#9 -Fog

If put to the test, fog, I would have to say, is gray. That would be my first and simplest definition.

It is variously described by Webster and others as "a murky condition of the atmosphere" or "anything obscuring the clearness of the atmosphere." Hereabouts it is commonly the result of warm damp air moving over the cold sea water all around us. Any way you look at it, or through it, fog is still gray unless it's nighttime, in which case I'd settle for Webster's "murky." 

A more clarifying depiction of the phenomenon and sensation of fog is a good old-fashioned fog experience, and that can truly be an experience. On the water, the usual sense of vastness, a globe awash in seas over 70% of its surface, is completely lost. The only thing left is you - no sky, no horizon . . . just you. 

If good luck or bad luck brings something into view, chances are you won't at first recognize it for what it is, and there’s a good chance you'd be better off if you'd never seen it in the first place. Alone in a fog, there is a lot of room for introspection, and there is no more trying situation to test your memory and sense of direction. In the best of times there is peace and tranquility, in the worst, hysteria and terror. 

That's one aspect of fog. Where we live in the woods we feel the fog minutes before we see it, ghosting through the trees, coming upon us in billowing mists, shutting us in a damp and private cloud that suggests the need for a summer evening fire to dry us out and warm us up. Clam chowder and biscuits are the best fare in a gray fog, and perhaps a good board game in front of the fire. Again, the effect is one of a world pulled in around us, where distance is only a vagueness. Nothing is moving. Time for a good book.

So perhaps we have found a broader definition of fog: a gray condition of the atmosphere caused by a specific interaction of air, temperature and water, whereby the sense of distance is entirely lost and replaced by a state of mind governed variously by motion or the lack of it. Einstein might have liked that. All is relative.