Below a pink and pale blue sky sprawls a panorama of rolling hills, offering an impressive vista from the top of Bald Rock Mountain. The sun is beginning to light up the tops of trees. It’s another good day to stand on a mountaintop, to look out there and drink it all in.
My eyes sweep all that lays before me. And out there, way out there, the fog begins its slow ascent off the cold ground, as it rises up to meet the warm air, creating what looks much like a massive white lake, a lake that gleams in the morning sun. At that distance, the eyes can play tricks, especially eyes attached to an inventive brain. I looked. I casually looked away. My imagination jumped into a fanciful overdrive.
I did a double take.
Through my camera's viewfinder, with a long lens attached, it's clear to see that the lake is just rising fog, with the occasional hill poking through. But to the naked eye, out there in the distance, it stirs an overactive imagination into believing the impossible: a massive body of water has flooded the valleys below and blocked my way back home, a jarring prospect.
It was just a fleeting thought. My conscious mind knew it could not be true. Nonetheless, the double take was involuntary. A quick look through the viewfinder told me what I should've known anyway.
I stood on that mountaintop and smiled at my foolishness, then looked all around, admiring the magnificent scene expanding out before me. Then, with my smiling face and my overactive imagination, I pondered, with considerable pleasure and at considerable length, the untold mysteries that might lie underneath a lake of fog.