The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg
It is quite early and the city is swaddled in a dense fog of the kind that wraps closely around those at street level and swallows building tops. I can well imagine that the view from the higher city hills will be of the inverse – a myriad of building tops aswim in a billowing white sea, their means of support and the activity in the streets hidden from view.
This morning’s fog is pervasive. I first noticed it on leaving my garage and it was omnipresent throughout my drive to work. From a car, fog is less interesting since headlights deny its mystery by converting semi-transparency into a dirty wall of reflected light. For its mystery is in its ability to obscure, but not block; to convert well-known and much-loved landscapes into slightly askew alternative universes: a mystery best enjoyed afoot because fog operates on all human senses, not just sight – sound is muted and its sources made difficult of location; dampness chills the skin as it refreshes the spirit; smells are simultaneously less strident while more miasmic; and the air has a faint aftertaste remindful of a sip of ice-cold water taken from the Spring run-off in a wild, stone-filled mountain creek.
Fog always reminds me of the perfect succintness of Carl Sandburg’s poem and of the lyrics of an under appreciated Thom Moore song as sung by Mary Black, the superb Irish songstress:
Some days the fog in Monterey comes
Blowing from the grove above, and then tears away
The drifting patches lift and fold
Then sunlight cuts them white and cold
In Monterey — fog comes, oh, then
It tears away
If simple truths are best, then it must be true that coffee secured by means of a morning’s fog-bound jaunt tastes far better than all other varieties due to its enrichment by Nature.
