Delightfully Wandering through Mount Washington Fog

In the San Joaquin Valley farm country where I grew up, the tule fog (named after the tule grass marshlands) pooled in the valley between the Tehachapi and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges like a witches’ brew at the bottom of a cauldron.  The tule fog was so dense that visibility was frequently zero.

Once my father drove his truck into a canal.

Another morning, he started out for school with the carpool of kids.  He hit a patch of tule fog so thick, he couldn’t risk turning around.  There was no way to tell know how long the patch would last.

The view outside the windows of our turquoise, wood-trimmed station wagon was a solid, monochromatic white.  It was utterly silent.  Driving in that tule fog was like driving in white pea soup; it was the daytime equivalent of driving in a pitch-black night with no lights and no stars.  Occasionally, we would hear a car creep slowly by on the narrow highway but we couldn’t see them, not even as a dim shape.

The experience was eerie enough to keep eight kids quiet for the entire drive.

My dad had to inch along with the driver’s side door open so he could see the dividing line on the two lane highway and not veer into the oncoming traffic.  We could only hope drivers coming the other way were doing the same.

The twelve mile trip took four and a half hours.

Inexplicably, I now love fog. 

It might be relief that I survived the tule fog of my youth.  Maybe it’s the frisson of remembered danger. Perhaps it’s the way fog transforms the familiar into the mysterious.

But it’s probably because fog in Mount Washington is so very, very beautiful.

In Monterey, I’ve seen fog roll down the hillside like a river to the sea.   I’ve watched mist waft like wraiths through the redwoods.  I’ve driven with relief from 120 degree blast furnace heat in the Central Valley (the Land of Extremes!) to 60-degree sweater weather and fog-pearled surf in Cambria.

But there is something special about the cloud-cloaked canyons and veiled vistas of Mount Washington. Silhouetted branches arc against the fog like swipes of ink on cotton fiber paper.  Every view is a Japanese woodcut.

In Mount Washington, the fog is delightful, not dangerous.  My son loved to walk to school in the fog. Fortified by Ovaltine and oatmeal, we would trudge up the hill to kindergarten.

Scraps of cloud, close enough to touch, drifted up from Mount Washington Canyon and across the road.  “Dragon smoke,” announced my son with five-year-old authority.  The Self-Realization Fellowship was clearly under a wizard’s spell.

My son and his friends gathered at the San Rafael fence and gaped down at the sight of the fog curled around the opposite edge of the Mount Washington Elementary School playground.

“White hot lava!” they shouted in unison.

When I saw my son's small fingers clutching the chain link fence with excitement, I remembered my father white-knuckling the steering wheel on that short but endless strip of Central Valley highway.  When it comes to childhood dangers, I’ll take white hot lava over tule fog any day.