Befogged
by Julia Sneden
Fog
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
— Carl Sandburg
In checking my memory of this poem, I discovered that people have messed around with that first line. In the original version, it is simply, as above, “The Fog comes….” In other versions, the poem begins: “The fog creeps in…”
Apparently some fanciful person thought “creeps in” was an improvement over the simple use of “comes,” but to my ear, “creeps in” sounds dangerously close to cute. A cat’s feet are notoriously silent, but unless the animal is stalking something, it probably doesn’t creep. Nor does the fog: it comes, steadily and silently, without intention, pulled by air currents and dispersed by sunshine. It really needs no metaphor, and although I do love those “silent haunches,” I have to question the bit about its “looking over harbor and city.” In my recollection, it doesn’t often look over: the pertinent verb is more like swallows up, at least until the sun burns it off.
1943: A MEMORY
When I was a child, living on a high hill on the San Francisco Peninsula, I had lots of first-hand experience with fog. Looking west, there were low coastal mountains officially named the Sierra Morena, but simply called “Skyline” by everyone we knew. On the far side of the mountains lay the Pacific Ocean, its waves endlessly chewing away at the land.
Often, as evening approached, great waves of fog came curling over Skyline like a giant comber pouring down the slopes and reaching into the valley at the foot of our hill. By morning, it had usually piled up nearly to our house, and spread over the entire valley below. The bay and the towns along its edge disappeared under a blanket of fog, but up in the sunshine as we were, we looked top-down on a moving carpet of soft gray and white. Here and there, a small hill, or perhaps the tip of a tall radio antenna, red lights a-flash, poked through. Across the valley, the high peaks of the mountains on the east side of the bay looked like islands floating on a white ocean.
On other mornings, we were exactly on the top edge of the fog, and could watch damp wisps and tendrils floating by our windows and winding through the branches of the live oak trees.
Every once in awhile, there came a morning when we, too, were buried deep within the fog. On those mornings, we couldn’t see much beyond the low wall at the edge of our driveway. Gone were the fruit trees in the little orchard below; gone was the whole world beyond our living room windows; vanished too was all but a few feet of the path our feet had long ago worn as we skipped down or trudged up the field on our way to or from our school bus stop, a quarter of a mile below.
On the foggiest mornings, our mother made sure we had on our jackets before we hurried out to catch our bus. We ran the whole way down, glad of the path to follow, for we could see little else around us.
On those days, I arrived at the bus stop very damp despite the jacket. My fine hair was plastered to my head, and my braids, having escaped from their soggy ribbons, began to unbraid themselves. I well remember the day my new red ribbons, the product of cheap, war-time dyes, got so fog-wet that the color ran, staining the ends of my blonde braids pink.
Photograph, from Wikipedia: Redwood National and State Parks
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