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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
A long drive on a foggy morning changes your perspective, even on things you see every day.
Living as I do between a line of bays and the Cape Fear, I’ve grown somewhat used to mornings coated in a cool gray blanket of moisture.
All too often, the fog burns off quickly enough to rejuvenate the mosquitoes, but not soon enough to make driving a little safer. It amazes me how something as big as an automobile – never mind a deer or a logging truck – can remain hidden in a thick morning fog.
So I respond as I usually do, by slowing down. This causes the folks behind me to rant and rave and probably say crude things about my mother, but that’s their problem.
Things are different when the atmospheric conditions are right and the landscape is covered by a fallen cloud. I fully realize that’s not what really happens, but it sounds better than having the correct combination of heat and cooling and moisture and whatever else is required.
Things look different on a foggy morning. If the foul-mouthed fellow behind me would slow down, he might appreciate that.
The pine forests are no longer great green mats of indeterminate trees choked by a million tiny vines. Instead they become solitary memorials to the turpentine industry, reaching up and out of sight in the gray of the morning’s light.
A fox squirrel solemnly watches the sparse traffic flowing by a few feet away, either confident that he’s invisible (he’s not) or not caring.
A gangly black and white hound puppy sits at the end of a driveway watching the lights of his master’s schoolbus disappear. School has long since started back, but the dog can’t understand why his constant companion of the past three months has gone away, and didn’t take him.
The school bus lumbers along like a big, blind, yellow animal, trusting to the headlights that barely cut through the mist as the driver carefully transports her precious load of the unwilling.
Blue lights cut through the fog to show where a state trooper found someone who was driving too fast or running without lights.
Ducks rocket off a pond, black crosses disappearing into the thickness of the morning.
Laundry hangs like lost souls on a long clothesline, the laundress confident that before the morning is out, the fog will burn off enough to dry the workpants, heavy shirts and solitary pair of overalls.
A long-forgotten farm house, its windows blank eyes and door a screaming mouth in sunlight, is once again a vibrant home, smelling of tobacco and biscuits and bacon.
The rusted, broken, worn-out harvester in the overgrown barnyard is clean and new again, waiting to be pulled down the fields by a balky mule or admired by neighbors and other farmers.
A foggy morning makes you realize why people think Spanish moss is spooky.
Eventually, though the fog loses its battle with the rising sun, and slowly burns away, crisp light forcing the grayness into submission for another day. People speed up, and headlights are turned off one by one.
The hound-puppy chases an amiable cat across the yard, and a modern tractor passes the rusted old harvester. With the loss of the fog the harvester becomes just another pile of junk which the farmer reminds himself again he should sell for scrap.
But for a little while, the fog held the landscape like sleep holds tightly to the last moments before we wake up.
Things that were are again, and if you’ll slow down a little bit, it’s not hard to find the beauty of a foggy fall morning.
• Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He may be reached via telephone at 640-4104, ext. 227.
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