"On little cat feet" not

Just before suddenly unmooring myself from the familiar topography and community of the island and journeying to the far-off desert Southwest for the most difficult of reasons – a medical emergency with my father – I was writing about fog. Here in Phoenix where the temperatures for more than a week have routinely topped 110, I’m told that, though uncommon, the city does get fog. Usually it occurs in the winter months and only after rain, when temperatures are cool enough to equal the dewpoint and moisture in the air condenses. 

As if the landscape here and the dizzying amount of jammed freeways and unfettered development are not disorienting itself, all of it overlaid with medical-jargonned prognoses and uncertain outcomes, that most estranging of terrains, I’m not sure what I’d make of it all were I to have to navigate my way through a dense, literal fog. Not that I imagine an Arizona fog can boast any resemblance to a true Maine pea souper.

Yes, northeast Atlantic fog can be reduced to a simple combination of meteorological and topographical elements – the offshore confluence of warm Gulf Stream and icy Labrador Current – but it’s hard not to think that our fog is like no other. And that, from our Big Granddaddy of fogs, all others spring, or, at the very least, are mere puny imitations.

In my native Chicago hunkered on Lake Michigan, we commonly enough are shrouded in fog. Famously, Carl Sandburg wrote of it:

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

 over harbor and city

 on silent haunches

 and then moves on.

 An island fog seldom arrives on little cat feet.  Nor is it polite. Waking to a heavy white scrim, we discover it's barged in unannounced overnight, has already unpacked its bags and, like an unwelcome houseguest, threatens to stick around. Or, even as the sun shines warmly on our heads, we watch as, out to sea, a wall of fog advances toward land with undaunted determination and purpose. The air grows chilly, colors fade, edges become vague, the horizon disappears. It’s hard to tell where things begin or end. A first luminous white becomes a dense, gray blanket. The world, soon enough, is reduced. Maine poet Philip Booth more accurately depicts our kind of fog, so thick, he writes, “that if you got to shingling your roof/you’d shingle four courses out onto/the fog before you fell off….”

Of this kind of fog, you’re likely to hear one itchy harbor-bound lobsterman ask another, “Seen your boat lately?”

No matter how long it sticks around – and whoever believes a stretch of fog must surely be followed by a batch of fine, clear weather doesn’t know Maine – there are of course the chance rifts when, as though veils are pulled back, we catch glimpses of the larger world that is still out there.  Though more than just a nuisance to fishermen or others who work outdoors or have to travel, being “thick o’fog” does increase a house’s snugness and may allay some of our guilt that we’re not out mowing the lawn or slapping another coat of paint on the house.

Often, it doesn’t help much to strain to see in a thick, stick-around kind of fog attempting to blot out just about everything. In it, only sound magnifies. But of course it’s hard to move toward something you cannot see. If, say, you’re not a lobsterman who almost seems able to navigate rocky shoals by feel, but you’re on a boat and lucky, you may be able to hear the clang of a channel marker, the steady bleat of a horn that will help tell you where you are. Boundaries, dissolved, will make themselves known. Hidden, indecipherable shapes will once again solidify.

In far-off Arizona, in unfamiliar landscape and hostile terrain, I’m listening and waiting for the fog to lift.

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