It's that time of year again. Driving to work this morning I drove into a solid wall of white fluff that would have been upsetting had I not been expecting the fog for some time. The rest of the drive to work was slower than usual as everyone was paying more attention to the traffic than they usually do. And we will be dealing with the fog off and on until sometime in March.
In Sacramento we have something called the Tule Fog (pronounced too-lee and related to the tule marshes) which can limit visibility to 200 yards or less. You can be driving along thinking that you can easily see several car lengths ahead of you and all of a sudden you can barely see a single car length. Freeways become death traps with chain reaction, multiple pile-ups occurring as visibility drops without warning. As recent as 10 years ago the Sacramento airport would shut down for days at a time as airplanes could not take off or land with just the instrumentation they had then. Flying from Orange County one day, we spent two hours circling Sacramento only to be redirected back to the Orange County airport.
Traffic and inconvenience aside, I really love fog. On foot, in the middle of a park or somewhere where you can’t be killed by something roaring at you at 60 miles per hour, fog has a calming effect. It limits the world to the immediate surroundings. Even sounds in the distance are muted. I feel like I’m living in my own little world. Is this how young children perceive the world before they get used to news reports telling us just how big and dangerous the world really is?
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