Fog

 

Carolyn J. Rose

Awakened in the middle of the night, I didn’t need to open my eyes to know what the streetlamp would reveal. The fog horn on the Columbia River clued me in.

The sound took me back to my early childhood and a visit to relatives somewhere on Long Island. The deep and mournful fog horn was like nothing I’d ever heard. 

Not like the Woodstock fire siren that screamed every day at noon. Not like the beeps and honks of cars and trucks and tractors. Not like the throb of a police siren.

It was dark when I heard that fog horn years ago, so I didn’t see the fog. To my disappointment, it had lifted by morning. But I felt it must have been something spectacular to require a horn, something more than I saw in the Catskills. 

Fog there skulked through the trees, rising and falling and sifting to the ground again as if it had been scattered by a feather duster.

I can’t recall seeing fog when I lived in Arizona. And the fog I recall in Arkansas had a uniform quality, more like gray smoky air. Fog was rare in Albuquerque, but once appeared at the base of the Sandia Mountains in a thick band like a giant snake slithering along the foothills. “Smoke,” excited callers told emergency dispatchers. “Something is on fire.”

When we moved to Eugene, I experienced fog with a vengeance. In the Pacific Northwest, fog only occasionally comes in on those poetic little cat feet. Usually it rolls over us like a tsunami. In Eugene a tide of fog filled the valley, and stayed. And stayed.

It slid up the hills like an avalanche in reverse. It was dense and cottony and cold. It frosted limbs and lawns and reduced visibility to a few yards. 

Driving home from work along a road without striping was disorienting, surreal. Signs and side roads were invisible. Until they weren’t. Headlights appeared as blurry blobs floating in milk. Sounds were distorted. Distances uncertain. I’d roll my windows down and creep along, listening for the crunch of gravel indicating I was on the shoulder, monitoring any tilt from the horizontal that meant I’d steered too far toward a ditch.

The first few evenings I viewed the drive as an adventure. Then as an endurance test. Then, after two weeks or more, as a form of physical and psychological torture.

I still dream about that experience and wake up in a cold sweat. Especially on nights when the fog horn moans.