Fourth Saturday’s Loneliest Liberal

Fog

By James Knudsen

All places have something that the locals talk about with a mixture of pride and begrudging respect. In the Lancaster/Palmdale region where I taught theatre at Antelope Valley College, it’s the wind. The locals will tell you that the Antlelope Valley Wind Festival runs January 1st thru December 31st. And I’d venture a guess that most tropic regions will insist they have rain like no other place on Earth. Okinawa could hurl down precipitation with the best of them during the monsoon season I spent there in 1985. But, I must give Chiang Mai, Thailand its due. There I saw the rain start the way it does in the movies; one second nothing and the next, as if someone had thrown a switch, a torrential downpour. I could go on – the cold of Russia, the streets of Paris, the crazies of New York, but I want to talk about my hometown, Tulare, California and what it does better than anywhere in the world. Fog.
    I lived in Los Angeles for over 20 years, and I lost track of how many times I had to correct someone who mistakenly called the “marine layer” we would get there most summer mornings, fog. That wasn’t fog. There may be a meteorological reason why it wasn’t fog but, that’s not the point. Fog is thick, impenetrable stuff that engulfs a town, a county, an entire valley, and it doesn’t go away by noon. Sometimes it doesn’t go away by three in the afternoon. Sometimes it just won’t go away. It’s there when you wake up. It’s there when you go to bed.
    When you’re a kindergartener it’s great fun. You run out into the middle of the playground and POOF, your classroom disappears. High school, if you’re a girl, with a perfectly coiffed head of hair, not so much. But generally, fog is not much of an issue for the youth. It’s actually a boon when they declare a “foggy day” schedule and you get to sleep in an extra hour. Of course, it took some doing to get that boon. An accident in December of 1977 involving a school bus and a tractor-trailer rig prompted a new policy to keep busses off the roads. Incidents like that sire the begrudging respect every valley resident has for the fog. It should also give those unfamiliar with our infamous cloud an idea of how bad it can get when you can’t see a semi-truck coming down the road.
    Tule fog is its official name. It occurs when air with high humidty, from recent rains, encounters temperatures cold enough to condense the moisture. It’s a cloud at ground level. High pressure, along with geographic features, traps this cloud in the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley, and there it remains until the region dries out or a weather system with some wind is able to mix the air enough to make it go away. If it’s not too thick, the sun can break through and thin it out. But, days can go by without meaningful sunshine. The only way to find it is to drive up into the mountains and out of the fog. From above, it’s a solid blanket of white, fluffy and bright. When you’re in it, it’s gray, gray, gray.

2005 Tule fog captured by NASA's Terra Satellite

Dense Tule fog in Bakersfield, California
(about 65 miles south of Tulare)

As a young Marine, I learned quickly that, for guys from the fly-over states, the only places in California that existed were Hollywood and San Francisco. And everybody went to the beach. But plenty of people have grown up in this part of California which doesn’t exist. I, like many of them, left for locales that were bigger, louder, and more colorful. I went to LA. Let’s add to that list at the top, the sunshine of LA, “Sunshine, year-round, 24/7, we never close.” It is lovely. But, I know that it can become ordinary. And all that sunshine, besides being bad for your skin, can make one a bit jaded. “Oh look, another perfect day.” (yawn) And I don’t think I ever developed a begrudging respect for weather that makes every day a vacation. Make no mistake, the gray is a hard taskmaster. It’s cold, unrelenting, and depressing. It probably contributes to the tendency for South Valley expats to describe their place of birth as dull and gray. But I remember plenty of color from my youth. And the fog will go away. There will be sunshine in spring and I’m going to appreciate it a little more this year.

Copyright © 2015 by James Knudsen