The Siren Fog

 

The fog called to me like the Sirens did Odysseus. If I remember the story correctly, the Sirens’ cry was so beautiful that sailors succumbed to the sound and sailed their ships right up onto the rocks, and were consequently eaten by the creatures which had the bodies of birds and the heads of women. Odysseus had his sailors stuff wax in their ears so they couldn’t hear the clarion call, and had himself tied to the mast so he could listen but not do anything about it.

All I had to do was drive to a trailhead in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. I was just using the tug of the fog flowing over the Marin Headlands to deliver a little Greek mythology.

The fog had come in overnight and was sitting on the floor of Mill Valley when I woke up. It stayed around for most of the morning and then burned back toward the coast. But off-shore breezes in the afternoon blew it back through The Gate into The Bay, and up some of the coastal valleys. Like Tennessee Valley.

Leaving the parking lot for the two-mile walk through the green hills, I met the wind carrying in the fog with such an edge that shirt and jacket were buttoned up to the neck. This after seventies on the other side of the coastal range.

When the fog settles in like that, the ceiling drops to a hundred feet, if that, and horizontal visibility is maybe a quarter-mile. The fog doesn’t reach very high, probably less than five-thousand feet, and it’s only in pockets. I can hear the occasional small plane flying above and around the heavy grey clouds.

The fog keeps many away; for a late Friday afternoon, there is a paucity of people. The lack of footsteps and conversation enhances the nesty natural quietude. Two vultures, the size of small planes, are dining on a possum, only briefly distracted by my passing. From The Gate, the rhythmic lowing of a foghorn seems just another part of the meteorology.

The fog is spectral deep and grey
And life goes on, I’m on my way.
The muse will have me before I sleep
And draw from this soul a story to keep.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

Home

©2004 SetonnoteS

.