Fog

I live where it's often foggy. I love it. (Come to think of it, several places I love are often foggy.) Even before I lived here, I always loved fog. I love how it looks, beset against a healthy forest or hillside. The way it traps the last bit of sun against the waterline, casting a brilliant orange all around for about twenty minutes of glory (when you're among the fortunate to have witnessed it). I can endlessly flip through posts and accounts on either the Golden Gate Bridge or Point Reyes and their relationship with light and fog.

Every time it's foggy, I think about the redwoods drinking the fog, and I appreciate it.

Living here, I now get the added layer of getting to experience the fog. Living in it, feeling it on my skin. This is my third year living here; here are my observations.

I have started to be able to discern a few moods of the fog. There is a very dense, often cold, thick type of fog. It seems to absorb all light, and the skyline, any discernible clouds, the ocean - each turns into barely-different forms of grey, and if I don't wear sunglasses, I spend the whole time squinting. (But if I do, I feel foolish for wearing sunglasses on a foggy, overcast day.)

We got caught in a dense fog like this our first HMB Pumpkin Festival. We chose to avoid the traffic and ride the half hour into town. (One of the absolute joys of living in our community is how much time we spend on bikes. A beautiful coast trail generally hugs the waterline or at least keeps me within sight of it from my house to the south end of town and back. In the ocean, there are generally waves, and surfers trying to ride them. Pelicans and seagulls traverse around, looking for their next meal. We have two whale sighting seasons. In between, dolphins, fishermen, and all sorts of joggers, dog walkers, open ocean swimmers, and families share this trail whether simply crossing to get to the sand, or commuting to town and back.

When this trail takes a couple of brief jogs inland, pleasant surprises await. Ad-hoc, community-made art installations. Beautiful, lived-in homes. Farmland. Tours on horseback, sometimes. And a sweet tree tunnel - a narrow ish bridge where tree branches intertwine to form a makeshift roof over top. It's such a stunning ride. My favorite bit is about halfway to downtown - there's a campsite surrounded by beautiful Cypress trees leaning determinedly into the wind. This is where a local mom's group organized soccer practices put on by incredibly generous local high school coaches for our community's children during the pandemic. Every time I ride by, I remember what it felt like to bring my son and daughter to these practices. It felt scary at first, and then okay, then kind of normal. It was the first time I remember feeling like maybe everything was going to be okay.)

The Pumpkin Festival is a very big deal in these parts. It's a point of pride that most of the Bay Area knows about and much of them enjoy it enough to come annually. Fantastic local brewers show off their seasonal taps. It features better-than-decent music, unfathomably large pumpkins competing to be crowned largest, above average people watching, and a chill vibe fitting our community.

All the people bring traffic, lots of it. There is one road traveling north-south across the town, mostly a two split-lane stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, but no one calls it that here. On weekends like this, the 5.3 miles to downtown from our house can take a couple hours by car. Biking is an easy choice.

On this day, our first Pumpkin Fest, the weather was evolving all morning. I wouldn't have been surprised if the overcast clouds split and the sun came out, or if it had started raining. We were prepared for both, up for anything.

After we'd attended the festival, we were riding home, a group of us happily pedaling along. We were new to the community, a few months in. This was enough time to be welcomed and accepted, openly. This is who we were with, neighbors and friends of all ages, kids and dogs in tow. Not quite halfway home, we all started to notice we were soaking wet in seemingly a matter of minutes.

I didn't know it then, but now after a few years of experiences I understand: what felt at the time like rain, wasn't. We were riding in and through the fog. It was a dense fog. Dense fog is maybe the most interesting type of fog. Something about the amount of composition of it, the water droplets coming from a bit further away than less dense fog, but not quite raining. It has lots of water, but it doesn't come from as far away as rain. It isn't as cold as rain. It's fascinating.

It added to the joy of the ride. Most days returning home has a slightly different lean-into-the-wind grind. This day, I don't remember it being windy at all. I do remember stopping at the sea wall when one of us spotted dolphins playing not more than 30 meters offshore. Oblivious of us, they turned and sprinted and jumped and chased and surfed for a solid ten minutes before disappearing as quick as they'd appeared. We stayed another minute or two, soaking wet but thrilled.

This type of fog is on the more dense end of the spectrum. I've experienced enough other types of fog to start to discern them. My favorite is what I don't have a better description than 'regular' fog. Regular fog is slightly less dense than what we experienced that Pumpkin Fest. The droplets are smaller. They come from closer. It still moves, and even now maybe a hundred or so days of fog under my belt, I have to convince myself feeling droplets falling into me isn't rain, it's fog. Regular fog is the easiest for me to figure out as not-rain. The water has this extremely delicate quality, as if formed no further than the reach of my breath.

The latest time I experienced this was riding to and from my friend's at night. They were moving and had incredibly kindly offered me their hive of bees. We'd just the night before had the wonderful adventure of moving the hive from his yard to mine. (I wish I had footage of the kind-of-ridiculous and kind of rad journey in our Subaru, us two middle aged dudes in full beekeeper gear driving along, a hive of bees contained in boxes literally taped and ratched shut in the back.)

One of the best parts of being a beekeeper is the study of bees. They are fascinating creatures, with incredible hive behaviors orchestrated in ways we don't understand by a central badass queen bee. Somehow they know when it's time to gather, when it's time to rest (yes, even bees rest. They take advantage when the weather is crap and conserve energy), when it's time to swarm.

One of the loveliest things I've learned about bees is swarming. The hive instinctively knows when they have enough honey, bees, and supply of nectar and water to split off to go find a new home. A big step towards swarming is creating new queen bees. The current queen seems to have final authority on whether a swarm happens, consuming any newly hatched queens for what we assume but again don't really know are reasons - not enough healthy bees, food or water or honey supplies, or maybe the new queen was unfit; we simply don't conclusively understand.

When a hive gets ready to swarm, they give off signs but nothing is a certainty. They'll 'beard' over the front of the hive at night sometimes before they swarm. Bearding is clustering together around the entrance, sometimes beautifully clumping outside the box. Sometimes they beard and don't ever swarm.

Because of this unpredictability, it's kind of magic when they do swarm. It's also insane. Picture somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 bees filling the air, flying chaotically around, most taking care to be close enough to the queen to protect her, but not so obvious as to attract predators to her.

The thing I find wild is the old queen is the one who swarms. It's opposite of how humans tend to behave, as I have observed. God willing, if we are able to create a successful home, maybe raise children in it, we aren't usually leaving the house to them when they're ready to start their families. We kick the kids out and let them find their way.

Not bees. This friend, the one whose house I was riding to and from a little while ago, he explained to me that the current queen decides this home is the new hive's best chance for survival. She knows how to start a hive and grow it healthily, so she's got the better chance of setting up shop somewhere else, so she grabs what and who she needs and sets off. It works for them, but we humans have decided another way works best for us.

Capturing swarms is an art. There are endless knowledge sources of best practices to painlessly get one, by setting up an empty hive and filling it with frames containing nectar or honey. I've heard it's best to put it in a visible, accessible spot. I've tried this every season I've been a beekeeper and never been successful.

Swarms usually end up in trees. I've mostly had them settle in our neighbors' - they are very gracious dealing with thousands of bees flying around their front yard. Then it's a pretty straightforward process - get a box (simple cardboard actually works!) close enough and essentially shake them into the box. The queen is at the center of the clump of bees, so one stiff jolt gets them dislodged. Once the queen is in, the rest of them will find their way. I've learned to leave the box by where they've swarmed until dusk, then they're ready to be moved to their hive. (Local beekeeping services simply vacuum up the swarm once they've landed. It's quite an operation.)

This brings me back to my recent night bike ride, riding in regular fog. I was on my way back from my friend's - the hive we'd moved the night before was mostly settled, but a couple handfuls of foragers had made their way back to his yard. He'd gotten them to settle in a box which I was now carrying home on my bike. I find all types of fog to have a sort of mystical quality to them. On this ride, the streetlights captured patches of fog in their spotlights. Sometimes moving, sometimes quite still, the fog was all at once a cloud and batches of tiny droplets of water. And it's everywhere. It envelops the street, the trees, and me, cutting through it with a box of bees tucked under one arm.

Today, the best language I have to describe these tiny variances distinguishing dense fog from regular or light fog is percentage difference. I rode home, seeing and feeling the wet. The regular fog is maybe thirty percent more cloud than water droplets felt in heavy fog. I end up ten percent less soaked - in dense fog, water piles up in my hair, on my face, and drips. In regular fog, water still piles up, only it's slower to form and doesn't drip. When I get home, it shakes off me when I take off my jacket. I see myself in a mirror and I see none of the nuance of half-soaked vs fully dripping soaked or simply clinging soaked.

Maybe another few years of living in the fog and I'll get to that level of discernment.