Fog

No Italics Necessary

Fog

The gray mask of the fog, the pale plate of the sun,
The dark nudeness of the stripped trees
And no motion, no wave of the branch:
The sun stuck in the thick of the sky and no wind to move it
The sagged fence and the field
Do not remember the lark or her mate or the black lift of the rising crows,
The eye sees and absorbs; the mind sees and absorbs;
The heart does not see and knows no quickening.
There has been frog for a month and nothing has moved;
The eyes and the brain drink it, but nothing has moved for a number of days;
And the heart will not quicken.

William Everson

The tule fog arrives like a whispered incantation, stealing across California’s Central Valley on phantom feet. It is no ordinary mist—this is fog with weight and presence, a living shroud that swallows orchards whole and erases the horizon line between earth and emptiness. The fog denies fellowship with lunar transit; phases of the moon marking the progress of the month. Denied also is communing with emerging winter constellations scoring the progress of the seasons.

Born from the marriage of high atmospheric pressure, cold winter air and moisture rising from irrigated fields, it pools in the valley’s basin like spilled cream, thick enough to taste. Tule fog doesn’t drift like the summer coastal fog, so much as settle, heavy and deliberate, transforming familiar landscapes into liminal spaces where distance loses all meaning. A grove of almond trees becomes a procession of gray ghosts. Highway signs emerge from the white only to vanish again, oracles speaking their warnings to no one. Even Christmas lights appear diffused, in soft focus, haloed as if the fog absorbs their illumination.

There’s something primordial about tule fog, something that predates the geometric precision of modern agriculture. It takes its name from the tule reeds that once dominated the valley’s marshlands—those ancient wetlands now mostly drained and paved, yet the fog remembers. Each winter it returns like a revenant, reclaiming the valley floor, asserting the old wilderness beneath the cultivated rows.

In the half-light of winter dawn, the fog transforms the mundane into the mythic. Travelers become pilgrims crawling through an achromatic dream. Sound behaves strangely here—absorbed, muffled, made intimate. The world contracts to whatever small circle of pavement your headlights can carve from the white.

And then, just as mysteriously as it descended, the fog lifts, burned away by afternoon sun or banished by wind, leaving only damp memory on fence posts and a peculiar clarity to the air, as if the valley has exhaled.