam­ple of how to adapt to the world rather than try­ing to alter or dom­i­nate it.
My bea­con as I slide off across a kilo­me­ter-wide stretch of open water is a stand of birch trees, a slash of white amid the som­bre conif­er­ous and hard­wood trees that pre­dom­i­nate here. If I’m lucky, I come upon loons hunt­ing for break­fast. For non-Cana­di­an read­ers, they’re the birds fea­tured on our one-dol­lar coin, which, sur­prise, we call a “loonie”. The two-dol­lar coin is, of course, a “toonie”. Their haunt­ing calls are the icon­ic “sound of the wilder­ness”. (Click this link, put the vol­ume up, and be amazed). They are also prob­a­bly what gave rise to the expres­sion “crazy as a loon”, which is iron­ic, since loons seem to be far san­er than humans. Loon pairs tend to return to the same lake, and often the same nest, every year. Except for size (males are big­ger) they are indis­tin­guish­able, and  share par­ent­ing duties equal­ly for what is usu­al­ly only one chick a year.

When they have twins, the stronger some­times kills the weak­er in the strug­gle for food, which is more under­stand­able than the human predilec­tion of killing for polit­i­cal pow­er, or just because you can.
In anoth­er les­son for humans, loons prac­tice a sys­tem of ami­ca­ble divorce. And don’t be fooled by their placid look. Get too close and you’ll quick­ly learn that loons are fierce and noisy defend­ers of their ter­ri­to­ry and young.

The chick­’s ‘Covid mask’ is actu­al­ly the shad­ow of the parent’s head. (Pho­to: Author)

Loons are ined­i­ble, have sol­id bones to help them dive as deep as 70 meters (230 feet) and stay sub­merged for more than three min­utes. Red pig­ment in the reti­na of their eyes fil­ters light to help them hunt at depth.

They make less noise when they duck under the water than my pad­dle does, no mat­ter how care­ful­ly I stroke as I reach my birch mark­ers and veer right along the gran­ite shore­line. The Cana­di­an Shield is among old­est rock on earth. The lakes here — some deep­er than 50 meters (165 feet) — were gouged out by glac­i­ers, which took thou­sands of years to recede. Human enter­prise has man­aged to melt glac­i­ers dra­mat­i­cal­ly in mere decades. How clever of us…

Per­haps it would help focus minds on cli­mate change if it was por­trayed as more of a threat to humans as a species than to the plan­et per se. The close-packed trees and the crea­tures I slip past make me think only Nature has the tenac­i­ty, let alone abil­i­ty to cling on and regen­er­ate against seem­ing­ly insur­mount­able odds.
For the most part the soil here is only cen­time­ters deep. Cana­di­an poet AJM Smith summed it up in the last lines of “The Lone­ly Land”, his won­drous­ly evoca­tive homage to the shores of Geor­gian Bay:
This is the beauty
of strength
bro­ken by strength
and still strong.

Late after­noon light (Pho­to: Author)

The trees here are what’s known as “sec­ond growth”. The orig­i­nal for­est, dom­i­nat­ed by white pines thrust­ing up a hun­dred feet (30+ meters) and more, was exploit­ed almost to extinc­tion in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry to sup­ply tim­ber for the Euro­pean ship-build­ing indus­try. That of course includ­ed warships…but we won’t go there.
No doubt next week will pro­vide may­hem, silli­ness and fol­ly to view from my perch. But this week “Go placid­ly” seemed a bet­ter idea, eh?
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