On the Northern California coast, Fogust is the cruelest month. After March winds and April showers, we’ve endured May Gray, June Gloom and No-Sky July. Once again, fog—dense in the morning, wispy in the afternoon, ghostly at night—has overstayed its welcome. I miss not just the sun, but the stars and the moon and the annual meteor showers I’ve never glimpsed.
But while I measure summer in sunshine, nature keeps its own calendar. So in this alleged summer month, I try reframing my dreary thoughts.
“Think of fog as a cloud kissing the earth,” a friend from the East suggests. But our fog doesn’t descend from above; it forms in a process called advection. During the annual Upwelling, cold, nutrient-rich water rises from the deep, fueling one of the planet’s richest marine ecosystems. When warm, moist air from the Pacific collides with the frigid upwelled water, it cools—and can no longer hold as much moisture.
Vapor condenses on particles of dust, salt and bacteria to form droplets less than one-tenth the size of raindrops. Together, they merge into a thick shroud. During what meteorologists call our “summer pattern,” temperatures soar in California’s sun-baked interior valleys. As hot air rises, the marine layer—sometimes up to 3,000 feet deep—forms offshore.
A long, pale ribbon of white hovers on the horizon like a corps of ballerinas awaiting their cue to rush onstage. Then the atmospheric performance begins. A single, ever-lengthening finger of fog slides through the Golden Gate and slinks between Alcatraz Island and the San Francisco skyline. Great billows of white avalanche over the coastal hills north of the city. From my desk, I watch Bodega Head, a massive granite promontory, dissolve into the mix of drizzle and mist that locals call “drist.”
Surging inland like an airborne sea, fog ebbs and flows through vineyards, imbuing grapes with a rich complexity. In hushed forests, stately redwoods drink water directly from the fog. Through a process called foliar uptake, their needle-like leaves absorb moisture in surprisingly copious amounts. The redwoods share this liquid bounty with their neighbors. Fog drip falls from the canopy to the understory, accounting for as much as forty percent of a forest’s water supply.
In ways both obvious and invisible, the summer fog stitches together an entire coastal community, nourishing creatures that may never glimpse the ocean. By cooling rivers and streams, it helps sustain the salmon, steelhead trout and other fish that swim in them as well as the frogs, toads, newts and salamanders that thrive in the fog-dampened forest duff.
Most years, I waver between acknowledging fog’s benefits and grumbling about its persistence. Any such ambivalence has vanished. When wildfires blazed to the north, thick smoke drifted downwind. Stepping outside, I could see, smell, even taste it. My eyes burned. My throat felt raspy. Every breath carried the sting of loss.
When the fires were contained and the air finally cleared, I didn’t complain about the fog’s return. Rather than resenting it for blocking my view, I welcomed its cool embrace as a life-giving friend. This year, Fogust has earned my appreciation.
