MISQUAH — To the Editor: There are two loon chicks on Big Pelican now, hatched in the first week of June, riding low on their parents’ backs out on the north end, and they cannot yet dive away from your wake. I am writing to ask, as plainly and as calmly as I know how, that you slow down on the north end of the lake through the month of July. Not for me. I have no standing to ask anything for myself. For them.

I know the holiday is coming and the boats are coming with it, more of them than any other weekend of the year, and I am not so foolish or so old as to ask you to stay home on the Fourth of July. I would not be heeded and I would not deserve to be. I am asking for something smaller and entirely possible: lift off the throttle for the quarter mile past the nest platform on the north shore. It costs you about ninety seconds. It costs the chicks, if you don’t, everything they have, which is not much yet, and is the whole world to their parents, who built that nest on a platform we put out for them because we said we wanted them here.

A chick separated from its parents by a wake it cannot dive under does not find its way back. It is not like a duck. It does not bob up downstream and paddle home. We learned this the hard and public way two summers ago, when this same pair lost a chick to a snapping turtle, and the whole lake felt it for a week, and I do not care to learn it a second time, and certainly not from a pontoon boat playing music on a holiday afternoon. A loon takes its slow time on this earth — thirty years, if we let it, longer than some marriages — and asks almost nothing of us in exchange but a slow pass for one month out of its long life. Give them that one month. The fish will wait; the fish always wait. The chicks cannot. — Dorothy Knutson, Mud Lake Association