“One
day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a
cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to
warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the
fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all
night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in
autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound
like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound
that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in
their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to
all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and
they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of
eternity and the briefness of life."
- Ray Bradbury, The Fog Horn
“The
fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent
haunches and then moves on.”
- Carl Sandburg,
1916 Chicago Poems, Fog
My place is a place of fog and mists. Now
that the autumn season has begun, mornings often begin within the deadened,
smothered silence of fog. Upon waking, I feel the strange hush – no train
sounds, no birdsong, the muffled hiss of morning traffic.
My world diminishes to what I can see
within the bounded obscurity of the verges of the fog bank. Within the fog, what are usually the normal
scuttles and flutters of the beginning mornings become heart-skipping thumps
and thuds. Horror movies and such use the instrument of fog to good advantage.
Sound is blunted but underscored; innocent, ordinary forms loom out of the murk
abruptly and unpredictably. A simple tree, ignored in the usual transparency of
bright sunlight, appears portentous, impending, startling me as though it has
not been in the same place each and every day.
Cold sweat and disquietude aside, I do
love the fog. I love how the world becomes temporarily black and white, like an
artsy Parisian photo – all lines and shadows and contours. I love how fog
softens the world, taking the jangle of our lives and dissolving it.
I used to tell my children that fog was a
cloud that had fallen down. So, if that is true, then when walking through a
fog, you may stumble upon angels.
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