FOG by Bill Capossere
“How can you find your way?” he said. “I lost mine.”
“There ain’t no fog can lose me,” she answered.
(Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Dawn of A To-morrow)
Once, driving along the Skyline Trail in northern Virginia, my friend Carl and I found ourselves so utterly caught in fog that the only means of ensuring our continued presence on the road was to slow to almost a walking pace. Carl leaned out the passenger door and called out directions, his head only a foot or so from the surface of the road as he struggled to find the white stripe marking its edge. The vehicle, a Volkswagen Cabriolet, was a small car to begin with but surrounded by the fog it seemed to sheer off just past the windshield. I felt I was driving one of those cars you sometimes see Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin driving in silent films – the ones that fall apart piece by piece around them until they are left sitting stunned in the middle of the road, wistfully spinning the steering wheel as if the ritual movement alone would reproduce the vehicle they had just been driving. Or better yet, like one of those same cars but in cartoon form where, rather than landing unceremoniously on the hard ground, the driver sails along in midair, blissfully unaware that all that remains of his car is the single piece he so serenely twirls in his hands. We know the driver could continue like that all day so long as he doesn’t violate the First Law of Cartoon Motion: a living creature moving unsupported through air will remain in motion until he/she/it looks down. But, of course, he/she/it always does.
Lost in the fog along the narrow roadways of the Virginia mountains, however, looking down was an option I neither wished to nor could indulge. My eyes burned from the strain, but I was afraid to rub them or turn them aside, afraid to close them even for a moment in case that was the second another car suddenly loomed before us, afraid to unlock my fingers from the wheel in case that was the second the road suddenly sloped away under the right front wheel.
Speed was a constant concern. Too slow would risk being struck from behind by a less cautious driver (not knowing then what we learned later – that the road behind had been closed to traffic), while too fast would chance blundering into the back of a slower-moving vehicle ahead of us. We discussed pulling over and waiting the fog out, except that meant trying to guess where the road ended and the mountainside began, and we had both seen before the fog fell how the shoulder’s width had been a constantly shifting ribbon, sometimes bordered by guard rails and other times not.
So we drove on. At times it was almost hallucinatory. The fog seemed to press heavily on the glass, seeping through unseen cracks, filling the interior with a slowly rising pool of moon-colored water. It became difficult to focus on anything; colors bled one into the other then simply disappeared. Red fed into black. Black silvered to gray. Gray bleached into white. We were leaking color like oil. Sight winnowed. Other senses followed. I couldn’t taste my tongue in my mouth, couldn’t hear the sound of the tires on the road. Even the pebbled rubber under my hands seemed far-off, distant, as if I were wearing heavy gloves. Eventually I couldn’t tell when my eyes moved. If they moved. Open, closed – there was no difference. One world was black and the other white. Otherwise they were the same – empty and inviting.
When I was a child I used to scare myself at night by staring at the wood paneling of my room until the whorls of grain disappeared and became instead horribly distorted faces – too long, with wide, screaming mouths and oval eyes. If I looked long enough though – and some nights I could – they too would disappear and I would be lost in a formless, colorless world, eyes open and unseeing, carried along by an unknown yet not unpleasant current. For two hours I drove like that, drifting in and out of reality, dragged back every few minutes by my friend’s voice as he yelled out directions, wiping his face of the water droplets that formed constantly on his skin as he moved through the heavy air, each of us seeking a more solid purchase in a world grown porous and damp.
The more I think about how nothing can be helped,
the faster the fog rolls in. And I’m glad when it gets thick enough
you’re lost in it and can let go, and be safe again.
(Chief Broom, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
When I think of fog, I think of it first in terms of cliché – a thick blanket of gray wool. Even the weatherman will stray at times from his technical talk of dew point and barometric pressure, will put aside his Doppler radar and “accuweathermap” to stroll for a moment into the poetic, talking about fog “blanketing the airport,” as if instead of adding even more danger to the routine but still risky task of taking off or landing an airplane, the fog were cozying up to the terminal, swaddling it in soft white layers. This is Carl Sandburg’s fog, coming in “on little cat feet,” or Eliot’s, that “Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,/And seeing that it was a soft October night,/Curled once about the house,/and fell asleep.” If you’ve ever been fogged in, you know that sense of languid intimacy and comfort, of being cut off from the world – its rough movement stilled, the chaotic chatter silenced.
Who hasn’t wanted to crawl inside sometimes and pull the mist in over your head, give up the weight of worldly concerns and responsibility? Chief Broom, hiding in the fog while the orderlies chased down the halls after their victims, knew the temptation of obscurement, the comfort of anonymity.
“Pretend I’m not here; go on without me,” you want to whisper, lying there hidden. And the thing is, they do. Lives go on. The world spins its hard ball all the same. And you remain undiscovered, fog-covered and free, and only a little dismayed at the world’s happy connivance, the ease of invisibility.
During the Revolutionary War, on August 29, 1776, a heavy fog allowed General George Washington and his outnumbered and near-defeated army to cross the East River to Manhattan without being discovered. “Providentially for us,” an American soldier would later remember, “a great fog arose, which prevented the enemy from seeing our retreat from their works which were not more than a musket shot from us.”
Wing forward now 165 years to a different war, a different water crossing, and yet here again are the English, though now they are not the enemy but our allies. It was the first week of June 1940 when a dense fog rolled in across the burning beaches of Dunkirk, holding the Luftwaffe in its hangars and hampering the German machine guns and artillery, while hiding in its depths more than 300,000 English, French, and Belgian soldiers as they day-by-day abandoned their gear and the beach, slipping away on board almost a thousand vessels, more than two-thirds of them small civilian crafts skippered by pilots who, probably for the first time in their nautical lives, whispered words of thanks for the cloaking presence of fog.
Fishing boats, tugs, personal yachts, even paddlewheelers and canoes braved the dangerous weather and crawled across the channel to where Allied soldiers stood in long lines of shoulder-deep water trying to pierce the smoke and fog with blood-shot and war-weary eyes. Meanwhile the German high command fretted helplessly beneath the adverse climate: “The bad weather has grounded the Luftwaffe,” the German Army Chief of Staff bitterly complained, “and we must now stand by and watch countless thousands of the enemy get away to England right under our noses.”
Among the last to be ferried across the channel to Dover was a five-year-old girl rescued from a Belgian farm. What a demon-haunted world it must have seemed to her still-forming mind: myriad shapes creaking out of the mists before her, sand and flames flying from the bombed-out beaches behind, and everywhere she looked rows and rows of men running from sand to water like human piers, some bent and bleeding, others, in the more surreal moments of a surreal landscape, heading a ragged soccer ball up and down the lines.
Under a clear blue sky it would have been the stuff of nightmare, yet limned as it all was in a pale white shroud, perhaps its horrors impressed themselves less sharply upon her senses. This sometimes is the promise of fog: everything seems to be happening somewhere else to someone else – lights gather a hazy corona, sound falls short; time slows and all the world seems the ineffectual cast of a fisherman’s spreading net.
Hey, you, get off of my cloud.
(Rolling Stones)
Comprised of minute water droplets suspended in the air and tethered to the surface of the earth, fog is just a cloud on a tight leash. In strict meteorological terms, fog is only fog when it reduces the visibility in the atmosphere to less than a kilometer. When the visibility is greater, it is technically fog’s lesser sibling, mist, who is still able to lord it over the smallest, thinnest member of the family – haze.
There are various types of fog, each determined by the forces which create it, all of them formed by the proximity of a warm to a cool surface. The one most of us encounter is ground or radiation fog, caused by cooling close to the earth’s surface. Once the sun goes down, the earth quickly loses its heat into the atmosphere, especially on clear nights when there are no clouds to reflect the heat back to the ground. As the air cools, becoming more dense and heavier than the air surrounding it, it sinks into the terrain’s low-lying spots. This is why driving through hilly areas, such as the drumlin-creased geography of upstate New York, we’re likely to find ourselves slipping free from fog again and again into moments of startling clarity as we crest the hills, then sink once more into the comforting concealment of ground mist and shadow.
Another type, upslope fog, occurs when air is forced by the prevailing winds up in elevation as it approaches mountains. This rise in elevation cools the air and results in the type of fog which one often sees on news reports showing sullen air travelers whose planes are standing idle at Denver airport.
Advection fog results when warm, moist air moves over a colder surface, such as icy water or land covered by snow. As the snow cools the lower layer of moist air, the air condenses into fog. In somewhat reverse fashion, evaporation fog is caused by cold air crossing over warmer bodies of water. The water’s moisture evaporates into the colder air which immediately condenses it into fog, causing the surface of the lake or river to look like it is steaming. Under the right conditions, this type of fog can form steam devils, tornado-like columns of mist which rise higher the greater the contrast between the air and water temperatures. Sometimes these spiraling columns of fog will seem to attach themselves to a low-flying cloud, so that earth and sky seem one vast cavern, arched and colonnaded by great swirling stalagmites and stalactites that dance one into the other, a phenomenon most often reported by gleeful pilots flying over the Arctic Ocean.
Advection/evaporation fog is somewhat less exhilarating below, to those powering across the surface of the water, especially in coastal areas where these types are most intense, such as along the banks of Newfoundland, one of the foggiest regions of the world and thus one of the most dangerous to shipping. It was here that the first lighthouses in America and Canada were built, though lighthouses were not a new concept; they and their keepers had been guiding sailors through fog since 280 B.C., beginning with the construction of the Pharos of Alexandria. Today, however, only one manned lighthouse, Boston Light, remains in the United States. All the others, 613 at last count, are automated, the lighthouse keeper gone nearly extinct.
The keeper kept the light in working order and was also responsible for the sound signal, used in addition to the light since in a heavy fog, even a modern light with 10 billion candlepower is barely visible from half a mile. The first fog signals were explosives (Boston Light used a cannon), but these were eventually supplanted by the foghorns one can still occasionally hear today sounding their extended, low doleful cries out across the water. Not for long, however; with modern navigational devices now required on all ships, the Coast Guard is phasing out foghorns due to their expense and because of complaints from seaside communities.
I, for one, will miss them. There are few things that capture the mournful ache, the sheer hollow weight of loneliness, like the long, low “beeeeoooooogggghhhh” of a distant foghorn. One feels it in the chest, less a sharp blow than a slow taking-hold, the way a surgeon might wrap his hand around a suddenly stopped heart before carefully trying to coax it back into motion. If I imagine the sound of that final beat – its trailing echoes that burst the heart’s own chambers then lose themselves in the corridors of the body – I hear in it the same prolonged cry that goes out on a fog-strewn evening to comfort and unsettle those lost upon the water, far from the familiarity of home, peering fearfully into the bemisted night.
But there went up a mist from the earth,
and watered the whole face of the ground.
(Genesis: Chapter 2, Verse 6)
Fall asleep on a dunetop in the Namibian Desert of Southwest Africa, and you’ll be wakened in the morning by a chilling pre-dawn fog, carried in by the cold ocean currents streaming along the western coast back to the equator. Lie there long enough, say until the tip of the sun begins to breach the horizon of sand, and you’ll find that you are no longer alone – the ground at your feet has suddenly begun to swarm with dozens of large black beetles, all of them scurrying to reach the top of the dune before the last tendrils of fog pass them by, looking like nothing so much as early-morning commuters rushing for the train.
Having attained the top, they stop, turn and, just before the next fogbank hits, stand on their heads. This is not mere gymnastic giddiness at the dawn of a new day, but is instead a miracle of evolutionary adaptation: their shiny black carapace is a perfect vehicle for condensation – as the morning mist washes over their inverted bodies, a single drop of water forms on the glossy surface and slowly slides down the tilted back to their waiting mouths. It will be enough water to last them an entire day in the desert. Manna from heaven.
Scientists are just now beginning to learn the part fog plays in the planet’s cycle of life. Redwoods, for example, grow only in foggy areas, in desperate need of as much moisture as they can wring out of the sky in order to sustain their growth. A giant redwood, in fact, can act as its own rainmaker. The tree’s needles, enveloped in a layer of fog, collect water vapor, which, as it condenses, drips down and off the needles to the ground, watering the root system below.
While for the redwoods this acts as a supplement to the regular rainfall, some plants subsist solely on fog, as in the desert of northern Chile, sandwiched between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean. Less rain falls here than anywhere else in the world thanks to the mountains, which prevent moist air from entering the region from the east, and the cold water of the Humboldt Current, which wrings all the rain from the clouds over the ocean before they strike land. Instead of rain, therefore, the vegetation of the region relies on the “camanchaca” – the recurring coastal fog that condenses on their spines, needles, or leaves and is just about their sole source of life-giving water.
It took several centuries of coexistence, but the people in the area are finally starting to learn from the plant life. The small mountain village of Chungungo, which once used to truck water in weekly from miles away, now mines the very air for water. About four miles from the town, the villagers have set up seventy-five sheets of nylon mesh, each sheet measuring forty feet by thirteen feet. As the camanchaca moves in from the coast, it condenses along the netting and drips down to the bottom, where the water is collected, filtered, and piped to the village below. On a good day, the nets can collect sixteen thousand gallons of water, or forty-eight gallons for each of the 330 inhabitants of the town. For families who once measured their daily water usage in quarts rather than gallons and who spent up to ten percent of their yearly income on purchasing even these meager amounts, the water which now funnels into the village must seem truly heaven-sent. Now, most homes have running water taps and the villagers are able to divert water to lush vegetable gardens and colorful flower gardens, luxuries which they couldn’t even have considered in the years before the fog collection began.
Interest in the Chilean experiment grew so high that in 1998, Robert S. Schemenauer, a research scientist and major organizer of the project in Chungungo, chaired the world’s first conference on fog and fog collection, held in Vancouver. There, scientists from across the globe watered their drinks and traded presentations on:
the physics and chemistry of fog, the capture and use of fog water by vegetation, the effects of acidic fogs on vegetation, the construction and use of fog collectors, the importance of fog water to ground water supplies, the forecasting of fog, the managed use of fog water in fog collection projects, and the role of international institutions in developing the use of fog as a water supply for the next century. (“Fog Collection’s Role”)
Scientists have reconvened every three years since. Meanwhile, Dr. Schemenauer’s newly formed nonprofit organization, Fogquest, continues to fund and advise fog collection projects in water-poor areas such as Guatemala, Peru, and Namibia, among others, easing the lives of thousands.
It must seem nearly a miracle to those people, whose ancestors thousands of years ago prayed, danced, and sang, as well as performed other less-benign rites, in attempts to mollify those rain gods whose names sound as hard and dry to us as the very land, their very hearts: Chac, Tlaloc, Cocha. Aloof they were, unconcerned and unhearing, as perhaps one might have predicted of a pantheon born in such parched land, evidence enough it would seem of an indifferent universe. The universe, though, does not engender the gods meant to represent it; it takes a human touch to create gods not merely indifferent but cruel. For they didn’t simply withhold the rain, they dangled it in curtains of promise above the Pacific, then, with it nearly in desperate reach, dispersed it to the air and wind, carrying it over the thirsty land in its most tenuous form, a perverse diffusion of hope – tendrils of vapory possibility that dampened the upraised face, then slipped softly away over the skin and through the fingers, air laden not with water, but water’s gray ghost.
One wonders what those gods, looking down at their tantalizing mists tamed and collected by a simple net, think now – their cosmic mockery thwarted by the minds of mere mortals. Though I think we can guess; our gods have always been jealous guardians of power.
Who has put wisdom in the clouds,
or given understanding to the mists?
(Job 36)
It took Raven, the creator/trickster god of the Tlingit tribe, many days to sweep the early world clean of fog, flying high above the primal mists and dispersing them with each beat of his powerful wings until finally the first lands began to appear. Fog wreathed the world in Chinese mythology as well until Pangu, the first being, began to swallow those clouds which flew into his mouth while he struggled over thousands of years to separate the earth and sky. By the time he was done, the heavens were far out of our reach, the stars, sun and moon were hung, and only a few clouds remained to come between us and their light.
The Norse, who gave us our word for fog (from fjog or fjug, meaning a thin layer of cloud), found room in their pantheon of worlds for an entire land of fog. Niflheim was a cold, cheerless place, watered by eleven rivers whose poisonous vapors rose and fell into a thick layer of ice. Where the heated air from Muspellheim touched the frozen waters, the ice ran, forming the first beings – the giant Ymir and the cow Audhumla, from which Ymir nourished himself. From Ymir sprang the race of Frost Giants, while from the ice which Audhumla licked emerged Buri, grandfather to the Norse gods, who in turn created man and woman.
Niflheim would later become the land of the dead, the holding place for those unlucky enough to have died of old age or sickness. Ruled there by Hel, goddess of death, they wandered lost in the fog and frost until Ragnarok, when the world would be consumed in flames and sink into the sea, only to rise again brightly green out of the weaving mists.
The Mayans also birthed their world from the insubstantial mists. Out of their swirling patterns were born the seas and rivers, the mountains and valleys, the world gaining more and more solidity as it was shaped hard and round by the same Creators who later made the animals, and then mankind. All was perfect until the Creators began to worry that perhaps mankind had been formed too well. They became frightened of the First Fathers’ farsight and wisdom and so took away the Fathers’ knowledge by blowing a blinding fog into their eyes, leaving them ignorant and dull of vision, no longer a threat.
How like the gods, I thought, when I read this, to hoard wisdom like gold behind their walls, always the same old story. Even as a child I had bristled at the idea, browsing through the children’s Bible in my pediatrician’s office or sitting in my short-lived religion class after school, listening to the instructor read from the King James Book of Genesis: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever: therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden.” At seven or eight, I may not have understood theology, but I’d been pretty well indoctrinated by both my parents and my teachers in the concept of sharing: whether it was hoarded Matchbox cars or the Tree of Life, I recognized selfishness when I saw it.
And fear. Fear I saw replayed throughout so many of the myths I read as I grew. What is it, I wonder, that so alarmed the gods they felt the need to banish us from paradise, pilfer our sight, scatter our languages, keep us bowered in night and darkness: “[Zeus] would not give to wretched men who live on earth, the power of fire . . . but Prometheus deceived him, and he stole the ray, farseeing, of unwearied fire . . . and Zeus . . . raged within to see the ray of fire farseeing, among men” (Hesiod 41).
Sitting in their mountaintop palaces high above the clouds, walking to and fro in the hazy day of the world, what was it they saw in this crude race they themselves had lifted from the mud of the earth? Did their keen ears, their far-sighted vision divine even then what was stalking through the mists of time: the burning ships and fired towers, fields irrigated in blood, the clank of chains and the hawker’s cry, bursting bombs, the day-to-day monotony of genocide? Did they anticipate even then Jack sliding out of the fog in Whitechapel, the whisper of knives against silk and skin?
Though better I suppose to ask that of those who create the creators – what is it we fear so much in ourselves that we repeatedly invent the same wary gods walling us off from knowledge: Adam and Eve expelled, Prometheus chained, Babel overthrown? What is it we see in the mirror that drives us to reimagine again and again the same cautionary tale against looking too closely, against too sharp a vision: Lot’s wife turned to salt, Eurydice gained and lost in a moment’s glance, Semele burnt to ash by the lightning glimpse of Zeus’ true self, Oedipus blinded by his own hands.
Beware the world gone clear, the stories say, its jagged points and undulled edges. What is it that you would see? What is it that you would know? If the veils of fog could be sheared from your eyes for a single standing moment, what robed and swinging corpse would cause you to pull them back across your shaken pupils, though brooches of gold were your only means?
The world will end in fire or ice, says Frost, but it is born from fog and we with it, of mud and mist we are wrought, neither solid nor sure; we are formless at our core and we use the fog as much to hide from what potential lies inside as from what may lurk in its folds beyond our eyes.
For the Mayans, living as they did in the jungle, where jaguars stalked on silent paws through the slanting mists and enemies could creep under cover of mountain fog to their very doorstep, the gods’ theft of piercing vision must have seemed an especially harsh punishment to bear. Day after day, faced with the jungle’s hidden dangers, how they must have yearned for a land of clear horizons and dazzling clarity. Yet at night, faced with the tenebrous forests of their own minds, how they must have thanked the gods for ungranted wishes and obscured lives.
What is your life?
For you are a mist that appears
for a little time and then vanishes.
(James 14)
It was the early seventies, before the fitness trend had really taken off, or at least before it had become fashionable, and my father and I were both simply dressed in a pair of blue shorts and a white tee-shirt. I don’t know what he was wearing on his feet, but mine were the same sneakers I wore every day to school, as well as to play football, soccer, or basketball. Footwear designers had not yet figured out the concept of sport shoe specialization. I’m not sure there even were footwear designers then.
I tried not to yawn as he warmed up with some stretches, not wanting to be banished back upstairs where my older sister and two younger brothers were still deep asleep, my mother as well – or at least pretending so. But the house was quiet, the only sound the rhythmic rasp of his murmured counting, and it was easy to become mesmerized by the bob of his head as he bounced his splayed fingers just over his toes, easy to get drawn in by the small circle of skin just visible in the middle of his thinning hair, the one part of him that was thinning he’d say, and so I did not notice when he finished and moved to the door, opening my eyes only at the sudden breeze which blew in across my skin.
It was early summer, still cool enough in the mornings to be a shock to the system, and the two of us shivered for a moment on the porch steps, then began a small-stepped trot down the driveway to the road, taking more steps than necessary and windmilling our arms to warm our bodies. When we reached the end of the driveway, marked by the pine tree he and I had planted together four years earlier, we moved off to the right with him on the outside, between me and the center of the road.
The morning sun was not yet strong enough to burn off a lingering fog and the combination of gray mist and morning lethargy kept us both quiet as we ran. I’m sure it seemed longer then, but looking back, it clearly took only a few hundred yards for me to realize that my small steps were going to have a hard time keeping up with my father’s. At the cross-point of our street, which formed a large capital A, we agreed that he would continue around the block while I would take the cross street and wait for him on the other side.
I watched him move off away from me into the sun and fog. When he was nearly out of sight, his white shirt blending into the mist that hung like Sunday’s wash across the street, I began to move off. The cross street was only four houses long, but I took my time walking to the other end. No use running now, especially since the grass was still too wet to sit on. When I reached the corner I stood leaning against the street sign and waited.
Looking back through the years and the mist of memory, I can barely see him: the eleven-year-old boy standing shivering against the sign, its pole wet from the morning fog leaving a spreading line of damp down his back. I would call to him if I could, offer a voice to navigate by, a flash of light promising eventual harbor, a hand to pull him free of what is about to rise around him.
But even in memory it is already too late. For just rounding the bend and heading back toward him comes his middle-aged father, carrying his extra weight in front – a line of sweat running from his neck to his waist. In a few months, he will be dead. And in the years to follow, a haze will slowly settle over the boy. He will lose in it first his father’s voice, then his hands, and finally even his face. Sometimes, at night, he will reach for them and they will slip through his fingers, leaving the merest sensation of moisture across his skin.
When his mother dies, three years after his father, and it begins again – all the grim attrition, the winnowing in the mist, he will fear then that the fog has gathered for good; that try as he might he will not ever pierce its cover, and his world will grow gray and damp and his life become the color of marrow.
It does not happen, I would tell him if I could. Time does heal all wounds, the mists will lift. But not all wounds that heal are free from pain, and mist and fog will find their phantom way through the merest crevice of your life, will coil slow around your core, and engender there forever a flickering cold, memory’s tendriled ghost that will not be ignored.
Shall I therefore cloud this new dawn o’er
With fog of futile sighs and vain regrets?
(Don Marquis, Dreams and Dust)
We didn’t tumble over the mountain in the fog along the Skyline Trail. Carl and I managed to find our way instead to a hotel parking lot some miles down the road, where we parked the car and exited, sliding one hand along the slick metal until we met at the front of the car, then moved off together toward where we guessed the hotel might be, walking close enough so that our shoulders brushed now and then with the bounce of our steps. Had either of us moved more than two feet away, he would have been invisible to the other.
As invisible as we grew, in fact, one to the other. Words had always been the link between us – friends who were would-be writers, writers who would be friends – but then the words somehow ran out, leaving us two blank pages that pass in the shuffled story of our lives, two unseen strangers going by in the mist.
In third grade my best friend, the first I can recall, was Johnny Pratchell. In fourth grade it was Peter Halter, my next-door neighbor whose window was close enough that we could throw Hardy Boy books and GI Joes back and forth across the gap between our yards. In sixth grade Charlie Hixon. Or maybe Dan Marcellus, who along with twenty or so other classmates signed a letter of consolation after the death of my father. Johnny, Charlie, and Dan all moved away, but even before, we had pretty much put each other away like old toys.
The world is a foggy place. And moments spin into days into weeks into months and time begets nothing so well as regret and loss and I have spun both about me like filament like cotton like tendrils of fog like fog that falls heavy into the hollow places of the earth and the heart. I have spun from fog the whole cloth of my life and there are times I fear its white, white unraveling.
And yet.
There is this truth as well. The world is three-quarters water, water that rises as vapor, then as clouds, then as fog, fog that unravels and falls as salt-mist on the face before it is carried away and down to the seas and oceans, from whence it rises once more. And what then of ourselves, more than half made of water, water more tightly bound, but water all the same? We drift one into the other and away, blending our liquid hearts, raining sweat and tears on the ground, bequeathing our blood, moving toward an inevitable dissolution while breathing upon the air a steady respiration that falls on us all, falls on all the living and all we leave behind – all our dry and dusty bones, a single shared exhalation ever descending upon this fallow earth like a watering fog full of human breath and their gods’ own wonder.
WORKS CONSULTED
Caswell, Helen. Shadows from the Singing House: Eskimo Folktales. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1968.
Evans, Ivor Ed. Brewers Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1981.
Holford, Ingrid. Guiness Book of Weather Facts and Feats. London: Guiness Limited, 1982.
Lemoine, J. M. Chronicles of the St. Lawrence. Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1878. Google Books. 12/6/08 http://books.google.com/books
———. Memoirs of the Long Island Historical Society Vol. III, “The Campaign of 1776.” Brooklyn, NY, 1878.
Mooney, Michael. “Come See the Camans.” Americas Vol. 47, No. 4 (1995): 30–38.
“Nora McCarthy, 40 Years Later, Memories Alive–Survivors recall Andrea Doria.” Newsday (26 July 1996): A35.
Osgood, James R. The Maritime Provinces: A Handbook for Travelers. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1875.
Peissel, Michael and Allen, Missy. The Encyclopedia of Danger: Dangerous Natural Phenomena. NY: Chelsea House Publishers, 1993.
Schemenauer, Robert. “Collecting Mists from the Earth.” Compass (Nov/Dec 1995): 19.
———. “Fog Collection’s Role in Water Planning for Developing Countries.” Natural Resources Forum (1994): 91–100.
Schlatter, Thomas. “Fall Fognadoes.” Weatherwise Vol. 48 (20 Oct. 1995): 38.
Tricot, Luis. “Drinking fog.” World Press Review Vol. 40 (1 Jan. 1993): 47.
Wheeler, Wayne. “The History of Signals I.” The Keeper’s Log Vol. VI, No. 4 (Summer 1990): 20–24.
———. The History of Signals II.” The Keeper’s Log Vol. VII, No. 1 (Fall 1990): 8–17.
Bill Capossere’s work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine “Readings,” Colorado Review, Rosebud, Bayou, and in two anthologies: Short Takes and Imaginary Writing.