The common loon has four calls—the tremolo, the yodel, the wail, and the hoot. Each call communicates an emotion, a desire, or a warning. When I return to Wisconsin, the place where I grew up and the place where my grandpa’s family has lived and died for generations, I listen to the loons calling to each other in the night, their voices echoing over the black lake. Theirs is a language I no longer understand.
The Tremolo: a call to announce a loon’s arrival; also signals distress
I am at the cabin in Northern Wisconsin where my family has been coming for twenty years, a feat we celebrate with balloons and strawberry cheesecake. The cabin belongs to one of my grandma’s friends, a woman named Nancy. Everyday conversation patters through the porch where I sit with my family. Their chatter falls around me like summer rain, soaking without chilling. Can you believe how big that Ace Hardware store was? Biggest I’ve been in! Do you want more pasta salad? I mostly listen. I find it difficult to articulate myself here, to say the words that would allow my family to understand me—what I mean, who I am.
This is a cabin forgotten by time. I haven’t been in six or seven years, but everything is exactly how I remember. The sun faded floral pull-out couch rests near the fireplace. The Northwoods stand-up calendar from 2009 still sits in the bathroom on the worn-out wooden shelf. My younger siblings and I sleep in the bunkbed stacked three beds high; I still have nightmares about falling from the top. Down by the lake, the floating white dock with puzzle-piece edges still bobbles in the water. There is no hot water, no shower, and no WiFi. The decorative sign hanging above the fireplace reads: Fishing Rules: 1) Bait your own hook. 2) Clean your own fish. 3) Tell your own lies.
Some things have changed. The old green-grey rowboat with one oar (its mate mysteriously vanished) now has a motor. Most of the pink donut floaties lay crumpled in deflated heaps. The lake’s water level is higher than I’ve ever seen it. Spiky white fingers of dead trees rise from the creeping water along the shore. I ask, but no one seems to know why this has become a place of drowned trees.
I sunbathe on the dock with my sister. She is a pediatric nurse who lives nearby with her soon-to-be husband. I ride on the sailboat with my younger brother who lives at home. I play cribbage and Scrabble with Grandpa.
I do all of this from a perspective somewhere outside myself. When I look at the surface of the lake that I loved so much as a child, the image gazing back at me is doubled, the hazy reflection almost imperceptibly off centre.
The Yodel: a territorial call, aggressive, possessive
When I was 18, I left Plymouth, Wisconsin for university in Vancouver, Canada. I believed in God, I was a Republican, and I was straight. I’d hardly ever met anyone who wasn’t all these things. All I had was a vague sense that I needed to move as far away as possible from the 15-foot cow statue in the middle of town, the inescapable stench of dairy farms, and the mundaneness of a homogenous community in rural Wisconsin. So, I left, expecting to return with wild stories of dorm life and ocean-worn rocks from the beach for Grandpa. Instead, I spent the next few years reeling, struggling to maintain a sense of self as a sharp divide grew between me and my family—between me and the only place I’d ever known. A series of coming out moments ensued: coming out as no longer believing in my family’s God, no longer agreeing with their politics, no longer being attracted to men. The pain of this break followed me for years. Anxiety. Fear. Shame. But I found my way into myself eventually.
The difficult part is knowing who I am when I go back.
◊ ◊ ◊
Everyone I pass on the street in Wisconsin says hello. This place lures me in with friendliness; my lip nearly catches on its razor-sharp hook—like the fishing lure that my grandpa accidentally cast into my scalp when I was a child. It took three grown men and a pair of pliers to unhook me.
I try to stick myself to the present with each breath. Stick. Stuck. Stick Stuck.
This is a place of contradiction—a land where the seasons are dramatic and unpredictable, but the people are slow to change their rhythms and their minds. These are people who weather storms with a practical unpretentiousness that runs deep into their routines and their accents. I tease Grandpa for how he says warshing.
This is the kind of place where the graduation party is in the garage, love is in the sloppy joes, and grief is in the blue nail polish my dad used to write Ryker on a gravestone after he shot our dying dog himself.
I give in, and I let this place have me once more. I breathe in deeply, and the stars are pulled into my nostrils like vapour, flecks of light in a dark mist entering my nose and filling my lungs. With stars in my chest, I jump into the black water, and I am subsumed by the lake like the dead trees who grew too close to the water’s edge.
The Wail: the call of a loon who has lost her chick or her mate, or both
One slow afternoon after a lunch of Johnsonville brats and more pasta salad, my grandpa begins to tell me the story of his mother, Hilma, who lived and died here. Hilma was the daughter of an immigrant from Norway. She was a tough woman. Stern. She wasn’t funny. She worked as a waitress at a truck-stop restaurant until she was too old to smile for a tip anymore. Hilma moved to Portland to work at the shipyards during WWII with her husband and children, then moved back to Wisconsin for the rest of her life.
This is the place where Hilma’s husband, a truck-driver, died in a trucking accident when my grandpa was seven. This is where she lived in a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house with four children and a rooster named Hennepin who went missing. She had another daughter—blast, why can’t I remember her name? my grandpa chides himself—who died as a baby. Hilma couldn’t understand the Latin words spoken at her dead daughter’s funeral. She never forgave her dead husband’s Catholic family for that.
She was physical sometimes, but it was out of love. My grandpa repeats this. She didn’t tell her children she was pregnant with Kenny the bartender’s child until the day came to give birth. Jerry, her oldest son, drove her to the hospital. She asked her children, “Should we keep this baby?” They said yes and raised a fifth baby in their cramped house. Eventually, her children left—two on the same day, a hard day—and Hilma grew into a grandma who watched tv, never locked her door, and told her grandson, my uncle: If you’re going to drink that beer, don’t try to hide it. Drink that beer and mean it.
My grandpa pauses to swat futilely at the flies around his ankles, and I ask him what he is most proud of. He says going to college. He had to eat cereal on weekends when the cafeteria was closed because he couldn’t afford anything else. He was Hilma’s only son to get a college degree. His degree is in chemistry, a rebellious act, perhaps, because Hilma wouldn’t buy him a chemistry set as kid for fear he would blow himself up. He was her only son not to go to Vietnam. This is his greatest regret. I tell him it’s not mine.
◊ ◊ ◊
I often wonder about Hilma. Would she have liked me? Would I have liked her? I can only remember her funeral and the black gloves my mother wore when she sobbed into her hands. But I have seen a black and white picture of a young Hilma in overalls, curly hair sticking out around a protective visor, smiling. It was taken when she was a welder in the shipyards in Oregon during the war. What did she think of the Pacific Northwest? How did she feel going back to Wisconsin? Did she ever feel like she didn’t quite belong?
I only know her through Grandpa’s stories. Later, I decide to paint her, naked with purple skin, floating on her back in a lake full of stars.
The Hoot: a call of curiosity or happiness between mates, chicks, families
One evening, my sister and I go kayaking under a pink sky. We paddle to the island where we used to have picnics as kids.
The island is split in two this year. The water is so high that the low, rocky spots in the middle are submerged. We paddle first to one side. My sister climbs out to stand on a rock barely protruding from the surface. From a distance, it must look like she is walking on water.
We paddle to the other side of the island. This side has fared poorly. The maple tree in the centre of the half-island is dead. Drowned. Surrounded by the smaller trees that died before it. As we paddle closer, I am lost in the white tendrils of the drowned. This is the greatest measure of times changed, of the past’s dissolution into memory, of trees that could not withstand the water.
And yet, there remains a patch of green bushes on this island of drowned trees, and orange flowers bloom there still, just a little wilted.
On the night before I fly back to Vancouver, I stand again on the dock. My grandpa joins me. I ask him what he might have thought the stars were if he didn’t already know. My grandpa is quiet. After a moment, he answers:
It’s like something cracked. And the stars are all the little pieces shattering down.
This place. It is a place I once belonged but no longer. My mother always asks me to stay. But I know better than to plant myself too close to the water’s edge.
This, too, is where my grandpa has retired to audit courses at the local community college—free for seniors—in topics he loves. Hilma’s son now spends his days woodcarving and polishing rocks. This is the place where he has asked me to one day spread his ashes in the firepit he dug himself.
I take one final breath of this impossibly big night sky. No matter where I go, these stars and stories clatter around in my chest.
Somewhere in the dark, a loon calls.
MJ Holec (she/her) is a lesbian writer, artist, and educator. She recently completed a certificate in creative writing from The Writer’s Studio at SFU. She has published fiction in Emerge 24 and a book review in Event. She is working on a queer historical novel set in Ancient Rome.
