The Tule Fog Is In

Tourists think there's just fog. People who live here know better. There's the marine layer, our constant companion during the summer months (at least where I live, in the Inner Outer Richmond), coming in off the Pacific and forcing tourist families in shorts to buy matching Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirts. That kind is grey and always moving.

In the winter there's the tule fog. We don't get it so much here because it comes from the Central Valley, rising off the marshes dense and still and silent and white, the color of death, a shroud over the land. Driving in a tule fog is an adventure: without warning the world vanishes, visibility drops to near zero and the universe is reduced to your car and a few feet on any side. You have no idea what's ahead. Every year or so there's some massive pileup on I-5 where people hit the tule fog doing 85 and rearend somebody slower and then people behind them rearend them and so on.

When it gets this far out it's not so thick, but it still has a spooky beauty all its own. It's the visual manifestation of winter, and it always makes me sad.

[That's all, folks]