Chasing Fog

a hand extends through the wide, white dark

“Foggish,” Beth Kephart, Multi-Media Collage with Mulberry and Hanji Paper

Fog, she tells us, is a water-in-the-air phenomenon, a purveyor of myth, a sweeper of grounds, a wreathing of our childhoods. If we look for it. If we (but not on dangerous mountaintops) surrender. She has a “fog-self” who stands “closer to [her] true self than anything that comes from embracing the unknown.” She is seeking—this is the greater fact—the unknown.

She is Laura Pashby. Her book, Chasing Fog, is an amalgam of photography, history, mythology, landscape, bottomless pools, invisible vistas, and poetics-flecked prose. Her book (I’ll write it this way) is a prayer. For fog to remain and, when it vanishes, return.

I’d waited a few weeks for the book to come. It arrived in the aftermath of sadness, fear. I read it through the sleepless corridors of present time, looking to it to bring me peace regarding the unknowable and unsure. 

I found scene: “The tide is in, the sky deep blue fading to black, a rough-hewn cross is silhouetted against the sunset, and there’s a waxing gibbous moon. The only sound is a flag flapping loudly on top of the church.”

I found whispers: “Fog is weather that becomes a space—somewhere that is neither here nor there, a temporary fissure. To me, fog seems to open up a rift in reality: I step out of everyday time and into a cool quietness—a locus of latent magic.”

I found empathy: “Fog, particularly when it is unexpected, untethers us: it can leave us feeling anchorless—lost at sea.”

I found inversions: “But perhaps I chase fog because this weightless drift is what I hope for.”

It has been dry here, for weeks. There are fire warnings in the neighboring state. The leaves are dust. There is no fog. The glare falls hard. But in Laura Pashby’s book there is the unspooling promise of something good that might yet come. There is a hand extended, through the wide white dark. There is waiting for a lift.