When the Fog Comes In

It comes in off the water, usually, and it comes in fast when it comes — you can watch it approach across the harbour, a grey wall advancing, swallowing the far shore, then the boats, then the end of the wharf, and then it is on you, and the world contracts to a few soft feet in every direction. The fog. Not rain, not storm, nothing violent — the gentlest of all the weathers, in a way, and the strangest, because what it does is not batter the world but erase it, quietly, dissolving the far and then the middle and then the near, until you are standing inside a small grey room that moves with you, walls of nothing a few paces off, the whole familiar landscape simply gone, not destroyed, just no longer there, hidden behind a softness you can walk into and never reach.

Anyone who lives near the sea knows the fog and knows its moods, and knows that it is not one thing. There is the thin fog that lies in the low places and burns off by mid-morning. There is the fog that sits for days, that soaks everything, that gets into the house and the bones and the temper. And there is the fog that comes in thick and sudden and total, the one I mean, that shortens the world to arm’s length and holds it there — and that one does something to a person, something worth trying to name, because it is one of the few weathers that changes not the landscape but your entire relationship to space, and does it in minutes, and does it without a sound.

The world made strange and near

The first thing the fog does is make the familiar strange, and this is the gothic of it, the reason fog has haunted the coastal imagination forever. Because you know this place. You have walked this shore, this street, this path a thousand times, and you know exactly what is there — the house on the corner, the boats at their moorings, the line of the far shore. And the fog takes all of it away and leaves you standing in a landscape you know by heart and cannot see, so that the known becomes unknown, the certain becomes doubtful, and shapes loom up out of the greyness at the last moment, half-recognized, wrong-seeming, a fence post that might be a figure, a moored boat that surfaces suddenly like something rising, the whole reliable world turned provisional and strange. Sound changes too — fog muffles and distorts, so that a foghorn seems to come from everywhere and nowhere, a voice carries oddly, footsteps approach that never arrive — and you move through a place you thought you owned as through a dream of it, everything familiar and nothing certain, which is precisely the sensation the ghost story spends whole chapters trying to build and the fog delivers for free in an afternoon.

But here is the turn, the thing about fog that the pure gothic reading misses, and that I have come to love: the fog does not only estrange. It also draws close. Because when the far and the middle distance vanish, what is left is the near — the few soft feet around you, the ground under your boots, the person walking beside you, the immediate world made suddenly intimate by the disappearance of everything beyond it. In clear weather your attention is scattered across the whole visible landscape, pulled to the horizon, the far shore, the distance; in fog there is no distance, and so your whole attention collapses inward, to the small circle of the actually-present, and the effect, unexpectedly, is a kind of tenderness. The fog closes the world down to just around you, and the just-around-you becomes, for once, the entire world, sharply present, all there is — the drop of water on a branch a foot from your face, the muffled quiet, the companion beside you become the only other person in a world reduced to grey. Fog is isolating, yes. It is also, strangely, gathering — it wraps you into the near, and shuts out the far, and leaves you alone with what is closest, which is not always a loss.

The distance you’re allowed to stop watching

I have come to think that is why the fog, for all its eeriness, so often brings a person a strange calm rather than only unease, and it is the same quality I have written about in the low grey sky: it asks nothing of the distance. On a clear day the world is all out there, demanding to be seen, the horizon pulling at you, the far shore reminding you of everywhere you are not. The fog cancels all of that. It draws a soft grey curtain a few feet off and says, in effect, there is nothing out there you need to attend to; there is only here; you may stop watching the distance. And there is a permission in that, an enforced smallness, a relief from the vast demanding visible world — you are excused, by the weather, from everything beyond arm’s length, and can attend, finally, only to what is close: your own footsteps, your own breath, the wet branch, the near quiet, the person at your side. The fog shrinks the world to a size you can actually hold.

So I have stopped minding the fog, and mostly come to welcome it, the thick sudden kind that swallows the harbour and leaves me in a small grey room a few feet wide. It is eerie, yes — the familiar made strange, the shapes looming, the muffled wrong-seeming sound — and I would not pretend the old coastal dread of it is baseless, because a fog can hide real dangers and has drowned real sailors, and the unease it raises is honestly earned. But underneath the eeriness there is the other thing, the gathering, the drawing-close, the world reduced to the near and the present and the small circle of what actually surrounds you — and on the right afternoon, walking a shore I know by heart and cannot see, alone with the wet branch and the muffled quiet and the ground under my boots, I find it is not a diminishment but a kind of mercy: the whole enormous demanding world folded down, for an hour, to exactly the size of what is close enough to touch, which is, when you think about it, the only part of it that was ever really yours to attend to anyway.