i spent the last couple days camping at the coast mesmerized by the fog. thereās something so unreal about being in a place where the landscape around you dissolves away into nothingness or comes into somethingness from that nothing - it feels like both at once.
when you live where i live in the deep east bay - so far out you are at the very edge of the bay area - you have a particular relationship with the fog. it comes as a gentle mercy at the end of a stretch of hot days - brimming at the top of the valley wall until it cannot be held back anymore and then cascading down as a surreal waterfall to bring a kiss of coolness and something that once was the sea. we have fog, but it isnāt ours in the way it is for communities closer to the bay and the ocean. fog where i live has rolled across miles to get there and is more like a good, familiar friend who is coming to visit than a constant neighbor.
on my way home from camping, thinking about how unreal the fog feels and thinking about the way it moves and has moved through my life, i stopped by point reyes. point reyes is the second foggiest place in north america; you are no longer neighbors with the fog, you are in its house. here, the fog was so dense i couldnāt see the historic lighthouse at the bottom of the stairs in the second picture. i couldnāt see the ocean below - but i could hear it roar with all its fury. and here, i changed my mind about fog being unreal. i came to realize just how Real it makes things. the whole world narrowed for a moment there to just that little pocket of space and the distant waves and i could, for a minute, know something about what the world is.
powerful stuff, that fog.
One thing for folks who haven't been there to note about the way fog works with the cypress trees at Point Reyes is that it's inverted to how trees and other coverings usually work in the rain. Look at the picture Keesh posted: the fog is constantly being blown from right to left nearly all times of every day, which is why the trees lean the way they do, but it also means that the tree acts as a way to catch the moisture from the fog blowing past, which means that once the moisture builds up enough in the tree, it has nowhere else to go but fall on the ground.
In this fog, it only rains where there are trees covering the path.
