Fog

I was composing something in my head about fog as I was driving through downtown Sacramento tonight. Nothing earth-shattering, just thoughts about fog and aquatints and so forth. But such is that nature of fog that after reading and doing some real work, the musing was gone. Well, not completely gone, but, dare we say, foggy?

I like fog. I like coastal fog, the kind that creeps on little cats feet and all that. I like to watch it roll over the hills and engulf San Francisco on a summer afternoon, then shoot across the bay like a lance, to pierce the heart of Berkeley, before splitting in two, continuing its conquest up the Delta and down to Oakland.

Where we live in Oakland the fog is as likely to come from the hills, on the rebound from its collision with Berkeley, as it is to come directly from the Bay. It is also more likely to hit much later in the day than it does in the City, which is a consolation for those of us who, as much as we like fog, are Sacramento boys who want summer to be hot and sunny.

For the night owls, the fog presents an interesting treat in the summer. It goes away briefly in the middle of the night, only to return before dawn. It doesn't do this all the time, but there is something neat about stepping outside at 2am (why would I know anything about that, you ask?) to see the stars, knowing that the blanket will be back when you wake up in the morning. Then it burns off and the afternoon is dazzling blue. Marvelous, really.

Coastal fog is caused by a peculiar weather phenonmenon called the Pacific High, a high pressure zone that settles over the Central Valley. As it bakes in the sun, this high pressure air heats up (and I mean really heats up). As we all know, thanks to M. Montgolffier, hot air ascends. When it rises, it sucks in air from the one natural break in the Coastal Range, which is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The air that comes in is cool, moisture laden air from the Pacific Ocean, which encounters mist from the breakers of Ocean Beach and precipitates into our fog.

What it all boils down to is God's air conditioning (or God's deep freeze unit, if you are caught poorly dressed in Golden Gate Park). In Sacramento it manifests itself in the nightly Delta Breeze. It usually hits around 8 or 9 in the evening, and turns 100+ into 70-80, making the weather just about perfect.

But the fog tonight is not Coastal Fog. There are no cats feet here. We are talking about Tule Fog, which is the Gothic Romantic fog of the bog, marsh and swamp. You see, once upon a time (about 150 years ago), the Central Valley was a seasonal inland sea, covered in tule rushes. Sure, there was the ocassional patch of high ground with Valley Oaks, and the riparian stands around the water ways, but most of it was a giant swamp. Japanese imigrant farmers, willing to toil for cheap land, the Army Corps of Engineers, willing to toil to make the Central Valley fit for cities and cattle ranches and the like, and a few private landowners (few, because of a quirk in California law that allowed one to claim land adjacent to one's own if it was submerged under navigable water - one winter a certain Henry Miller (not THAT Henry Miller) got out his row boat and braved the floodwaters, with a bunch of surveyor's stakes. Needless to say, Mr. Miller ended up with a lot of land in his name) built levees and drained most of the sea. Once in awhile the sea comes back, but for the most part, we are sitting on millions of acres of terra firma.

Not, however, terra arida. We are still the low part of a ring of impressive mountains. Sure, most of the meltoff and runoff flows through the levees to the ocean, but the ground still gets plenty of moisture.

So, when the dewpoint is right vapors rise from the ground, like so many zombies, intent on blinding and warping and chilling to the bone. Sometimes the fog sits for weeks. Sacramentans, who were only a few months earlier bemoaning the heat, start to wonder if they will ever see the sun again. In August, when I drive from the Bay Area, the thermometer moves faster than the odometer. From Vallejo to Vacaville, the temperature can climb as much as forty degrees (in twenty miles). In the winter it can do the same, but in the other direction. Yesterday it was in the 70's on the coast when it was in the 40's inland.

In Sacramento, most of the oaks are Valley Oaks, which, unlike the Live Oaks, lose their leaves in the winter. So we get this eerie gray fog with skeletal trees. Sometimes the fog will be thin enough for the moon to peek through. Gothic. Romantic. Boeklin and late Franz Liszt and all of that Isle of the Dead stuff comes to mind (when your mind can get off the fact that your body is really cold). You drive and familiar landmarks pass unnoticed. Even big, neon-lit landmarks. There are massive pile-ups on Interstate 5 and Highway 99.

That is the setting that these fog musings came from. I would tell them to you, but they got lost in the fog.