SoMa Literary Review - Fog, Fog @ Nite, Rain, and Sunny Days

Fog, Fog @ Nite, Rain, and Sunny Days

By Fred Zackel

Fog

Some days the fog is eggshell gray.

Some days the sun burns through the fog onto the city streets, beams down a patch of bright gold, and suddenly people and buildings have shadows.

Some days the fog never burns off completely.

Sometimes it drizzled.

Fog so thick, the golden hills around the Golden Gate Bridge were purple bruises.

This fog was giving us weather like we get 'round Christmas; we were all stressed and depressed, but there were no lights on the trees.

Fog in the fir trees, like a Japanese lithograph.

San Francisco was a windy city, and the flags in front of City Hall were all standing erect on their poles. But then flags are always erect in San Francisco . It's those constant westerlies off the ocean that keep them snapping in the breeze.

I watched long enough for the heavy rain to change to a light mist, then back again to heavy.

She was freezing from summer fog and the westerly winds, all bundled up, standing on a street corner. A jogger ran past, covered in sweat, wearing only running trunks and a t-shirt. She stared after him, disgusted.

"They're going to inherit the earth, just you wait and see."

A tourist was taking pictures of the fog.

The fog hadn't burned off, and the sky was cloudy, like just before the rain starts.

August means coastal fog, with the awesome regularity that only God could create.

A stormy sky that looked pistol-whipped.

Seagulls soaring the slope, riding the updrafts along the cliffs, hovering in mid-air, on the beachside.

Offshore, a cold current that flows down from the Bering Straits.

A seagull flying through the fog down a city street.

The sky was ghost.

A lobster-faced sky

The weatherman on the car radio said lots of prevailing winds meant another storm on the heels of this one.

He lived in a pink pastel-painted duplex apartment on Dawnview Street off Burnett and Portola. But in the fog the pastels were muted, faded, and the duplex looked shabby. In this part of Twin Peaks , the fog was ground-level.

From Tiburon, the skyline was serrating the fog, and the buildings stuck up like rocks in the surf.

Hard to guess how tall buildings are in the fog.

The fog was ground-level.

The fog was thick. I couldn't see the billboard-size signs on the freeway.

The night was rainy cold and still. The fog was so thick, the Richmond bridge was all I saw, and the only reason I saw it was because I happened to be driving across it.

Most summer mornings the fog ends two blocks east of my apartment and almost right above the old Sears store on Masonic. From there eastward is good old California sunshine, never-ending sunshine in a sky that is never-endingly blue.

How bright the fog was. I realized this still was summer. Fog that made me squint. But San Franciscans eschew sunglasses. Sunglasses were affectations of Angelinos.

It was noon, and visibility was four blocks.

Nobody sweats in San Francisco .

During the summer the weathermen xerox a week's worth of their weather forecasts and phone them in. "Coastal fog extending inland. Temperatures will range from sixties along the coast to the nineties inland."

The fog begins as cold breezes from the constant westerlies that spread out from the Golden Gateway to ease the insane heat in the Valley.

The heat in the San Joaquin Valley sucks in the cool Pacific air. Fog forms from the hot air inland meeting the cold air off the ocean. Drive up or down the inland highways, and you will see "the fingers of God" curling over the coastal range.

San Francisco is the only major break in the coastal range from San Luis Obispo to Oregon . Sometimes the fog comes in at water level, below the Golden Gate Bridge . Sometimes it tumbles like a fluffy avalanche over the Bridge.

In the summer San Francisco usually averages three days of fog, three days of sun, then three days of fog again, all the way through until Labor Day.

The fog never disappears during August. Only waits a dozen miles offshore for the Valley to heat up again. Then the hot air rises and sucks the cold air in under it.

Fog at the end of the alley.

Fog that came in rivers of oyster sauce and salt sea air.

Foghorns, like songbirds, fewer each year.

Blue as the summer fog at twilight, as blue as twilight itself and thicker than lambs wool.

I looked up at the bland fog-colored sky.

Foggy streets like a foreign country.

Sometimes the fog is so thick that it becomes a wet cold mist for windshield wipers. Sometimes the mist is thick enough to convince the tourists it's raining. But the natives refuse to call it rain. It's just heavy dew, they proclaim.

Fog at noon. All day had been grey overcast, and I wondered again what had happened to summer. Christ, this is supposed to be August. Meter maids in down parkas had their scooter headlights on at noon.

Sometimes the fog doesn't burn off all day.

"Why is there fog?"

"I think because the dew point and the condensation point met."

A sea breeze came through the alleyway, rattled the brittle ivy on the brick walls. The ivy was multi-colored, had died with last autumn.

Three walls of the lot were fenced. The chain-link fence was threaded by ivy. The ivy was multi-colored, brittle and dry, having died the last season.

Golden Gate Park was dripping with fog.

I could see my breath in the cold air. Even my piss steamed.

Flags were snapping to attention from the winds off the ocean. The winds pressed her dress against her body.

See from Marin the tips of the skyscrapers above the white fog bank.

A fog advisory had been issued on the Golden Gate Bridge . The fog looked like some mad scientist movie, looked like foam spilling over the rim.

Brutal wind and rain on the bridge.

The daily sea breeze on the Bridge was an icy draught that gave me goosebumps.

The fog had come in. I couldn't see the top of the hill. It was ice-cold.

Something sinister about the fog.

Fog and wind blowing up skirts.

Fog = cold smoke-filled town.

I found sprinkles on the windshield.

One location has patchy fog and bright blue sky. On the other hand, another place has grey low clouds, and some airplane flies through the patch.

The fog in San Francisco contrasted with the hot sunshine of Orinda, Santa Rosa , Palo Alto , and the other suburbs of the City. The temperature rose a degree for every mile driven east of the Golden Gate Bridge , until Sacramento was reached, and the 100 degrees Fahrenheit mark was topped.

Fog, like another season altogether.

The City had a killer fog. The stop signs were silhouetted in the white out. The weatherman on the radio said this blizzard of cold clouds was clocked at 40 miles per hour.

Bayside fog.

On the ridge side, under fog I could see the blue sky of SF bay.

A gray car in the fog.

Tourists were frantic to find the sun.

"I need a beach," she moaned.

It was Getaway Weekend in August.

She loved the fog, she said. "I couldn't stand a regular summer. All that bright light for days and days. I couldn't take it."

Fog like a snow bank. Fog like a first snowdrift.

Fog thick with raindrops, alive and growling, a wind that buffets the blue tourists.

"I always wear a hat in San Francisco . You lose a third of your body heat from your head."

Fog like a horizontal waterfall across the Golden Gate Bridge . . .

Morning had brought fog and drizzle.

Fog @ Nite

The Bridge and its yellow lights at night in the fog.

Where the hills vanish into the fog, black shapes of trees among white fog.

Driving creates hypnotic trance in a foggy night. Every street is a fog-filled tunnel.

The streetlights were like runway lights at some fogged-in airport.

Empty skyscrapers shrouded in midnight fog.

Tonight was a cold night in August. The fog hadn't settled in yet, was still writhing eastward and past the bay. Once it settled in, the fog would trap the heat escaping from the city, actually warming up the night. But the winds hadn't died down yet. Inland must still be too warm, or perhaps the ocean still too cold.

The fog goes up to Masonic, filling in the Richmond basin with summer fog. The fog stops above the old Sears store on Masonic and Geary. From the parking lot, it looks like the fog rose to the sun every day.

Because the summer nights in the city were so cold, there are few houseflies in the city.

There are few warm nights in San Francisco 's summer. There were even fewer summer sunsets.

The streets looked like they were smoke-filled. But that smoke was cold and damp and drizzled on the streets.

The fogbank looked like a strip of black tape across the peaks of the city's glittering skyline.

Grey skyscrapers, silent and empty, colossi in the fog and night.

Hard to know how high a building is with this fog.

Streetlights in the night fog looking like some connect-the-dots puzzle.

Streetlights disappearing in pairs into the fog.

The lights on the next hill looked like lights suspended, no, floating!, in the foggy air.

Rain

The day was gloomy with approaching rain.

A cyclone of scrap paper and leaves, like a butterfly in a cyclone

Rain. At first big drops like the paw prints of a cat on the car hood. Then furious rain bounced. Raindrops that could crack the windshield. Wipers were worthless.

San Franciscans are tolerant of almost everything except long rain storms. They still drive at 75 miles per hour in the slanting rain. According to KCBS, there had been a twenty car pile-up in the South Bay and that the resultant mess would take time to clear up.

A pickup truck passed me at eighty-plus miles per hour at that exact point where a truck identical to his has moments before gone off the road into a water-filled ditch.

The best part of San Francisco is after the rain. All the cars are off the wet streets, and empty streets glisten under the streetlights. The lights of the city shine brighter. I could see across the bay, and Oakland actually sparkles like the jewel it'll never be. Even Berkeley looks cheery.

Sunny Days

California 's never-ending blue skies. The kind of day cabbies hate. Blue skies. A good day for walking.

The TV weatherman said the radar satellite says there were no clouds in California today.

San Francisco weather.

Same as yesterday. Same as tomorrow.

Frederick Zackel teaches literature and the humanities at a Midwestern university in the United States . His San Francisco-based novel Cocaine & Blue Eyes was recently re-published by Point Blank Press.