The Romance of Fog

 

*💧🤍💧*

        I realize that not everyone loves fog. I am reminded of Huck Finn when he was rafting down the big river with Jim the slave saying, “durn fog!” Probably most drivers don’t like to be stuck in thick fog, especially on a dark night. Thank goodness for reflectors on the road and those bright white lines!
        Sailors don’t appreciate foggy times on the water. It has its hazards.
        I am also reminded of my mother’s impressions of the foggy, misty PNW when she was fresh from dry old southern Idaho. She said the fog hung in the tops of those tall firs like banners or curtains and it seemed so dreary to her she said.
        I, however, since they brought me here, have grown up in this place which is so misty on so many days, and I find it enchanting, even magical.

        Foggy days are soft. They’re quiet. All those tiny water droplets must muffle the sound somehow. It’s similar to the sound of a snowy day, but not so cold.
        Fog is white because of the size of the water droplets reflecting the light as they do. If the droplets reach too large of size they clump together and fall as rain.
        Interesting things happen in the fog. Of course, the Res was kind of out of the ordinary in some ways anyhow. But I remember a day when I had to drive the big GM van toward town, which was about 8 miles away. It was daylight, but a very foggy day. The air looked white and I couldn’t see very far down two lane Marine Drive. At a certain spot on the road a white horse stepped slowly across the road and headed into the deep forest. What? He looked like a hallucination. He was there and then he was gone. And where was he going? Horses don’t general frequent the thick forest. Do they?

        On another foggy day out there a white fox crossed the road in the same spot. Come on! Were they same creature wearing different clothes on different days or what? I started thinking that I might have seen a shapeshifter of some kind. I wasn’t really up on Squatches back then, but looking back I wonder. Who goes there?

        Then there are fog horns. If you have lived anywhere near the big water sometimes you can hear a fog horn, intermittently blowing its dull note. It’s an evocative sound. A marine sound.

        I love to see a train emerging from the fog. Reminds me of a Turner painting.

It seems to me to be a kind of magical matrix wherein you might expect to see or experience something beyond the normal events of a clear or sunny day. It looks like a fairy tale world. The eyes play tricks and perhaps the imagination also!

        I choose to remain charmed and delighted by that misty world.