When I left my driveway at 6:30 a.m., I entered dense fog. At least I thought it was fog. Had a flashback to a silly line of poetry I wrote over 40 years ago while teaching a high school class the elements of poetry. "Desperately daring to distinguish fog from smog boggles my goggles." Sounds very silly now, but at the time it appropriately referred to the steady increase in the smog-to-fog ratio in the Central Valley that ultimately prompted my escape to the Sierra. I'm pretty sure what I drove into this morning was not entirely fog. It was quite dense in the direction of the 'industrial zone' of town and, as you can see in the above photo, the sky was clear toward the West. That's Spanish Peak glowing in the early morning sunlight before it reached the valley floor. Just bringing this up caused another flashback: a memory of studying Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People." The theme: if bringing money to a community involves producing pollution, people don't want to know about it; and if they don't like the message, they'll shoot the messenger. I'd better go hide.
The bed of Ponderosa Pine needles on the ground below me brought back memories of playing pick-up-sticks. I wonder if cold weather causes these flashbacks. What I did for a good 15 minutes was shiver and process old memories. Hmmmm.
The frost did some beautiful things in the area, too. As I said to a friend in an early email, I didn't need to go to a coffee shop to get wired.
A 'field' of frost on top of a fence post. I wish I could hang around and watch it sublimate. The air seems dry enough that the frost should disappear without melting. That always fascinates me.
A frosty knot got my attention before I had to get back into the car to get warm.
To complete the story, here's the view East where the stuff in the sky is ambiguous. Fog? Smog? Either way, it makes the sunrise more dramatic.
No comments:
Post a Comment