Appalachian Houdini

Fog this morning was like a thick blanket–thicker than thick, a woolly bedspread, a knitted afghan in layers so deep, doubled and tripled, that even the creek bottoms had fallen into clouds. Grey mist suspended in the air protesting subjection to the laws of gravity.

A young buck emerges seemingly out of nowhere. He does not startle at first, but picks up his pace as I come closer, trotting across the road before pausing in the neighbor’s yard, his tail flicking up and down, his two chopstick horns angled heavenward. We are both a bit stunned: where did this strange observer, the man in the SUV wearing a baseball cap, come from so quietly? We both suspect the other of being able to teleport. Not far beyond, a rafter of wild turkeys pause, picking at the remains of a dead squirrel and dozens of black walnuts, all crushed by passing cars.

On the old highway, I see men putting a boat out on the river, stocked with provisions and coffee for a morning of fishing. They float in the fog upon the water, rapids and currents a trance of noise, their fly rods waving back and forth like sorcerers’ wands.

A crew of workers further up is trimming back the canopy of the right of way, tending to the overgrown, lush forest for the first time in decades, at least judging by the size of the trees they’re cutting down. It will be better for melting icy roads in the winter, I know, but still it exposes the asphalt harshly, the white ribbons guarding the edges catching the fiery morning light reflected off autumn’s emerging color for the first time this millennium. They’ve stacked several logs in front of a humble old house, the kind that will appreciate this free cord of firewood some future winter day. I drive on, wondering if they thought to do it on their own.

There is a point where the old highway crests a hill and comes down, and on normal days there is a lovely view of mountain tops, but today the fog has secreted them away. When I walk to my office, the horizon is strangely barren, flat and off white in color, the ridges rubbed out. It’s quite a magic trick, isn’t it? How do you hide a trillion tons of Great Smokies? How can you disappear the rock, soil, forest, and deer? The turkeys poking at dead squirrels? The river and salamanders and trout and birds of prey? The fishermen and women and children, the rich and the poor?

All it takes, dear reader, are tiny water droplets.

God knows how many, and I can wildly guess. A quadrillion times a quadrillion? Are there numbers big enough? It’s just a heavy cloud, this fuzzy dream-blanket about us this morning, and the individual droplets are only micrometers across. By some miracle of creation they’ve all congregated here, together, dense enough to see all, but not one. Enough to be dangerous for driving. To hide mountains. To surprise a buck.

In an hour or two, the sun will obliterate every last drop. The mountains will reappear, everything as expected, sorted and ordered. On the far horizon, the muted colors of a dry October creep down from their cold peaks, mustard-yellow and tan-orange and burgundy-red, everything changed–if only slightly–in the hidden rooms of a thick morning fog.