Author and Artist
What Fog Is Good For
A fictional travelogue; three minute read.
Just over a year ago, my wife was standing on a sidewalk near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf when a car jumped the curb. She never knew what hit her.
Since her death, my unmapped walks take me nowhere I need to be. For hours, I trek up and down, down and up, the city’s hilled contours, along its one-way streets or into vacant alleyways. Cold, wet, dense foggy days are the best because they match my foggy lack of direction.
My wife was at Fisherman’s Wharf for just one reason—to visit the sea lions. While they slumbered on the piers, she made it her business to drop by to bark her ‘hellos’ and wish them well. If they barked back, she was happy.
My ache is about the places we can’t explore together, the meals we won’t share, the untold sea lion stories. Everything in my life has turned a little bit duller, foggier.
People have long since stopped asking me what they can do—or even expressing sympathy. Except for high school history teachers like me and Latin-speakers, living in the past is not prologue.
I’m most at home where the bay waters lap up against the ghosted memories of abandoned shipyards. The waterlogged pilings slowly sinking, the metal railings bent, broken, rusting away.
Either that or standing at Aquatic Park. The coved breakwater encircles swimmers in waters as quiet and as calm as a gravesite. My wife would know if sea lions ever swam inside the cove.
For over 150 years Aquatic Park has dodged redevelopment death. It spawned a Maritime Museum, the Dolphin Club, the South End Rowing Club, the WWII Western Antiaircraft Command and a private casino.
My wife never reinvented herself. Never wanted to. Never grieved for a missing version of herself.
In the fierce wind, smelling of seaweed, my nostrils flare as they take in a lungful of sea saltiness. My ears redden. My eyes water. Mourning foghorns are Gregorian death chants.
Not far away, tourists offload at a cable car turntable. Maybe they will visit the restored old ferries and historic schooners docked at the Hyde Street Pier—each vessel in its own way a memorial.
Or maybe the neon signage of the Buena Vista Café will attract them. Two thousand times a day, the bartenders pour an otherworldly Irish coffee. The cafe’s signature drink is as much a part of San Francisco lore as the 1906 earthquake and fire. I am a regular and, since her death, too regular.
I walk on, arriving at our favorite lookout. From under an overhang of cypress trees, through the misty fog, I can barely make out the bald head of the Palace of Fine Arts, the yachts berthed at St. Francis Yacht Club, Alcatraz, the hundreds of sailboats tacking and playing like waterborne squirrels.
Without warning, the fog clears. The sun illuminates the waterfront like a high intensity beam from a coastal lighthouse. As if her soft hand is touching me, I feel the warmth of the sunrise off my right shoulder. The sun glints off my wedding band.
When the gray clouds close as suddenly as they parted, the fog wraps its wet, chilling mist around me.
I’m lost in my own city—again.
