The Loon Is Thoreau

For one calm October afternoon, a loon makes a fool of Thoreau, diving under his rowboat and laughing at him across the water. Kaag spent boyhood summers among loons at Chaffee's Locks, and he is convinced the bird is a self-portrait: eccentric, mournful, austere to the point of grace. His title gives the reading away, and he doesn't mind; nobody describes an animal this carefully unless the description is a door. Behind it waits transcendentalism's central claim about divinity, and that claim has political teeth. Then the chapter drops its gaze to a war on a woodpile, and to a hermit thrush that caught Kaag not listening.