When my son and I went down to the lake for some early-morning photography, we couldn’t believe our eyes: there, in the dawn’s early light, it appeared as though some great sea monsters had emerged from the deep in the night. All up and down the shoreline, these scaly leviathans were silhouetted against the saffron sky. It reminded me of a pod of beached whales.

The daylight revealed something almost as strange: the monsters had become huge piles of ice, which form (I later learned) when broken-up ice is driven by high winds to the shoreline; it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon called ice-stacking. So much for sea monsters.

in the dark, we can

only imagine monsters–

at dawn, we see them

–photos by me