Fog

Between snowfalls this week have been above-freezing periods when fog forms above the snow cover. This is the beginning of the spring fog season, despite the six inches of snow on the ground.

Fog season lasts from the first gray-on-gray snow mists of February through the gray-on-green mists of June, giving way only to the dryness of deep summer. During that time mists cluster nightly in hollows. At dawn they creep up hillsides to dissipate in orange sparkles as they encounter sunlight. The mists skitter across the roads or foment inside shrub clusters. Never predictable, yet always soft, mists are a constant of the spring here. I live on a knoll above hollows, streams, woods, and a winding road, so I have seen all these kinds of mists from inside, beside, and above.

Friends of mine have described living inside a disease as being in a fog. The metaphor is spoken as if it is a sadness. I think I agree there is a foglike quality to the reality of any trauma, emotional or physical, but sadness oversimplifies the accuracy of the metaphor. I have known moments of beauty that could have occurred nowhere else but from inside, beside or above a mist.

Once I was weeding at dawn in a mist so thick I could see only the flower bed and a few vague blots that were trees. I was clipping grass away from the rocks with shears when I noticed that every time I snipped, a mocking bird answered. I played with the bird. Me: snip; bird: snip. Me: snip, snip; bird: snip, snip. We sat invisible to each other, calling and responding a metallic music for many minutes. If the bird could have seen me, it would not have been tricked into singing with me. Only the mist let us come together.

Another time, I was up at the top of my knoll. A mist filled the valley below me stopping just at my feet. I stood in the clear before a cloud that looked solid enough to walk on. Above the fog was a full moon and inside it were hundreds of fireflies, small points of bright clarity, rising in syncopated flickerings toward the moon. Traumas are like that, illusions of solidity filled with glints of pure clarity.

Above: Bridge in Fog, digitally altered photo of a trestle  over the Skagway River. Original photo was taken on a trip I made to Alaska in 2003. Copyright 2010 ptw.