Alexandersmap

    Tag: Fog

    • A Walk in Dense Fog

      The dense fog presses up against the glass, tapping on the window lightly, wanting to come inside. Or calling me outside. I listen and layer up for a walk to the bay. I know it’s out there, if only from memory. And walk slowly to the water.

      The fog comes
      on little cat feet.
      It sits looking
      over harbor and city
      on silent haunches
      and then moves on.
      Carl Sandburg, Fog

      The birds carry on their morning song, but not so many today. Early still. What does 98% humidity sound like? It sounds like it looks; muted and disorienting. I close my eyes and let my bearings reset. I’m the only human outside this morning. Or possibly one of thousands – who can tell in the gray billowing dance?

      Down by the water, surprising wave action on a still morning. The bay is restless, like a sleeping child with a fever. Fog blurs hard lines. Instead I focus on what it amplifies. The lapping sounds of the waves slapping on the beach. A loon hidden from view out there somewhere calling its kind. Reaching me.

      Walking up from the shore, the sweet smell of dune grass requests a moment of my time. I gladly linger and thank the grass for the invitation. The air feels different as you walk away from the beach. The waves recede, birdsong grows and the world brightens. Dawn is approaching even as the fog asserts its hold on the world.

      Much later, fog lifting, you see the details fill in. I admit I liked the ambiguity of the fog just a bit more. If only for a momentary change in perspective. And, ironically, the clarity it brought. Swirling in the darkness by the bay.

    • 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.