From the Archives: Frank Graham’s ‘Of Dreams and Dread’

Editor’s Notice: Frank Graham was Audubon journal’s discipline editor for 45 years, throughout which period he skillfully captured the wonder and complexity of topics from throughout the pure world. This characteristic, a favourite, was first revealed within the November 1982 difficulty.

I’m a deep sleeper, not more likely to be roused by sharp little creaks or clangs of the darkish that appear to fracture an evening’s relaxation for others. However some high quality of insistence, half bodily, half the stuff of desires, could get to me after midnight. No different sound constantly reaches thus far down into my sleep and brings me again to the second because the hoarse, repetitive notes that filter via—from 10 miles away—the place there’s a faint breeze from the southwest and the fog horn sounds on the Petit Manan Lighthouse.

A foghorn, like a gull’s cry and the thunder that waves make on a distant seashore, is the music of the ocean for many of us with a romantic flip of thoughts. The true mariner, in fact, goes past these marks of the littoral into the ocean’s coronary heart. There, one’s ship is the supply of almost all sound. A ship snatches distant voices from the air and its wires, and serves as a sounding board for wind and waves. However a foghorn speaks of the menace that lies on the fringe of land, calling up ideas of heroism or penetrating the evening to disturb our desires.

Essentially the most ardent admirer of untamed nature is unlikely to speak of loving fog, as he may love sunshine or snow. Fog is simply too flimsy a stuff, too like nothing, although it capabilities with all of the solidity of a veil and leaves on no matter it touches a skinny smear of moisture that’s its substance. It’s, as a scientist writes, “an ideal swarm like assemblage within the floor air of a whole bunch of 1000’s of droplets per cubic inch so minute that it might take seven billion of them to make a teaspoon stuffed with water.” However in what it garments, and in what it reveals, fog transforms our world, gilds it in grey, makes the poet in every of us surprise once more on the number of masks that nature places on and off to enchant us.

It was in fog that I first noticed the a part of Maine’s coast the place I’ve made my dwelling for greater than a quarter-century—fog was a part of the enchantment that caught and held me. We drove down a peninsula on a slender filth street alongside which the spruces dripped with old-man’s-beard lichen and moisture pilfered from the dense vapor. The panorama was ghostly, and the drive appeared limitless. Finally our potential landlords stopped at a small cove and we acquired out and stood there wanting into the fog.

It had receded considerably, baring an indeterminate stretch of mudflat. There was no water in sight, however we have been assured it was on the market someplace within the murk. The stillness was profound. No leaf rustled, no chicken cried. We stared on the shrouded seascape, as if it held some exalting and momentous revelation. For the second it made us no overture the ocean and the fog weren’t able to grant these newcomers their blessing.

However as we chatted on the shore, unwilling to decide to this new place, the weather conspired to pressure our hand. A breeze got here up, stirring and tearing the fog, and the water got here into view a good distance out throughout the mud. It was merely a glint at first, like a puddle creeping beneath a door. Then it gained substance. We grew to become conscious of an impending occasion exterior our earlier expertise. The breeze was out of the south, and it appeared to push the water forward of it beneath the fog, urging it nearer, amplifying the sense of primal motion with a low, soughing that gave the impression of a thousand individuals whispering. “chrysalises.”

The ocean’s sudden look out of the fog, its floor agitated by the sunshine wind, gave it a rare phantasm of velocity. That it was two hours or extra earlier than the tide lastly pushed its foaming entrance edge up the slender sand seashore the place we stood didn’t alter that impression. It was a time in my life after I was opening myself as by no means earlier than to the assorted experiences of the pure world. To dwell in its energetic presence was to nourish one’s sense of being alive. Right here the inexorable rhythm of the tides mixed with that vaporous broth, the fog, to make manifest the pressure of solar and moon and earth’s limitless spinning on this wild coast. It was a recurring drama I’d discover arduous to go away behind.

Much has modified since my first day on this coast, however not the tides and fogs. A hasty look on the tide chart tells me when the ocean comes and goes, although the fog retains to no timetable (an announcement a customer won’t settle for in July, when our deliberate outings are canceled morning after morning because the fog closes in). However usually by day I can see a thick fogbank hovering simply offshore. Because it begins to maneuver up the bay, one island after one other is doused like a flame beneath an old style candle-snuffer, and shortly the murk is throughout me, with the timber dripping. If I can hear the horn at Petit Manan, the environment appears denser nonetheless.

There was a lighthouse on Petit Manan, a treeless island of 9 acres, since 1817. It was constructed by the federal authorities to mark a treacherous reef that runs to the island from some extent of the identical title a pair miles away. Apparently the unique tower was a sorry affair, already crumbling when a authorities inspector stopped there 14 years later. The lightkeeper’s dwelling was leaking badly, and the dispirited keeper had lengthy since fled to the mainland. The man’s spouse, constructed of sterner stuff, had taken over for him.

Sooner or later, a extra dependable keeper was discovered. (The poor spouse, citing expertise, utilized for the job after her husband’s dying, however, predictably, was turned down by the male authorities.) And in 1855 a brand new granite lighthouse went up. Though the tower was 119 ft excessive, one of many tallest on the Atlantic Coast, it was acknowledged {that a} warning gentle alone was not sufficient to maintain a passing ship off the rocks. How may mariners be alerted on this dense fog?

E. Worth Edwards, a historian of British lighthouses writing over a century in the past, talked about his personal nation’s makes an attempt to grapple with the issue: “It’s correct, nonetheless, to watch that the lighthouse authorities in america took up the matter virtually earlier than it engaged a lot consideration on this nation, owing to the East Coast of America being in an distinctive diploma liable to visitation of fog, by which the coasting site visitors was severely inconvenienced; and the need arose for one thing to be accomplished whereby the issue is perhaps obviated. The prepared genius of the nation was not lengthy in coming to conclusions, and though some form of sound indicators, similar to bells, gongs, and many others., have been employed in Europe, the Individuals first introduced into use Brobdingnagian trumpets, whistles, and many others.”

So even earlier than the disintegrating tower got here down at Petit Manan Island, the federal government put in one of many newfangled fog sign bells there. Edward Rowe Snow, in The Lighthouses of New England, had described the following step within the wrestle towards the hazards of fog in our space, which was the putting of a foghorn on the lighthouse in 1869: “The water provide for the fog steam sign created fairly an issue, nonetheless, for a close-by swamp was discovered to comprise an excessive amount of vegetable matter. Lastly the previous keeper’s dwelling was roofed over and fitted with gutters, which carried rain water into two wood tanks within the cellar. Pipes ran from the cellar to the fog sign station and the water drawback was solved.”

{The electrical} age introduced refinements to the indicators. Finally, expertise made even lighthouse keepers out of date. They have been taken off Petit Manan in 1972, and the station grew to become totally automated. Now machines are in cost, holding the sunshine flashing and sending the recurrent deep moan out via the gloom.

In summer time the island is a welter of stench and shriek—the results of one of many final a couple of giant tern colonies surviving on the Maine coast. Fog reveals its baleful facet then. Herring gulls, which nest simply throughout a slender bar on Inexperienced Island, ordinarily forage for miles round throughout the day however could change their habits when the fog rolls in. Then, like yachtsmen or bathers, they have an inclination to attend it out. They focus on the nesting terns conveniently shut at hand, gliding in on their nests within the poor visibility, and there’s a rise within the predation of eggs and chicks.

However on the mainland, summer time fogs convey surprising pleasures to stay-at-home people. Wild-flowers, their colours generally bleached out beneath a brilliant solar, purchase a rare luminosity towards the pallid backdrop. Birdsong takes on a haunting high quality lacking on fantastic days. The flutelike notes of the hermit thrush, beautiful beneath any situations, appear to return from one other world as day fades into nightfall or mist, and we hear once more the mantra that Whitman recalled in one other form of gloom in “When Lilacs Final within the Dooryard Bloom’d“:

Sing on sing on you gray-brown chicken,

Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,

Limitless out of the nightfall, out of the cedars and pines.

Suntil, if I had one chicken to decide on because the voice of the fog within the northern forest, it might be the white-throated sparrow. Buddies of mine on the coast who knew the dreamy music, however not the title of the singer all the time referred to as it “the Beethoven chicken.” After listening to it because it sang within the alders one foggy June night, I hesitated to inform them its actual title for worry of breaking a fragile spell.

We consider fog as a veil, hiding or distorting actuality. However after I stroll out right into a morning when all of the world past the closest meadow is blotted out, I discover one other world introduced into focus proper at my ft. In June each bush glistens with the layered webs of the bowl and doily spiders, convex meshes suspended between twigs with one other broad horizontal internet under, like that stretched for a high-wire artist. As summer time matures, the droplets of fog contact up in astonishing element different webs that go all however unnoticed in brilliant daylight—the orbs of the backyard spider, the jewel-studded nets of the hackle-band weavers enclosing the ideas of goldenrod, and the intense rectangles of gossamer within the grass that betray the funnel weavers. The baubles held on every strand appear to attract the menace from them, and maybe they do. Are flying bugs warned away by this radiance?

Let the sphere entomologist reply deal with that query. The one which begs to be answered right here is, What’s fog? For the poet Carl Sandburg it was merely one thing that “comes on little cat ft.” For the etymologist, it’s a phrase of obscure origin that apparently drifted into trendy English from the Scandinavian mists. For the meteorologist, it’s vapor that restricts visibility in any path to lower than one kilometer. And for the curious of each persuasion, it’s a cloud that hugs the bottom.

“At any time when the air is cooled, by any means no matter, under its dew level, a portion of the water vapor current separates out on such mud particles or different condensation nuclei as occur to be current,” wrote the meteorologist W.J. Humphries in his e-book Fog and Clouds. “If this course of happens solely at a substantial distance above the floor of the earth, leaving the decrease clear, the result’s some type of cloud. If, however, it extends fairly to, or happens at, the floor of the earth, it’s then referred to as a fog, irrespective of how shallow or how deep it might be. The excellence, subsequently, between fog and cloud is that of place. Fog is a cloud on the earth; a cloud, a fog within the sky.”

Alongside the Maine coast fog has remained a part of the lives of individuals within the fishing villages, in addition to these of summer time guests. Samuel Eliott Morison, the well-known historian of the ocean, recalled his boyhood trip journeys to Mount Desert island within the Nineties aboard the previous steamboat Metropolis of Richmond. In his little e-book The Story of Mount Desert Island, Morison wrote: “She was owned by her skipper, Captain Charles Deering, who carried no insurance coverage and in a thick fog was wont to anchor, whereas his rivals felt their manner alongside by listening to sheep blatting on the rocky islands, or by the echoes of their very own steam whistles. On one event, when town of Richmond had anchored for a very long time, a passenger inquired of Captain Deering, ‘Aren’t you happening?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Why not? It is all clear overhead.’ ‘We’re not certain that manner!’

I nonetheless assume again on scenes of the latest previous with a fogbank because the backdrop. Late at evening, when the mist closed in rapidly, quite a lot of hardy souls have been out on the mudflats at low tide, digging marine worms for the sport-fishing market. All of the sudden the little cove the place they parked their previous automobiles got here alive in a glow of headlights and blaring of auto horns: Considered one of their colleagues had not returned. Nearly concurrently, lights went on within the home windows of shoreline camps the place summer time guests have been attempting to sleep, and there got here offended cries of “Quiet!” However the wormers within the cove saved honking horns and blinking lights till their tardy good friend, guided by the uproar, got here trudging out of the fog, solely minutes forward of the incoming tide, his buckets full of a pink and pulpy mess of bloodworms.

Though the crafters of thrillers normally go away us with the impression that fog is the enemy of advantage, cloaking solely essentially the most mischievous affairs, historical past reveals that heroes, too, have generally made good use of dense cowl. It’s stated that Common George Washington escaped full catastrophe and a sudden finish to the colonists hopes by spiriting his surviving forces out of the British military’s clutches beneath cowl of fog after the Battle of Lengthy Island in 1776. Napoleon additionally lived to battle one other day when he eluded a British fleet in fog and returned to France from Egypt in 1799.

But it surely have to be admitted that fog is extra more likely to upset than abet human plans. Right here a comparability with birds could also be instructive. Birds, particularly throughout the early phases of their migrations, are likely to land in the event that they fly into thick fog. People who proceed usually come to grief, and there are experiences of varied species, notably geese, crashing into buildings, timber, and wires. Arthur Cleveland Bent, in his Life Histories of North American Gallinaceous Birds, quoted an observer of one of many many catastrophes to which the passenger pigeon was polarized within the late nineteenth century, this time in Michigan: “On one event, an immense flock of younger birds grew to become bewildered in a fog whereas crossing Crooked Lake and, descending, struck the water and perished by the 1000’s. The shore for miles was coated a foot or extra deep with them. The previous birds rose above the fog and none have been killed.”

Fog is alleged to kill and injure extra people (not directly) than does every other meteorological hazard. A sampling of latest newspaper clippings suggests the hurt to individuals and property:

Scattered fog brought on a 118-car chain-reaction accident on a significant West German autobahn that injured 19 individuals, 5 of them critically.

When 1000’s of passengers stampeded onto a fog-shrouded ferry in Shanghai, China, 11 have been killed and 76 injured.

A rushing bus plowed into mourners in a funeral procession at a village 450 miles south of Cairo, Egypt, 13 individuals have been killed and 9 injured within the accident, which occurred in a heavy fog.

Highly effective stuff, fog. The stuff of life and dying; of desires and melodrama, nice photos and poetry. Shakespeare, the arch-poet who remodeled our language and generally prefigured our historical past, drenched Macbeth in fog. Within the play’s very opening, the three witches chant, Honest is foul, and foul is honest/Hover via the fog and filthy air.

England later appeared to refill with “the fog and filthy air,” towards which the British got here to have a proprietary feeling, particularly when it descended on their capital. There it was referred to as, within the spirit of Cockney humor, “a London specific,” emphasizing its uniqueness amongst others of its variety. In Dickens’s Bleak Home, Esther Summerson arrived in London and located the streets so stuffed with dense, brown smoke that she requested if there was an ideal fireplace someplace. “O expensive no, miss,” she was informed. “This can be a London specific, a fog, miss.”

Fog, as a manifestation of a sure form of gentle, has been essential to painters and completely important to writers and moviemakers who deal in thrills or horror. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of many founders of the trendy arm of the commerce, may take a villainous character and a wisp of fog, throw in a blood-curdling shriek, and whip up a deliciously toxic stew. Even right now, The Hound of the Baskervilles stays steeped in terror:

“Over the nice Grimpen Mire there hung a dense, white fog. It was drifting slowly in our path and banked itself up like a wall on that aspect of us, low however thick and effectively outlined. The moon shone on it, and it regarded like an ideal shimmering ice-field with the heads of the distant tors as rocks boring upon its floor. Holmes’s face was turned in direction of it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift.”

With good cause did the incomparable detective mutter in vexation and, a second later, cry out in alarm. By no means was a fog so sinister and murderous! In it lurked that “hound of hell” that threatened to upset all of Holmes’s well-laid plans and produce doom to nonetheless one other Baskerville. But it surely was a benignant fog, too—confounding ultimately the wretch Stapleton and sending him to his simply deserts within the dreadful ooze of the Grimpen Mire.

And so at evening the earth usually works its alchemy. The darkening sky closes in, the land and water appear to exhale their vaporous breath, and a foghorn sounds via the deepening gloom. Then scientists give strategy to poets and dreamers.