Emily Brisse

What do you say to an island?  Hello. Hello, there.   I came to say... Yes? Just hello, I guess. Hello. And what is it like and how does it feel and what are the sounds and smells and tastes of being here so always, so all-year-everyday, so long? It is like... Yes? This. When I canoe across the wide water, when I slide into the bay, along its shore, I pay attention. I notice muskrats and blackbirds, fish flopping, and wind. I think about its name-- Loon --and its location-- south --and I wonder at the way it was when those northern birds were here enough to leave their name. How much changes on an island like this? No houses, no campers, no impervious surfaces. Just green and brown and blue and green and green and green and green. What is it like to be so set apart? To have children watch you every summer of their lives, curious and wise? And then for them to go away, sometimes for long stretches of time, only to come back older and quieter and less brave? Does the isla...

. The loon is a mythic bird in Minnesota. Wood ducks float close to docks, accept bits of bread thrown from children's hands; Canadian geese walk single file down residential streets. But loons. They keep their distance. Occasionally you'll see them floating in the middle of a lake. Rarely — and magically — they will pop up fifteen feet from your canoe and stare with their red eyes for a few moments before diving back into their solitary worlds. But what you can count on in Minnesota — the land that claims these creatures as its state bird — is hearing them almost anytime you are on a quiet lake in the presence of the moon. And you'd never mistake it. Children don't ask their parents whose call that was. It's a sound that seems to rise out of the mist, even on a clear night. One that seems simultaneously desolate and binding and old. They are ghosts in a way, these birds. And you listen for them as you would movement in the backyard when you are home alone.  . Vid...