Fog

Fog Series by Stephen Cummings CC-BY 2.0

We woke up this morning to a thick fog descended upon our neighborhood. Driving to work, I strained ahead to catch the flash of brakes or the traffic signal which I knew existed but could not see until I was only a handful of car lengths away.

At ground level and walking pace, the cloudy mist left a cool dampness on my bare arms and shrouded the buildings across the river with a filtered light that briefly made one question the existence of actual bricks and glass. The scene from our sixth-floor office windows presented a virtual late-summer snowscape, nothing but white visible when looking out over the city.

Growing up, my mom drove us to school, which took us past her campus-style corporate complex. Her offices sat back from the road enough that on foggy mornings like today the buildings would be indiscernible. Sometimes, the closest structure would loom out of the haze just as we passed by, a sudden presence on the left side of the road. We would joke that if Mom couldn’t see her office, she didn’t really have to go to work that day, although that never seemed to serve as a good excuse to get us out of school on the same mornings.

Two and a half decades later, I found myself in downtown Cincinnati, early for a morning meeting and craving a caffeine fix. Walking through Lytle Park, the same fog that hid office buildings in my childhood was cloaking the skyscrapers and historic walkups of my new city. All at once, the rising sun behind me found a chink in the low-lying clouds and illuminated the towers with an unearthly golden-pink glow that cannot be adequately described. The waning stillness of the awakening city, the detailed permanence of the architecture around me, the moistness of morning mist, and this vibrant peachy glow filled me with an awe typically reserved for a mountain vista and reassured me that I do, at times, love a city.

 
Do you have any strong memories of foggy days? Were you in a city, on a beach, or out in wilderness? What is the best description of fog you have seen or heard? How would you use the written word to paint a picture of a heavy fog? Share your ideas in the comments.