NOT QUITE EARLY FOG

A half-hour before daylight, when I checked the day's weather forecast on my iPod, I saw early fog on the agenda. Great, I said to myself, maybe I can get some neat foggy photos from along the river. 

I made coffee and readied my gear. Then, as the morning sun began to creep over the eastern horizon, I looked out at the pool and riffle in front of the cottage. Naturally, I expected an indistinct view, thanks to that prognosticated blanket of luminous fog.

What? Where's that silky, mysterious fog I was promised? There wasn't even a hint of thin mist hanging above the water! I'd been hoodwinked, misled, deceived and deluded once again by those dastardly weather diviners.

And so, not willing to let a morning photo outing escape so easily,  I went looking up the hill and thence up the road. And the best image I found was the one above, of the just-risen sun shining through what could be fog, or might be nothing more than the usual exhalation mist of woods and dewy grass along the edge of a small copse. A pretty image, regardless.

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AN INDISTINCT WORLD

Yesterday morning, a misty fog magically erased all separation between earth and sky. Instead, one became the other somewhere in the midst of a luminous white veil caused by cold snow cover and warming air. It was visually impossible, no matter how hard you strained to see, to say where one began and the other ended—everything was muddled, indistinct, an atmospheric mystery both oddly comforting and deliciously disquieting.

I thought it was also a nebulous world of soft, glowing beauty, where a pair of towering elms near a two-rail fence were like faded image on an old black & white print, or a young maple seemed suspended, almost floating.

Oaks in a grove up the road from the cottage looked more ephemeral and less sturdy, not at all their usual indomitable stalwart selves. Why, at any moment, they might simply fade away…even that vigorous youngster which had, so far, failed to give up a single one of last year's now-brown leaves.

Alas, while the photographer in me wanted desperately to spend the morning making pictures, there was no time. I had places to go, errands to run, appointments to keep. My time on this day was not my own. A quick look as I drove along was the best I could do…well, almost. I did have my camera on the passenger seat, and I did stop once or twice, roll down the window, and make a few snaps.

Drive-by photography isn't my thing, but sometimes it's all you can manage.

MISTY MORNING…

Early morning, long before the sun slips up from the east, I stand on the deck and look across the Cottage Pool toward the island. The river wears a gauzy veil—a mist thin and silvery, translucent as it diffracts the light amid slow swirls which sometimes merge with the movement of the river’s warm currents, loosely cojoining the two elements, water and sky, though always their borders remain ambiguous, unclear.

Looking upstream from the deck.

There’s an innocence to such mornings that I adore, a Garden-of-Eden illusion that is both mysterious and comforting. I can sense the newness of creation. Forget, if only briefly, all the ugliness and turmoil, grief, sickness, and trouble of the world. What I see before me is it, all there is, everything…and the mood is filled with gentle peace and quiet joy. A great blue heron fishes in the shallows at the upstream tip of the island, alert to my presence the moment I stepped into view. I wonder if he’s caught anything for breakfast. Yesterday’s on-off showers have freshed and roiled the stream so that it is neither muddy nor clear, but rather a nebulous shade that’s more a dull olive…still fishable if I were of such a mind today. The only sounds I can detect are the slow whispers of current against the rocks, and from somewhere behind, a titmouse calling its usual peter, peter, peter. The turkey vultures which roost on the island are invisible in their treetops; they likely won’t reappear for another hour—depending on the mist’s longevity. Even then, they’ll probably just reposition themselves to catch the burgeoning light, then sit around a while warming damp bones in the rising sun, waiting for that moment when whichever of them gets to decide such matters, finally launches from his perch, catches on outspread wings, flaps once or twice to begin a slow lifting into the morning. I have yard work to do today, things I’d hoped to get finished over the weekend but couldn’t manage because of the rain. So I need to fix my own breakfast and get started. But for just a few minutes longer I linger…savoring the diffused green light, the sweet cool breath of morning against my cheek, the magic of the moving river as it appears from some unseen, secret source, gains clarity as it glides sibilantly near my feet, then fades and disappears again into the unfathomable mist to continue its enviable journey.