“Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it roils defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ‘prentice boy up on deck. Chinese people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.”
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
A miracle has occurred: morning has broken without the accompaniment of a blanket of fog; in fact, without the least hint of fog. For the first time in many days, fog has not beset Humptulips County so that even the nearest trees lack definition or, on some days, even outline.  Only high clouds remain this morning to remind us that the mists are still close by, gracious in their restraint but laden with threat.
Fall is often a time of heavy morning fogs here in Humptulips County, fogs that typically disappear into the advancement of mornings. They are often localized to boggy areas or to the shorelines of rivers or lakes, and since the Farm has one boggy area and is near to the river, we are often blessed by their magic. The fogs of the last fortnight, however, have enjoyed epic staying power, remaining with us for entire days as if we were being treated to a perpetual overnight. All of Puget Sound and its adjacent lands to a depth of thirty to fifty miles have been blanketed and muted, swaddled and cocooned.
The fogs have been so deep that I have felt as if I should be preparing for a trip to the Chancery Court, that I was faced with making a presentation in the matter of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce and was unprepared even for such a smallish bit part. However, since the matter has been toiling on for some 200 years by now, and since none of the litigants could remember what the matter was about even when Dickens first described it, I haven’t been overly concerned about my lack of preparedness, just mildly bothered. I began my preparation for the Chancery Court this morning in the dark hours, in my anticipation of the morning’s fog we were assured of by the weatherman, by re-reading the first chapter of Bleak House – only to find when the sun finally rose that I had been freed of obligation.
While I enjoy the fog for its hints of things fey, after several days of its unrelenting presence the atmosphere becomes heavy with an assumed, undefinable dread. Things lurk in the fog. Things lurk in the fog even when they haven’t the least disposition to lurk. Ordinary things assume cloaks of extraordinary shapes and loom suddenly as if springing from ambush, when they want nothing more than to be at peace and have ordinariness re-established as quickly as possible. Nothing is as it should be; nothing acts as it should act; and nothing is often as startling as if it were something.
So I am pleased to see a day without fog announce itself, pleased to see the dawning of a typical mid-fall day: to be certain, a variant B mid-fall day, the sort with only a threat of rain, as distinguished from a Variant A mid-fall day, the more usual sort replete and resonant with rain from dawn until dusk. For either variant constitutes an ordinary mid-fall, Humptulips County day, days full of wetness or of the augury of wetness, days lacking a sustained, lurking dread.
