Fog

Fog frozen to the trees across the street from us.

I love it! There is no natural phenomenon other than a womanly face which brings half so much pleasure to my heart as fog. As I grew up, I used to hear people complaining about rainy or cloudy days. I couldn't understand. On a cloudy day, the colors on the ground seem to stand out more and have a brightness of their own which they always lack on a bright, sunny day when practically everything seems yellow.

Directly across the street from our house is a small park. People walk their dogs and do their laps on the little paved track around it. Children play on its equipment. Chubbuck city employees mow it. And I pick up trash there. Well, I suppose someone else also picks up trash there, but I never see them. I have a cute little weapon for the purpose. I sawed off a shovel handle a couple of years ago, drove a big nail half-way into the end of it, and used my Dremel tool to file a point on it. It's great for picking up trash of most kinds, although I've never yet been into a bar to try it on some of the folks there.

It just so happens that I've been blessed to see lots of fog in my time. We get lots of it here in the Chubbuck and Pocatello area during the winter. In the seventies, which I spent half of in and around Victorville, CA, home of the armpit of the Tactical Air Command, George Air Force Base, we would often go "down the hill" to shop in San Bernardino. You could be cruising along I-15, minding your own business, trying to avoid all the people who were ignoring the signs that said, "Arrive alive. Drive 55," when all at once you would be obligated to come almost to a complete stop. You had driven into a bank of fog which didn't allow you to see past the front of your own car. This presents quite a quandary. Do you keep going at some kind of highway speed and risk running into someone ahead of you whom you stand no chance whatsoever of seeing before you hit them, or do you slow way down and stay there, barely creeping along to avoid a front-end crash, while exposing your rear bumper to all the tender mercies of a trucker who enters the fog bank several seconds behind you at 80 miles per hour?

There was one good thing going for us. We were driving Shayne's 1957 Chevrolet which was made completely of steel and which could absorb a lot of punishment before any visible damage would occur. But the fifty-sevens were built a long time before GM and their competitors started equipping their vehicles with seat belts. And even cars built back then had their limits. If you got rear-ended by a Peterbilt hauling several tons of lumber, it wouldn't matter if you were driving a Sherman tank! I suspect that even one of Stalin's T-34s or Hitler's King Tigers would get shoved around quite a little by a high velocity punch from such a truck, and the people in it might get some pretty serious whiplash if not broken necks.

The best fog I've ever seen (or the worst, depending on your point of view) was in Italy, way up north in the foothills of the Alps. In Verona, home of Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen and also of his "star-crossed lovers," we six missionaries were invited to attend a Christmas dinner at the home of an Air Force staff sergeant and his wife outside the city. The fog was light as we crossed the city on our ever-faithful bicycles, but, as we got out into the countryside, it thickened up so that, despite the daylight, all we could see was the white line on the side of the highway. We lined up on it and kept pedaling for several miles. One of the elders said he knew where we were supposed to turn, but I assumed that we'd coast right past our turn on our bikes without seeing any sign of it.

Oh, me of little faith! The DL or somebody figured out that we were about to arrive at our left turn. Remember that the left side of the road was completely invisible to us. We could only see about 4 feet in any direction. Elder Thacker, a particularly pleasant and quick-witted fellow, had already crashed his bike a few weeks before when the little suitcase which held our filmstrip projector got itself stuck in his front spokes and threw him off the bike. He had landed jaw-bone first on one of those typical granite curbstones they have over there. After all, people build their nations out of what they're made of. Russians built everything for centuries out of wood, because all they had was trees. Italians built everything out of either granite or marble, because most of the peninsula was made of or built above these things. Anyway, poor Elder Thacker had his jaw wired shut and was not likely to enjoy the Christmas dinner very much anyway.

We were so cared for by our Heavenly Father over there and saved so constantly from serious harm that it became a bit commonplace in our minds, I fear. Only now, after nearly 38 years, can I look back on events like our finding of the American USAF Staff Sergeant's house as what they were: miracles, pure and simple. I rarely even considered such things back then. I had spent my life in pursuit of drama and didn't recognize it when it really happened.

I do recall one thing about that fog. We brought a lot of it into the Sergeant's home with us. My suit, which had been built by a tailor in Brescia, was made of wool. Our passage through several miles of pea-soup fog had drenched the suit as though I'd been rained on the whole way. The crease in my trousers was but a memory. I gathered up sections of both the trousers and the jacket and wrung them out until they stopped pouring water on the back porch. Then I twisted them a little harder to get out as many drops as I could. That pale green wool suit was pretty smelly when it was wet, and it was never wetter than it was on that Christmas day in 1971.

The good sister of the home had a blender. She put some of everything into it, hit puree' or something like that, and poured it into a glass for Elder Thacker. He drank his Christmas dinner through his teeth and through the wires that were holding his jaw together. He actually seemed grateful. He didn't complain. And he could have complained, too! He could speak, after a fashion. But he didn't murmur about it at all.

I got to serve with him again the next year in the Monza district for a while. We attended some car races at the famous Monza track. When the little formula twos blurred by, making their distinctive high pitched buzzing scream, it was Elder Thacker who quipped, "'Dem's motatin'!"

It was also in Monza where I had my most eerie experience with fog. Any RM will tell you that you always feel weird and like things just aren't right if you get accidentally separated from your companion. Elder Jan Graham Bunker and I were riding our bikes home after teaching a lady on the far side of the city. We lived in a much older part of town, and had a long way to go. It was dark, and, as we proceeded, the fog kept getting thicker until all we could see was the front tire of our own bikes. We couldn't see each other at all. The street lamps above us made the front tires barely visible, but the poles that held those lamps aloft might as well not have been there. We never saw them.

Now, Elder Bunker and I were companions for 7 (seven) months! All of that was in Monza. I was there another three months after his departure. So you may safely assume that we got to know the streets of that city about as well as we knew those of our home towns. We had traveled that route after dark many times. Although we couldn't see any of the buildings or even the street itself, we instinctively knew how to follow the dim glare of the lights above us back to our apartment, miles from where we'd been teaching. We couldn't see each other, either, so we kept up a light chatter as we kept pedaling deeper into the old section of town.

I answered something Elder Bunker had said and made a lengthy comment of my own. I ended it with a question as to his opinion. I waited for him to respond. He didn't. "Elder?" I asked calmly. No response. The stages of mild worry and real nervousness were skipped over altogether. I was afraid. My companion was gone! I couldn't hear him or see him. I'd been out maybe 17 or 18 months and this had never happened before. I think I applied my hand brakes, listened carefully for a moment, and then shouted his name again. Nothing! Murmuring a prayer, I started on again, trusting in my notoriously non-existent sense of direction and my familiarity with the ancient city to get me home. Thoughts of winding up in some other city, exhausted and alone many hours hence, and having to ask the police to call the mission headquarters to get me back to my apartment in the morning passed irresistibly through my mind which was steeped in a couple of years of dramatic tradition in both high school and college.

But those thoughts didn't stop me from pedaling. I just kept riding along through the darkness and the fog. No one was out on the streets. I was alone for perhaps 15 or 20 minutes and never heard or saw the lights of another vehicle. Even the apartments above the stores were dark. The occasional street lamps seemed to be my only companions. But that wasn't true. I had another companion. I don't recall making any turns or choosing any new directions. I simply kept pedaling until I was aware of being on a very narrow street. A bit of light was coming from behind a high gate. I rode up to it and stopped. It was our gate. I opened it, I think with a key. I closed it behind me and parked my bike by the side of the little building which, along with an older Italian couple upstairs, we called home. I went into the apartment and turned on the lights. You had to rotate a dark brown key-like switch to turn on lights over there. I must have prayed some more. I really don't recall. Pretty soon Elder Bunker walked in, his eyes as wide as mine must have been. He asked where I had been. I wondered the same thing about him. We were pretty quiet as we prepared for bed that night.

Now, you could say that it was just dumb luck. You could say that it was instinct. You could say anything you wanted to say about this experience. But I had the experience. And I know what happened that night. The Holy Ghost guided us back to our home and put us back together just as surely as parental hands guide baby footsteps. Even as I've been writing this, I've felt to bow my head and offer another prayer of thanks for a miracle, and no minor one at that, which occurred in Monza in 1972.

Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, was first inspired to create that organization when he got lost at night in foggy London. A young fellow who lived in the neighborhood was able to tell him in detail just how to get to where he needed to be. Such young men, he thought, were in short supply and should be trained up in greater numbers by an organization created for just that purpose. It wasn't long before his idea spread across the Atlantic and was adopted by people like Ernest Thompson Seton, author of the first American Boy Scout handbook.

My feelings about fog are mixed and rich. It is exciting and full of adventure. It's also a little scary. I love it.