Panorama

 

   This photo is a panoramic view of Lake Bronson in Kittson County, Minnesota. I love panoramic photos, but they tend to distort reality. Those two roads seeming to go off in different directions are actually a straight east-west highway behind me. I had pulled over last February to see the lake in its drained state. Note that grey car on the right side of the photo. More about that later.

   Kittson county in extreme northwest Minnesota is one of the few Minnesota counties with no natural lakes. During the Depression in the 1930, the region was having a drought and the state decided to dam the South Branch of the Two Rivers upstream from the town of Bronson to create a reservoir. A new state park was created along the shores of the new lake and the townspeople were so delighted, they changed their name of their town to Lake Bronson.

   After almost eighty years, the earthen dam is starting to leak. I doubt the town of Lake Bronson would be wiped out in a dam collapse, but the state decided to rebuild the dam. Last summer the lake was drained down. People started telling me how weird the empty lake bottom looked, so in February Teresa and I took a drive fifty miles west of home to see what we could.

   My photo doesn't do Lake Bronson's bottom justice. The state park is directly across from where I was standing. The shoreline is much wider than it appears here. You really had to be there. I could see sandbars in the middle of the lake area. The sandbars are where fishermen in the know would go to catch a fish.

   The morning before we visited the lake I had told a friend about our coming adventure. When I got home I sent him this panoramic view. He replied, "That's my car!' 

"Ya sure," I responded.

He said he had had an appointment in the area that afternoon. He remembered seeing a guy taking pics along the highway, but hadn't recognized me. Hmm. One nice thing about panos is that you can use your fingers to hone in on different area of the photo. I had always recognized my friend's car by the grill in the back to keep the dogs out of the front seats. I could see that the car in the photo had no grill. My friend said he had taken the grill out. I honed in some more until I was able to read his license plate. 

   It's not that I didn't believe my friend; it just seemed very weird that he be would driving by at the exact moment I was taking the photo. If this was for real, I thought, I could get a job as a detective with a police crime solving unit. The next time I visited my friend I checked the license plate in my photo against his Toyota. It was a match! All I could think was wierd, very weird.

Blow-up from pano

Proof positive