Brno. Twilight lake swim

26 Aug 2023. I’m not used to not having photos to show what I’m writing about. In fact, the content of the piece itself usually stems from the very shots I took during the trip or event I’m trying to describe. There are, however, rare situations where I simply lack any photographic evidence of what my writing aims to depict – and that is okay, because the absence of photographic proof doesn’t make the events any less real. When that happens, I’ll only rely on words to recall things exactly as they happened.

I went on a long lake swim at twilight, and it was beautiful. We were out in a group of fifteen, maybe more, barbecuing at the lake. There was food, there were drinks, there were games, and there were swims. At one point, as we stood on the shore, one of the guys from our group asked me (or maybe I asked him): ‘How far is it to the other side? Could we swim the whole distance?’ ‘Let’s try some time during the day’, we agreed.

After hours of eating, drinking and playing games, I’d half forgotten about it, or maybe I’d simply assumed there’d be no time. He remembered, though, and asked: ‘You still in for the swim?’, to which I replied: ‘If you go, I go’. And we went.

Just as we dipped into water and began to swim, I turned to the right, and the moon was out. It was the First Quarter Moon, which means a full half is visible in the sky, maybe a little more than that. It was a pale white semicircle, transparent and weightless against a soft brush of pink sky at blue hour. I saw the moon, the lush green hills framing the lake, covered in a thick layer of trees, the water surface gently rippled by the lightest breeze – I saw all of that and thought how lucky I was to be there to see it, because it was perfect.

At no point did we seem able to guess how far we’d come, how close to the other side we were (‘Are we halfway yet?’ ‘No, not even close’), so we swam on. But then the small sailboat moored to the tiny post on the other side grew bigger and bigger, and we knew we were close. The light grew fainter, the moon had disappeared behind a layer of clouds coming over from the south, the water surface was dark green and almost flat.

We touched the concrete edge on the other side of the lake. We’d made it. We climbed the slippery steps of the steel pool ladder and stood there for a minute. Then we went back in and started the swim back.

Blue hour was gone, everything was instantly tinged in the grey hues of the early evening. Bands of clouds cut through the sky as if sprouting from the hilltop in front of us. ‘Look at the clouds over there!’, I said. ‘It looks like a fire’, my swimming companion replied. It did.

We swam in silence, a silence only momentarily broken by the one motorboat still out that late. All the people, all the boats were long gone. On our lake shore a bonfire was lit up, then lights were switched on in a house, maybe a bar or a restaurant nearby. By the time we got back to our shore it was evening. We could barely recognise the outlines of the other people from our group, still sitting and chatting around the wooden table next to the grill.

‘Thank you for choosing the most special time of the day for this’, I said.

Imagine doing this again. Imagine doing it at sunrise. No, but seriously, imagine doing it again.

The photos featured in this post are from 31 August, when I went back to the lake to take a few shots at sunset. The light and the colours were nothing like those from the night of the swim, but I thought I’d include a few anyway. Twilight is always a special time of the day, after all.