The Fog

Carl Sandberg was a well known poet, but I don't think he ever lived in San Francisco, and he most certainly did not live up here on Skyline Boulevard. Sandberg wrote a famous poem called "The Fog".

"The fog comes in on little cat feet.
It sits looking over the harbor on silent haunches
and then moves on."

Fog does not come in on little cat feet up here in foggy redwood country. It gallops over the hills and roars through the mountain passes. There is nothing cat-like about it.

From afar, fingers of fog gently grip the hillsides, filling the empty spaces between the ridges, like a giant white-gloved hand creeping over the top of the mountain. But in the thick of it, there is nothing gentle about it. The temperature suddenly drops ten degrees as soon as I start my ascent up the mountain. As I climb higher, the fog races over my windshield like the North Wind itself is blowing it, hard, from behind.

The tiny droplets collect on the redwood trees, and I can hear the drip-drip-drip of the collected water raining down from the evergreen needles onto the matted forest floor.

And then, at some point, unpredictably, the fog simply vanishes, like a wisp of smoke disappearing into the atmosphere.