Dense fog forms water droplets on oak twigs in Round Valley.
Visions in grey
Stillness but for the motion of breath in steam. Silence but for the call of a distant owl, a smoke ring of sound disintegrating into heavy air. I was standing still and silent, hoping to spot a bobcat scouting for an ambush site among boulders hidden in mist, or a coyote loping warily through an arroyo laced in haze.
It was morning at Round Valley Regional Preserve but it could have been evening. The Sun’s disc, wherever it might be drifting in the cerulean blue, was veiled by a wave of grey saturating East County like a storm surge in slow motion. I was standing inside a cloud.
I hike in the fog not merely for the eerie imagery, for the vision of oaks drifting wraithlike in and out of view; I hike in the fog for the awareness of my own form drifting wraithlike in and out of view. I come to wear grey like a garment.
But I’d come to this place for more than the grey. I’d come to steal a glimpse of the hidden: a view denied the several hundred-thousand folk below. I’d come to see if the park’s 1,220-foot apex stood above or below the fog’s rippled plateau. If above, I’d be able to rotate through the panorama of Mt. Diablo’s twin peaks in the west, the broad brushstroke of Morgan Territory’s ridgeline southeast, south 25 miles to Ohlone Wilderness, and east 100 miles to Sierra’s granite spine – all floating above a sea of fog.
Trapped in a bubble of the immediate atop Round Valley.
Thoreau believed that winter promotes an inward life. Standing on the banks of a frozen river, he imagined the human brain as “the kernel which winter itself matures.” As winter winds clear leaves from branches, the ordeal of winter clears the mind’s clutter. “The winter,” Thoreau maintained, “is thrown to us like a bone to a famished dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it.”
Fog would seem the natural enemy of transparency. The irony: fog aids, not inhibits, perception; helps us gnaw out the marrow. The fog ahead seems utterly opaque but with each step we’re able to resolve nearby images with striking clarity. We’re trapped in a bubble of the immediate. There is no ahead; there is only here.
I arrived at a summit drowned in fog. That vision of Diablo, Morgan Territory, Ohlone and the Sierra I’d desired was denied. No trace of bobcat or coyote. The visible universe had collapsed to a sphere 40 yards in diameter. What lay beyond was the stuff of theory; not evidence.
But I was in good company. That miniature cosmos, that fog-encased bubble I was dragging around resonated with the energy of creatures committed to the immediate task: cicada and butterfly larvae, great-horned owls and kit foxes; some dormant, some busy outwitting the cold Sun and long night. They don’t need fog to make them aware of the grass beneath their feet. Their existence is free of the riddle of existence, of melancholic musings over the uncertain promise of spring. They aren’t mesmerized by metaphors. They are metaphors.
And so I count among the season’s many blessings the grey – yes, even the cold Sun and long night that are its inseparable companions. May they pass into and through us, and lead us to find on the other side of winter a place where the first wildflowers grasp for the growing light, a place that without winter would be less sweet.