Feeling a little looney ~ November 16, 2005

David Heiller

Several years ago I heard a strange thing while on a canoe trip.

Three buddies and I were camped on an island on Lake Insula in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It was mid-May, a beautiful, cool evening, with a full moon on its way. Loons were calling around the lake. That’s a pretty hard sound to beat, especially in a remote spot like we were on.

Malika's loon and baby.

Then I heard a loon in front of our campsite calling like I have never heard before or since. The loon had a hoarse voice. It tried and tried to make its majestic presence known. Maybe it was a call marking its territory or a call for a mate. I’m not sure. Loons have several very fascinating calls. But that loon couldn’t do it. Its call came out thin and raspy. You could tell it was straining with all it had, but it ended up sounding weak and weary.

The oddest part was that the other loons seemed to rise up and call even louder. I know it was my human imagination, but they seemed to be laughing at their weak-voiced competitor. They drowned him out, and he eventually gave up trying. It was all kind of funny, yet sad too.

Without a strong voice, that loon had to be at a disadvantage. I wonder what became of it.

I felt like that loon last week. It started about Monday, when my voice started cracking. I knew I wasn’t going through puberty again (thank goodness). “Cold coming on,” I thought.

On Tuesday, I took half a day off from more cold-like symptoms, stuffy head, ringing in my ears. By Wednesday, when I spoke, I felt like I was in an echo chamber.

Healthy and happy David.

By Thursday, it was hard to talk. My throat hurt. I went to a roundtable discussion in Coon Rapids with some fellow newspaper editors. I tried to make some comments, but my throat was plugged up. My voice came out thin, and died about three feet in front of me. It didn’t even seem like my voice. That made me think too much about what I was saying. My words weren’t spontaneous at all. I was one step behind everyone, one step more than usual at least.

That persisted at home too, and went further. I didn’t want to talk, not about what happened at work, what I saw, what I read. It hurt to talk, so things went unsaid. I wasn’t me.

More of the same on Friday. Big football game, incredible ending, going to the Metrodome, all I could muster was a raspy, “Wow.”

I didn’t sleep at all Friday night. I croaked like a chain-smoking whiskey tenor. Cindy insisted that I go in for a strep throat test on Saturday. I argued that of course. Every guy has to argue a trip to the doctor. A doctor? No way! I’ll ride it out just like my great grandpa Cro Magnon used to do. The one that lived to age 43.

Cindy got out a medical book. “Call your nurse information service or doctor if you’ve tried self-care but your symptoms haven't improved after 48 hours.” she read. It only took about two more hours of me thinking about that to see that Cindy was right. Saturday morning I had the positive strep test results in hand and a shot of penicillin in my behind.

Then things got better, as they usually do. My smoldering throat quit burning. The echo chamber went away. My voice slowly came back to normal. I picked up the fiddle, did chores, told my wife about that interesting banjo article I had read recently. Everything seemed more fresh, more interesting. I felt thankful about nothing in particular and about everything in general.

Getting sick can be a good thing in a perverse kind of way, and I’ll be the first to acknowledge that my brief sickness hardly registers as serious. But it made me appreciate good health, and the simple desire and ability to speak. Like that loon.