Fog

No Italics Necessary

It’s been two weeks of fog and I don’t know what to write about. The holiday season is pressing in with its expectations. The motorcycle has been quiet and to ride the bicycle is a challenge in enduring the cold. The blog is waiting. All of it creates this particular kind of hollow that needs filling. As I gaze out the window I see a redbud that has retreated into dormancy, stripped of its life affirming leaves. An acer holds fast to its red-orange leaves drained of chlorophyll. The redwood towers over all of this drabness, ironically, taking succor from the moisture that flattens the light.

The last of the citrus, Persian limes and Meyer lemons, have been harvested. The annuals and perennials that provided exuberant blush to the landscape just a few weeks ago have collapsed into a damp, dreary withering beneath leaves shed by the crepe myrtle, now barren. The last gasp white flowering begonias and lantana with enduring lavender or orange, yellow, and red sepals and leaves of deep green await a chilling frost to join its flowerbed mates. The azalea, ferns, and hearty primroses whose blossoms are only now awakening, give some relief to an otherwise fading landscape.

Living in an area surrounded by almonds, pistachios, walnuts, and other assorted deciduous fruit bearing orchards, dormancy is overwhelmingly apparent. Ornamental trees both native and cultivated non-natives, are taking on their winter semblance, stripped of energy producing leaves as well. Only the conifers that we barely keep alive during the brutally hot summers by inundating with the remnants of the previous winter’s snowfall that comes from their native Sierra Nevada appear to thrive.

Gardners revving leaf blowers and leaf collection machinery dispatched by the city to harvest their efforts break the muted neighborhood sounds. Dog walkers are shuttered in their warm homes, rather than brace the cold dampness. Even the playful cries of children at recess attending neighborhood elementary schools is vague, only occasionally do the high pitched squeals of little girls, likely chased by little boys, break through.

Crows squawk on their morning journey northeast and again on their return flight southwest before sunset. Flickers peck for insects on the dead birch branches. Sparrow hawks dispatch cedar waxwings down from the mountains – the waxwings drunk on fermented pyracantha berries, excreting everywhere. Squirrels from Rascal Creek scamper about storing the last of wild pecans in flowerbeds that become deeply rooted nuisances as they forget their larder and I try to extract them come spring.

Birds getting drunk, squirrels being squirrels, nature carrying on messily despite everything. Yet for all this dormancy and dampness, something else is happening. Even in the gray stillness, there’s an impulse to create light and warmth and community when nature withdraws. It shows up at Christmas, and exists across cultures. It’s what humans do when it’s dark and cold. It punctures the fog. People have been doing this for thousands of years. When it’s cold and dark, we light fires, we gather, we feast, we make noise and music. Decorating, celebrating, gathering is a kind of gentle rebellion against the dreariness. We refuse to just hunker down like dormant trees and wait it out.

Familiar carols and seasonal music create a soundtrack that the fog can’t quite muffle. Christmas has absorbed and carries forward these older winter traditions of light-making and gathering. Squawking crows, orchards of naked trees, bone chilling cold that penetrates, and those forgetful squirrels cannot stifle a spirit that the Christmas season evokes. I may find myself toasting the cedar waxwings, acknowledging that my spirit can be warmed by a yule log from without and a cup of eggnog from within.

Cheers and season’s greetings!

Sisyphus 12/5/2025

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.

Tag: Fog

Of This Specific Emptiness