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Essay: Embracing Fog

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It’s January and the pea soup is upon us. Read how one local citizen copes.

Back in my younger years, I had a boyfriend who, for a time, resided in a vintage Airstream on a slough south of Sacramento in the Delta. He and the Airstream hunkered down on a low-lying section of Ryer Island that faced two obstacles every winter: too much rain and too much fog. Both could be deadly.
But because I was young and crazy, I’d make the winter drives from Sacramento to Ryer Island, taking at least one and sometimes two ferries to get there. Most of the year, the journey was heavenly. I love the rivers that feed and surround us, that bless and curse us depending upon their moods. In winter, however, I made many unwise drives along tiny roads atop precarious levees in heavy fog, often in the deepest dark of night.

I would sometimes crawl along those roads in my tiny Honda, desperate for clarity, something to guide me through the thick, cold air, or at least for a helpful car—even a truck—to follow, grateful for the lights of Sacramento when they appeared in the distance. I was terrified, every time.
And one foggy night just before I left for home, this boyfriend said to me, in a rare Zen moment (or perhaps a sarcastic one), “You need to embrace the fog.”

So I tried that very night, breathing deeply as I careened around the sharp curves of the levees, knowing the thick wall would occasionally break open into clean dark. I learned to have faith in the drive, tried to find metaphor in journeying without seeing clearly, decided I would not be intimidated by a high-pressure cloud trapped on the ground.

It was the beginning of one Central Valley girl’s quest to embrace the fog.
Fog does not come on little cat feet here. With apologies to Carl Sandburg, ours, as every local knows, arrives by dump truck, as if celestial beings backed up a super-duper big loader and deposited pile after pile of thick white mist that instantly gets sucked to the ground.

You say “fog” to people from Nebraska and they think San Francisco—wispy, slow-moving, low-hanging clouds that drift lazily and, with luck, lift into sparkling cold blue skies.

We know better.

We know that fog means tule, and we don’t mean elk. We know fog as a dense curtain that hits the ground with a thud and stays there. For days and days and days. We know the experience of driving to Auburn or El Dorado Hills just to catch a glimpse of sun. I have friends who linger under their “happy lights” for much of January to lift their spirits.

It’s a tough, tough month, no matter how you cut it.

Although I have been known to decamp to Hawaii, when possible, in early January, that still leaves approximately two to four weeks to practice embracing the fog. Here’s some of what I do:

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