Thursday, Aug 13, 2026

[Dave]

Early last month something caused a memory from my college days to pop into my mind.

A friend was going to spend the weekend at his family's lakeside home in Wisconsin and graciously invited me along.

The small town was holding a regatta and my friend entered us in it. Even though I had never been on any boat with a sail, it sounded fun to me.The lake was small – maybe 2 miles by 1 mile (3.2 km by 1 km) and the course started near the shore, went out to the middle of the lake, then returned to the starting point. Most of the boats tightly rounded the far buoy and quickly headed towards the finish line, but my friend kept us heading far out onto the middle of the lake. Smart move: he knew we'd catch enough wind in the middle of the lake to double or triple our speed. So despite my inexperience, we quickly blew past the other 9 or so boats and won easily. Pretty neat.

One night we slept on a pontoon boat near the far shore. It was nice to watch the lake and sky darken as the lake and wildlife settled down for the night. We were awakened in the predawn by the haunting cry of a loon from somewhere across the still and dark water. A memorable experience.

Last week I tried to convert a bright and colorful photo of water reflections into a night scene. Here's the daylight version taken around 20 years ago at the nearby Bolsa Chica Wetlands Ecological Preserve:

   

I learned that this sort conversion wasn't as easy as I expected, and the results were pretty lame:

   

Later, inspired by this memory and by Japanese haiku poetry, I tried writing a short poem about that night on the lake.

[Man From Ironbark]

What a lovely experience.
I do like both photos. It is easier to make a bright photo dark than a dark photo light. I do like the result. The dark image seems to have greater depth.

[Dave]

Thank you MFI.

I'm very lucky that despite the deteriorating memory capabilities that comes to many of us with age, this experience (from 55 to 57 years ago) is still clear.

I confess that I'm not seeing the increased depth in the night version.

And for me lightening a dark photo is easier than darkening an overexposed one. Not sure why.

The haiku inspired short verse I came up with...

   a loon's eerie call
   across the silent lake
   gently woke me

I tried to make the sounds of the words soft and quiet to reflect what I sensed that morning.

[Man From Ironbark]

Overexposed has the detail burnt out. It used to take a lot of masking to try and get detail when making prints from overexposed film.
Liked your Haiku. We don't have loons but we do have some very noticeable evening bird calls.
I looked for loon sounds and found this 2:29 minute youtube.

[Dave]

Thank you MFI.

I don't claim that my haiku-inspired verse comes close to being real haiku, which is bound by lots of symbolism: for example some animals symbolize things such as death, rebirth and much more. Snowfall or rain may also symbolize different things. Even sounds can symbolize different this. Although I find it fascinating, my verse isn't haiku. And I'm still tweaking it with different word combinations whose soft sounds better evoke what I was feeling that morning on the lake.

Thanks for the audio/video; I hadn't come across that one.