The bayou in autumn feels like a place that belongs to Halloween. The cypress trees wear their moss like torn veils, the water holds reflections that look too perfect to be trusted, and the air shifts from gold to grey in the space of a single breath. It is a place that can be tender one moment and terrifying the next, its beauty inseparable from its shadows.
I came here with a camera, but more often than not. It felt as if the camera was only an excuse to enter into a conversation with the place itself. Every frame is less a document than a mood, an impression, a whispered story rising out of the stillness. These are not photographs to me—they are encounters, each with its own way of bending the light into memory.
Bayou Impressions
In my previous post, I wrote a bit about my recent trip to Caddo Lake. Here’s another of what will eventually become four or five postable shots from that short journey. Shooting from a moving boat, sometimes in low light, with a long lens—it turns out to be more difficult than I had expected. I’d tried swamp photography before, so I was prepared for the challenge of finding compositions. What I hadn’t expected was how hard it would be simply to get a frame in focus.
What surprised all of us, though, was how impressionistic many of the images turned out to be—like they’d been painted in oil rather than caught in pixels. Images are strange creatures. They trigger memories, or half-memories, and associations that we can’t always trace. When I first saw this photo on a larger screen, I immediately thought of Japanese or Chinese landscape art. I’m no art historian, and my knowledge is thin, but the connection was undeniable. Research didn’t reveal an exact parallel, but I discovered that Chinese painters were among the first to devote themselves entirely to landscape as a subject, which then shaped Japanese ukiyo-e, which in turn shaped the Impressionists. So, apparently, my instinct wasn’t completely misplaced.
Still, if you Google ukiyo-e, you might shake your head and mutter, What is this guy even seeing? I found a Japanese artist, Koukei Kojima, whose delicate work seemed to echo the feeling of my bayou photos more than their form. Whether the connection is justified hardly matters. I fell in love with the image, not because it’s technically perfect, but because of that impressionistic style that jumped out at me. I know what it lacks by traditional standards, but I don’t care. I like what I like.
Feathers and Flames
This one is pure abstraction—or nearly so. A stand of cypress trees, lit by late afternoon light, on the bayou in autumn. I exaggerated the colours, played with softness, and highlighted edges. It is not reality exactly, but not fantasy either. The balance point between the two.
What makes Caddo Lake so special is how dramatically it changes with the light. One hour, the trunks are copper; the next, they are shadowed and grey, veiled in moss. The mosses themselves, and the flames of autumn colour, never arrange themselves the same way twice. It is a place of infinite variety.
… On Halloween, the bayou reminds us that nature was always our first haunted house.
Mirror Mirror
If the bayou sometimes feels warm and inviting, it can turn, without warning, into something far darker. That’s what happened here. The shadows grew long, the waters black, and the trees leaned into forms that belonged to nightmare.
This image became my favourite of the trip, precisely because of its darkness. It evokes something primal—the fear of venturing into places where the light thins, where stories of witches and wolves once lived. It is the stuff of old fairy tales, meant to scare children into staying near the fire, meant to remind us that the world is wide, and wild, and not without danger.
Of course, the bayou has its own monsters. It is a favourite haunt of Sasquatch hunters, and whether you believe them or not, the real beasts are more than enough: alligators slip under the water without a sound, and alligator snapping turtles—the largest of them two hundred pounds—rest in the dark below. But the most destructive monster here isn’t a beast at all, but a plant. Giant Salvinia—Salvinia molesta—spreads across the surface, doubling in size every few days, choking out fish, birds, and the entire ecosystem. Texas fights it. Louisiana doesn’t. And so the monster grows.
The mirror in the water is clear, perfect, and terrible. Like the reflection in a darkened fairy-tale pool, it gives back more than it receives.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Late afternoon, the sun filtered through the trees and lit the Spanish moss until it seemed to glow from within. Spanish moss always moves me this way: a soft sadness, overlaid with wonder, mystery, and beauty. It feels like the trees are weeping.
I’m not the first to feel that way. There are stories woven into the moss. One tells of Gorez Goz, a Spaniard whose beard tangled in the branches as he chased a young maiden to the water. He died there, and his grey beard still hangs from the trees. Another comes from the native people of this place: a young couple in love, the woman struck by illness, the man burying her and cutting her hair to hang in memory from the cypress limbs. The moss is her hair, forever in mourning.
On this trip, I joined friends at a lakeside house. They had arrived a day before me. The place came with a jukebox, stocked with old country and 70s and 80s rock. We listened to it every night, and when I thought of a headline for this shot, it was a Beatles song that came to me: While My Guitar Gently Weeps. The moss, the stories, the music, the melancholy—it all tied together.
Read More: Storybook: The Hoh Rainforest
…The bayou is never the same twice—one hour it is golden, the next it is a dark mirror where myths take root.
Many-Colored Skirt
This one is from another year, another river—the Black River of eastern North Carolina. It was fall of 2020. The pandemic was long, travel was scarce, and I needed to move, to paddle, to photograph. I loaded the kayak and went in search of colour. By early November, most leaves had fallen, but some still clung stubbornly to the cypress.
One branch in particular caught my eye. It looked like an old woman in a worn but brightly colored skirt, swirling once more in memory of younger days. Perhaps I was stir-crazy, my imagination running loose. Perhaps. But in that moment, she was magnificent.
The mist in the photo was a happy accident. Water splashed on my camera lens, and in the cold, my attempt to clean it left a smear of condensation. What I thought was a mistake turned out to be a gift—the mist I had always wanted to capture, wrapping the dark water. It is the old grande dame cypress herself who remains the star, but the mist—accidental, fragile—makes her glow.
I hadn’t posted in a long while before this one. Momentum is a curious thing. Stop for a year, and the first step back feels impossible. But with this image, I crossed that threshold again. And maybe the next one will be easier.
Between Land and Water
The word bayou arrives already wrapped in mystery. Yet what it names is simple. Waters that move at the pace of breath, winding through marsh and channel. Spreading wide into lakes where the edges of land blur and surrender. Here, neither water nor earth reigns; they lean into each other, shaping and reshaping a world in slow negotiation.
Caddo Lake, stretched across the line between Texas and Louisiana, is one of the bayou’s great cathedrals, its bald cypress crowned in veils of Spanish moss. To call it a swamp would flatten its subtleties, to call it a lake would deny its reach. The bayou is always something between, and always something more—an ancient rhythm that holds its silence like a secret, seeping into anyone willing to drift long enough to hear it.
…Spanish moss hangs like a weeping veil, binding folklore to the branches of the cypress.
Echoes in the Bayou
As I look back across these images, I see not just the cypress and the moss, the reflections and the flames of autumn, but a series of thresholds. The bayou is always inviting us to cross them: from daylight into darkness, from reality into dream, from the ordinary into the uncanny. It is a reminder that the natural world has always been our first haunted house—alive with stories, thick with shadows, beautiful in its capacity to unsettle.
On Halloween, when the veil between what we know and what we imagine grows thin, I find myself returning to these waters. They are mirrors of our own fears and fascinations, places where myth and memory take root, where an old tree can become an ancient dame in her skirt of colours, where moss becomes a lover’s hair, and where reflections remind us that beauty is never far from dread.
The bayou holds its secrets, but it also gives them freely to anyone willing to linger in its silence. I leave it as I found it: luminous, ominous, unforgettable.
Read More: Caddo Lake: The Ghost Forest
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