Sometime in May, they come back. You won't see them at first, they'll be out on the lake, too far away to make out clearly. But you'll hear them. That call, the one that sounds like someone laughing in the dark, like joy and loneliness mixed together in a way only a loon can manage. It's the sound that tells you winter is truly over. It's the sound that says you're home.
People talk about the robins as a sign of spring. Here in Flat Rock, we know better. The robins are nice enough, but they're just birds. The loons...the loons are something else. They're a covenant. A promise that the world still turns the way it's supposed to.
Minnesota chose the loon as our state bird, and whoever made that decision understood something fundamental about us, as a people. It wasn't because the loon is particularly beautiful, though it is. Black and white, sleek and elegant, the kind of bird that looks like it was designed to mean something. It was because of that call. Because you hear it and you know—you know—that you're in a place where wild things still exist. Where water is enough, and sky is enough, and the sound of a bird laughing across a lake in the gathering dark is enough.
Mason White says he can set his watch by when they return. Within a day or two of the same week every year, they're back on Lake La Pointe. Mason has been running White's Hardware long enough to know how these things work. He's noticed patterns. He's learned what's reliable.
"You'll be out on the water," he told me once, "and you'll hear that sound, and it's like the whole season shifts. Everything that was waiting starts moving again."
I asked him if he ever gets tired of Minnesota. The long winters, the unpredictable weather, the sameness of it all.
"Why would I?" he said. "Where else can you hear that?"
He had a point.
There's something about that call that gets into your bones. Young people leave Flat Rock all the time. They go to the Cities, or further, looking for opportunities, or adventure, or just because they need to know what else is out there. And plenty of them don't come back. But the ones who do, the ones who stay, they all mention the same thing eventually. They miss that sound.
I read once that loon chicks learn their parents' call while they're still in the egg. Before they're even born, they're learning the voice of home. Maybe that's what we do too, growing up on these lakes. We learn the loon's call before we even know we're learning it, and it becomes wired into us. Becomes the sound of belonging.
Despite what Longfellow or Gordon Lightfoot may say, the Ojibwe people called this place Gitchi-Gami. The great water. They understood what the loons understand. That some places are sacred not because of what we build there, but because of what already exists there. What was there before us, and what will be there after.
In May, when you hear that laugh echoing across the water at dusk, you're hearing something that's been echoing across these lakes for longer than Flat Rock has existed. Longer than Minnesota has been a state. It's a sound that connects us backward. To the people who listened to it before us. To the seasons that turned before we were here to see them.
And it promises that if we're lucky, it'll still be echoing long after we're gone.
That's why we listen for it. That's why we mark its return. That's why, when spring finally comes and you hear that wild, laughing call across the water, you stop whatever you're doing and just listen.
Listen to the Loons...