Another Foggy Day in Sewanee

When I was fifteen, my parents got special permission to take me out of school for two weeks (which destroyed my grasp of Latin because I missed the teaching of the ut clause) so that I could join them and my oldest brother on a cross-country road- trip to California. There, my father was installed as President of the then National Paint, Varnish, and Lacquer Association.

The trip was terrific: we slept in a tepee motel; drove Route 66; counted cows and read Burma Shave signs; saw the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert; rode mules down into the Grand Canyon; visited Carlsbad Caverns from which thousands of bats flew at sunset; spent the night in Amarillo, Texas where I bought cowgirl pants; saw plenty of real Native Americans in Gallup, NM; ate Mexican food for the first time (at least my first time) in old town, Albuquerque, New Mexico; almost ran out of gas in the desert, where tumbleweeds and coyotes skipped about; ate bird's nest soup in San Francisco at a restaurant in Chinatown; and spent the day in Yosemite and the night in the old wooden lodge.

On that trip, I also saw fog for the first time I remember -- in Carmel, California, where Joan Baez, one of my heroines, lived. The fog rolled in, just as writers always described it, from over the Pacific and snaked through strangely shaped evergreen trees.

Now I live in a land of fog. A local coffee shop used to sell T-shirts that said, "Another foggy day in Sewanee." Despite weather reports that this weekend would be clear and beautiful (so my painters could work on my porch and deck), I awoke to one of our typically gray days. Actually, the fog today is light -- just wisps of cloud, through which almost everything is visible, at least the important stuff. As the trees top out, the fog grows heavier.

Once, I saw an almost black fog here, so thick I literally couldn't hold an arm out straight and see my hand at the end of it. Another time, the white fog was so thick that when I left on my commute, it took almost half an hour to get to the interstate instead of the usual ten minutes. Still another time, when I drove up the mountain, I came into a freezing fog: from about five feet up, the fog was instantly freezing everything, while below all was clear and unfrozen.

We have fog in the middle of the summer and in the dead of winter and at every time in between.

I love the fog: it dampens noise and provides a kind of earache without the ache or a bad cold without the discomfort, enclosing everyone and everything in a wrapping of dampening moisture that leads to reading and napping and staring. It's the perfect excuse for an indoor day of doing nothing.