Fog on Buzzards Bay
Fog on Buzzards Bay
Saturday we were treated to a beautiful sight as the sun slowly warmed the air above the cold waters of Buzzards Bay and the temperature variations triggered a thick, swirling fog. This wasn’t some boring whiteout fog, this was a constantly changing feast for the eyes. The fog highlighted rises in the land I’d never really noticed in the years I’d been coming here. It amplified the bells on the navigational buoys in the channel approaching the Cape Cod Canal and the sharp honk! honk! honk! blare of the foghorn on some unseen barge making its way up the channel telling whoever will listen that “I am operating astern propulsion”. Saturday morning was a day for radar if you dared to be out there at all.
I find fog to be fascinating. I once walked Bodhi in a fog so thick I couldn’t see five feet in front of me. I once launched a couple of eights full of rowers, realized that the fog was too thick for them to safely be out there, and couldn’t find them on the river. Thankfully they’d decided it wasn’t safe and had just gone back to the dock, but I spent 45 minutes slowly running up and down the river in my launch trying to find them. As I wrote in one of my first posts, when I was in St. Johns, Newfoundland I watched a fog roll in so quickly that I quickly that I wasn’t able to cover 200 hundred yards before everything was obscured.
Fog can be both dangerous and beautiful. It completely changes your perception of the world, and when it lifts it stays with you as a haunting memory. Some view it as sinister or terrifying, but I think it’s fascinating. I just don’t want to be stopped in the high speed lane of a highway with the people behind me seeing nothing but gray clouds in front of them.
I generally take weather as it comes. Really, what choice do we have living in the northeast? I try to enjoy the rain, snow or fog as much as I do those perfect sunny days or starry nights. Stoic philosophy dictates that we accept our fate in life. It is what it is. For me a cold, foggy morning on the bay was more interesting than a warm, sunny day might have been. Either way, the pictures speak more eloquently than I can, even if they don’t tell the full story.
