Page 126 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

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foGGy tHinkinG

Fog is a cloud that is earth bound.

—Alexander McAdie, “The Control of Fog”

or most of human history, at least until 1944, people were at a loss
to know what to do about the fogs and vapors obscuring their view.
F Natural fog, seen from afar, is quite beautiful as it pools in the river
valleys or burns off on a sunny morning, but those enshrouded by it may not fully
welcome the whiteout conditions it brings. of course, such obscuration can be a
good thing, as in Virgil’s Aeneid when Venus cloaks her son and his companion
in a thick fog to protect them on their journey, or when, following a massive artil-
lery barrage in World War I, the fog, “mute but masterful . . . countermanded
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all battle orders, and the roar of a thousand batteries gave way to stillness.”
Sometimes fog is used as a theatrical curtain. Shakespeare employs the weather
to reveal Hamlet’s mental state when he apprehends the sky filled with “a foul
and pestilent congregation of vapors.” Coleridge’s ill-fated albatross first appears
to the Ancient Mariner out of an ice fog. Then there is London or pea soup fog,
mixed with the smoke of millions of chimneys, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “dun-
coloured veil,” sometimes yellow, sometimes brown, composed of an unhealthy
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mixture of smoke and vapor. Actual, as opposed to literary, fogs were deemed