I Love the Fog

I woke up this morning in my little beach house by Salmon Creek and everything was bathed in pale gray fog.  There was a hush in the air and yet I heard the ocean roar in the distance ... maybe not roar, but rather gently rumble.  All the green plants close by were covered in dew as the fog shed its moisture, and the outside wooden deck felt cool and wet on my bare feet.  I can barely see the ducks in the estuary and can locate the snowy egret only because he is dramatically white amidst all the gray.  There is a little convention of wild birds on my deck pecking away at the the food I left them, the red wing blackbirds looking particularly elegant and dramatic in the mist.  This is just another Saturday morning at the beach.

When I was five or six I trudged to school in the fog, holding on to my Winnie the Pooh lunchbox, and I loved the feeling of camouflage that I experienced.  Ever the loner, I felt safe in this cloaked state.  I fell asleep at night at my Grandmother's listening to the song of the fog horns, which always seemed to be in a minor key.  I remember feeling that the moan of those horns was meant especially for me.  When I was older and living in North Beach on the eastern end of the city, I recall watching with excitement as rolling pillows of fog poured over Russian Hill to the west, coming toward us like the ocean in slow motion.

Though fog generally evokes the many years of my life in San Francisco, I've experienced it in England and Ireland, those beautiful rolling green landscapes bathed in moisture and reeking of the earth and placid sheep, and out on the water in Vietnam as we cruised Halong Bay in a junk exploring ancient islands, and obviously in places not clear in my memory at the moment.  This beautiful blanket of moisture has always conjured comfort and safety for me, a sense of being held in a benign cocoon.  And then there is the mystery of fog.  Think of a Sherlock Holmes film where the undaunted detective strides through the foggy wet London streets as the street lamps cast their eerie light here and there and remind us of danger.   Yes, comfort and mystery all in one ... The shades of gray in our lives.

I've always believed in the shades of gray, I think, perhaps because the confusion I was raised in offered no clear and safe points of reference.  And so I lived through days, months, and years of the gray, no anchor.  Eventually I got used to it because I had to.  A certain trust in the gray mystery came to influence my intellect, and became part of what I saw as true.  I remember numerous conversations with daughter number one when she was little, and later when she became a young adult, heated words about right and wrong and the great mystery in between.  She wanted to settle the questions of her world in black and white, and I kept telling her no, that was not the way the world worked.  The world was filled with mystery (which I continued to see as a benign fog), and that was o.k.  We could still find our way because we had reason and a determination to seek our own truth.  But of course she didn't come to wisdom because her mother pronounced it to her ... the path is more complicated than that.

The older we get the more we see the ambiguities and confusions underneath the big picture.  As I grow old and struggle with loss of vitality, connection, self assurance perhaps, the more my mind tilts inward, examining and weighing the quirkiness and complexity of my life.  I see how many detours were taken, promises abandoned, and points of view shifted.  At age twenty it is much easier to feel certainty and conviction about right and wrong because the world is narrower, less life has been lived;  by the time you get to sixty or seventy you see just how many different rights and wrongs are possible.  I think this has something to do with relativity, but I'm not going to  journey there.

The blackbirds are still doing their dance outside around the food dish, crimson red paint strokes flashing through their black wings as they flutter and argue.  The sun is beginning to push through the gray mist.  Pretty soon the ocean will be visible again and the water on the creek will be sparkling in bright light.  The soft fog blanket will eventually disappear and become a memory.  This makes most people smile and rejoice.  They want into the light.  And it's not that I don't want to see the sun, or feel its warm hand on my back.  It's all of a piece, really ... I (we) need it all:  inky dark night for our rest, fog shrouded morning where we hunker down with the thought anything is possible, and the sparkling day arriving, offering its unknown gifts ....  Just another Saturday at the beach.