Different Valley, Same Fog

Thursday, my schools had their first foggy day schedule in 5 years.  We regularly have patchy fog, or pockets of dense fog, or complete loss of visibility over the river due to fog.  But this was real, thick, Hound of the Baskervilles, White-Christmas-in-Merced fog.  In other words: tule fog.

Tule fog (say Too-lee) is apparently a Central Valley specialty.  It's named for the tule grass that grows in the wetlands, where the fog likes to settle. Yes, we know dense things like to settle in the valley.  Smart fogs are probably the ones that drift over occasionally from the Bay Area and keep moving.

Tule fog and I go way back.  As a kid, we had foggy day schedule 5-10 times a year.  Though the buses were delayed an hour, people who walked were supposed to get there on time.  Is it harder to see a big yellow bus in the fog than a lone kid in a gray jacket?? On a dozen mornings every winter, as I arrived at the baseball field adjacent to my junior high, there would be a solid wall of white where the school should  have been.  Every morning, my hopes were high that the school was invisible not because of the fog, but because it had burned down in the night.  I would make up elaborate stories about how it could have been bombed or relocated or destroyed by an earthquake without my parents noticing three blocks away.  About the time I was ready to pitch my homework in the bushes and celebrate a morning's freedom, an ominous shape would slowly materialize out of the haze.  Or, even worse, a bell would ring out of the whiteness, telling me that not being able to see the school was no excuse for not getting there.

Now, on foggy mornings, I again approach an invisible school, hoping with all my might "maybe, just maybe ...."