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A mountain range separated my home from the sea to the south.
At the mountaincrest, the hot desert air in our valley meets the winds off the sea and its frozen Aleutian current. They spar, turning over and against each other, this canyon won by day, the next lost by night. In their turmoil, the heat and the cold condense and coalesce into each other and create a fog — The Marine Layer. I could see the fog from far off, as I stood in the valley or on the dusty northern hills, or from the car window on the morning way to school. The sun catches it, and for a few brief moments it reflects golden light off the mountainside. By the time I returned my attention in the glaze of the afternoon, the golden light had most times become an overgolden heat, and the fog had burned away, its moment in this world gone to vapor.
There are occasions when some front relinquishes, when the clouds abandon their place at the top of the mountains and roll slowly into the valley. As I watched its march, incessant and deliberate from on high, it seemed as if it were scrying a message upon the Earth, calling me to live among it in the hollows and rifts. I often went when the mountains were shrouded in full. The sky was closer to the ground. I was corralled, not in the sense of a wild horse unnaturally penned, but like a wayward sheep finally returned to its flock. It was the same feeling as retiring inside with a close friend during a large party and being comfortably wrapped in each other’s silence, sharing a lucid moment of rest over a dining room table. These times, to me, have always been the birthplace of emergent secrets: deep ones that lie unknown even to the self. In the fog, the air too becomes a confidant. There is a self-exploratory yearning to find something to say to the lonesome misty air. It’s all to do with contrast. Like a lone raven standing in a field of snow, I stand among the fog a lone figure protruding from the empty world. I know right where I start and where I end. The fog inspires a reflection, a contemplative state that I cannot always find in the sunlit world.
It is there, in the fog, that I can look up and see more nothing than I can see anywhere else in the world. The perfect distant splendor of infinite stars on a dark night lights the mind and heart in a conjoined rapturous flame and sets the eyes teeming with tears full of starlight. But I don’t think the stars compare to that fog, which closes in and begs you instead to look inside of yourself and marvel at what is already there.
In fog is uncertainty. Look elsewhere for truth.
Why don’t I tell you a story? It was six of us. We got into the truck with the short bed late at night and set our minds on the ocean. We went on. We drove Kanan to Kanan Dume – a pass through the mountains. It was cloudy at home, and we were propelled by a lofty aesthetic mood to embrace a life intrepid on the nocturnal shore. We set out on a journey, maybe in the hopes of a transpiration, maybe with a promise of growing up a little.
We crossed a threshold where, at the foot of the mountains, there is an intersection. On three sides streetlamps extend in familiar rows. The fourth arm extends out into the mountains. Looming above the road, a stop light burns in front of a great veil of fog, beckoning, beholding us in our anticipation. The light in its turn went green, and we drove headlong into its mystery.
That night, the engine rumbled beneath us and the winter night air passed through the unrolled windows. That great fog stood in perfect contradistinction to us. Great where we were small, hazy where we were clear, flat grey where we were dynamic, fiery streaks of vivid color. I find it both difficult and unworthy to describe my friends by some process of essential distillation. I will say only that we were multifarious and loved each other deeply, each of us yearning outwards to the world, and that should be enough. There was surely some music playing, but I could not hear it. I cannot hear it now. I cannot now hear anything but the sound of wind rushing through my ears. I don’t know if the rest of them in the car felt my trepidation, my suppliance. They were wilder than I.
The light turned green, and we sped up into the canyon. Winding up steep roads, through amber-lit tunnels, all diffused and blended in the milky vagueness. As we spun up the sides of the range, the fog grew thicker. Our headlights were lost, reflecting back a hundred thousand drops of water instead of the road or the mountain wall. It was like a projector illuminating the screen before the movie starts, lighted with no definition. Every wet drop hung in suspension, as particulate to that obscure and dangerous fog. It was daring to make our blind way through that glossless pale.
Light often obscures when it means to reveal. Towards the top of the pass, we turned our lights off. We could see better, and the road was entirely empty, so we did not fear the oncoming lane. The black truck devoid of light was like a piece of the night sky carved to shape and stuck on the back of the Earth, like chewing gum. And we were sitting there swaying in movement, squeezed tight, sharing the warmth of our pressed skin. I have a picture, I think, from around the moment I’m describing. I may have deleted it, actually: it was blurry and my eyes were squinted and I looked gaunt and my stubble was overgrown. My skin looked pale in the flash.
As remarkable as it was to be inside of that fog, it was more remarkable to share it with others. I remember our shared incredulity that a fog could be so thick and blinding as this one was. I remember our mouths gaping and our eyes open wide, not quite believing what we were experiencing. I would say that it is only for them that I can attribute this night to reality, and not some curious dream.
This time in the fog, I didn’t want to scream anything. That part of me that yearns to cry out into the vast cryptic grey was shut and locked behind a placidness I did not understand. For the moment, I was taken away from that usual state of living between a difficult past and an invisibly prospected future: removed from the agonizing glare of the anxious eyes of sun and moon, wrapped instead in a quilted blanket out of sight, in a present untouchable by any who would harm me. We moved forward through the great rolls and lifts and I felt free in my confinement, and in my companionship. I cannot speak to the internal movements of my friends, but I know we travelled through the same mountains on the same night, and so we must have converged in some way.
Sometimes I swear I see ghosts, or little shadows crawling along the walls, usually when I haven’t slept for a long time, or when that creeping sense of the world begins to emerge and shade my eyes. As soon as they come into sight, they scuttle away beneath some stove or into some crack in the wall. And I see ghosts too, not in front of me or even behind me, but in the middle of my memories. People who cannot possibly have been there show themselves to me in perfect clear image, dancing and laughing along with those whose bodies inspired the long-standing images of my true mind. I have heard impossible voices call to me from between the world. I woke one morning in sadness and heard a missing silver voice speak from the other side of the bed, but when I looked, I saw only the sun slanting through the window. I do not bear the delusion that these falsehoods come from anywhere but my mind, but as part of my mind they are part of my world, and I must accept them as such.
Fog, too, breeds illusions.
Halfway down the southern slope, facing the Malibu coast, the fog ceased. The whole night was split in two unmarried pieces. The clear jet sky seemed as alien as the fog had just ten minutes prior. At night, from a distance, it is impossible to tell where the sea and sky meet. It is just as difficult to find the seam between the land and the sea. (Or have you ever tried to tell where the sky meets the ground? A thick fog reminds us that the sky is at our feet, as well as over our heads.) In this distinction, we are looking for a darkness that is deeper than the others. The sea is darker than the land is darker than the sky. Somewhere above, the moon spread itself over us, and somewhere beyond, the city lights did the same. Neither helped us to see. We were lost in the tripartite darkness. And yet, the forms were clear, the hillsides rising to points until they stopped. The darkness falls into darkness, rises up to darkness. Amid fog, each figure, as it disappeared in the near distance, seemed as though it vanished forever. Here it was at least conceivable that something could be definite.
We ended up down on a little strand of beach hidden behind Point Dume. We parked on the side of the road and walked down the line. Lovers embraced as the cold surf lapped over their ankles, vagabonds laid unshapely heaped under blankets on the blue-white sand. I beheld so much life around me. I remember everybody I passed, and yet, there was no register for them. I had crossed now into a kind of solipsist fugue. Perhaps the fog had revealed something in me, and now on this beach I fled from it. Who can say? I certainly can’t. If you’re looking for a lesson, or some other tidiness, look away from the fog.
That ensemble along the beach puzzles me. In my memory, they all stood entirely still, like wax figures, dreamlike totems, intent on stillness while we insisted on remaining in motion. Maybe they had seized onto something that was slipping by us. They were vagrants, lovers, wanderers. They stood all of them fixed to the moonlit sea. Surely there is some gap in my memory, and in the loose crowd there was movement I could not see. We kept on. I suppose here we were approaching some climax of the trip, but as I alluded to before, we didn’t have a purpose to be here other than to be here.
The beach, the clear air, the gentle susurrus of wave and wind, it all felt so real compared to the dream world we had driven through to get here. And yet, there was still an uncanniness. As we walked, things felt so close and familiar that they began to shrink back into the distance, shying away from ones looking so closely. I saw with the wondrous clarity of a myopic child wearing glasses for the first time. The world was changing shape around me.
Towards the end of that beach, the coast road is gated. The population of cast-off figures diminished until we were the only ones left, finding our way along the strand. We approached a garden of boulders, each pocked by wind and sea. The black rocks cropped up from the white sand. We were closer now to the moon and its light was falling on us and the water, which swirled and eddied between the rocks. A rising tide encroached slowly to the sandy bluff. We chose a tall flat rock and climbed atop. We laughed into the wind as the water receded and re-flooded the sand beneath us, reaching a higher mark each time. I felt a metal plaque emblazoned into the rock beneath my hand and took out my phone to see it under light. The rock had been marked with a round piece of tarnished bronze by the US Geodetic Survey. It bore some significance, enough to be marked out, and I felt that maybe I was part of that significance. Then I looked out across the water and the world stopped and, for a brief moment in time, made itself known.
I saw the moon, that bright moon, carried out above the wind-whipping sea, folding its beams across the peaking waves, lighting each cresting tip in harmonic, regular time. The sky was alight with its invisible fire. In the hour that had passed, it had neared the horizon, and the far-dark sea now shone pulsing below a sky dappled in ethereal clouds. I looked out to that moon and I felt that I had passed into some unspeakable nowhere. It had all been turned to a faerie world. Each name became a mystery and the solid rock beneath me seemed to morph like the changing sand. Everything inside of me welled to such a degree of uncertainty, driving me to a thereto unknown state of reflection, a prevailing ecstasy sourced in dread. Perhaps that night I saw the future laid out before me in the form of the Pacific Ocean. It was ineffable and broad, extending in all directions except one, blackest of the elemental domains.
The Germans called it Sturm und Drang, the uncertain listing of the heart faced with things larger than it can understand. The images they turned to – the dark cloudy sky over a turbulent ocean, a lone traveler standing over a large sea of fog – are my images too. But there is a difference between art and life. I cannot live in a painting, nor can a painting live my life. I am a subject pulled through time, and those Romantics plucked moments from time like precious gems from the Earth, setting them in crystal casings and the gold settings of their rings.
We were forced off our rock by high tide. The night was cold and the ocean soaked through my shoes. The moon had shifted, and it wasn’t quite as it was before. It looked mostly the same, but there was no more golden choir. My breath had returned, and in most ways so had I, from that transitory moment of anxious transcendence. I looked past the lamps lining the coast road, up to the unlighted peaks.
I am too meticulous and too nervous to allow myself to be dragged so constantly up to the very face of experience. I was not made for desert flings and forward retreats into the dark and unknown wilds. I still hold fantasies of leaving and wending on to the wild untamed lands, or those so steeped in the cruel gentility and tradition of their past centuries that they hold under their crumbling stones the very same mystery as the wilderness from which they emerged. I still adhere to the fantasy that I can find myself anywhere away from home. But the longer I inhabit this inherited mind, the more that fantasy diminishes, and so I turn inwards, and attempt to find a way out from within.
I have no true remarks regarding the journey back. I don’t remember much of it, anyway. I remember one thing, actually: the fog had lifted by the time we reached the top of the pass, and the way home was steeped in a rarified crystalline silence. The silence annealed the soft burning of experience into something I feel I can now hold in my hands. The longer I hold it, though, the more I fear I’ll smudge its ink. I come back to this night, hoping again to find an answer trapped within its frail casing, but instead I find only the barrier fog and its adjacent moonlit sea.
Ian Connolly is a recent USC graduate in theater and creative writing, a recipient of the Edward Moses Undergraduate Fiction Prize. He has been featured in Palaver Magazine.