Fog

Note: Fog, written in February 2018, reassures and encourages me. Beyond routines, meal plans, to-do lists and appointments, the details of my next minutes, hours and days are hidden, unseen, foggy— if you will. Most likely yours are too. In posting Fog on Given Word Now, I was reminded that God is ALL powerful. In seeking Him, He gives us grace, shows us all we need to see and brings us through our foggy places.

 

My weather app says the sun is shining. Surely it is—somewhere—but around me it’s thickening fog. Dense clouds are dripping down a heavy wash of gray.  The woods to the north are barely visible. Such impenetrable fogs trigger memories for me—always the same three.

The first, from 1962, is a comfortable one, full of adventure and teamwork. My husband Ed and I were driving home on unlit highways from a visit to his parent’s on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. We’d spent a lovely day boating, sipped before dinner drinks under the tall maple trees shading a hillside that sloped gently down to the water.  We’d lingered over a family dinner around an oval table long enough to give generous elbow room for a family of seven and then walked down to the pier to watch the sun set down across the lake. Setting out late for our drive home to Crystal Lake, Illinois, a light misty fog began to fall. As Ed’s mom and Dad stood on the sidewalk to the circular drive way waving good-byes, they cautioned us to be careful, to drive safely.

I sat beside my husband in his 1960 orange Volkswagen. Our first son, almost a year old, slept on the back seat. As we drove south past familiar fields and barns the fog slowly thickened.  Just south of Woodstock, the visibility on Route 47 fell to almost nothing. As we passed Pleasant Valley Road, Ed stopped the car in the middle of the highway. He asked me to get out and walk in front of the headlights to guide his steering. Slowly, he pulled the car onto the shoulder—not into the ditch. When I got back into the car, he got out and walked ahead to find the turn onto Rte. 176. Then, estimating rather than seeing, he carefully inched the car into the turn for the final stretch of road home. How glad we were to see the street lights of our town. That was a happy love-filled memory. A happy day. A happy ending.

My second fog memory fell in the early months of 1971. It wasn’t happy. A fog in my head was matched by a fog outside the windows.  My heart was aching then. My children and I were living with my mom and dad. The year before, every childhood dream of  home and marriage with a loving husband had dissolved. I was ill with daily fevers, intense head pain and other lupus symptoms. While moving through grief, I was also battling and overcoming unrealistic toxic fears. As I slowly sorted through through vastly changed circumstances, daily tasks like meals, dishes, and laundry brought a measure of order and stability to life, but in many ways I felt lost, unable to see ahead. I was trying to seek God and wanted to trust Him, but my faith was feeble. In my heart I nurtured a secret fantasy that a savior, in the form of a real, live, flesh and blood prince, would one day knock on the door. He would look in my eyes with divine unquenchable love, read my heart, understand my mind, and comfort my pain, loss and loneliness.

Perhaps fog triggered my imagination, for thick, thick fog, often coincided with bouts of longing for my savior-prince. It would settle down for more than a day. Once, I drove to the store through the fog. Half a mile away, the sky was clear, but on returning home, our street was still blanketed with gray.  It was uncanny. Somehow, I felt those fogs were a sign, external evidence of my own inner haze.

I almost wore out a 33 rpm recording of Kate Smith singing,  “Somewhere the sun is shining, Somewhere the blue-birds dwell. Hush then, thy sad repining, God reigns and all is well.”  Looking back, the glimmers of confidence that “God reigns and all is well” I found through those foggy days of weakness, seeking and need were foreshadows of my third memory of fog about twenty-five years later.

That fog was in the mid-1990’s— at Niagara Falls, New York. At that time, my children were grown and I was teaching ESL while working on an MA at the University of Illinois. A young South Korean friend and I had attended a Christian Conference in Mississauga, Canada. We’d driven there by the fast route, through Canada by way of Detroit. After days of worship and seeking God, we choose the slower southern route back to Illinois, by way of Western New York, just so we could see Niagara Falls.

As we left Mississauga, the sun shone brightly in a cloudless sky; the dry air was freezing cold. The roads were clear; the landscapes wintry brown, and the snow had either not yet come or already receded. Our drive toward the border was swift, but as we approached the Canadian side of the Falls, thin mists rose up to meet us. As we drew nearer to the Falls, the mists thickened and quickly turned to dense, heavy, earth-bound fog. And every drop of water that condensed onto any surface began to freeze.

The small street leading to the Fall’s parking lot was a sheet of ice. We edged into the parking lot, grateful to avoid a spin. The parking lot was slicker than an ice rink. We held onto each other, slipping and sliding our way across the small street toward the Falls. The trees and shrubbery around us bent low, shiningly ice covered and heavy. Still holding onto each other, we shuffled our way along the sidewalk to the building guarding the street level tourist entrance. Finally, we reached a fence. I held onto it; my friend held onto me.

Mist clung and condensed onto our coats and scarves. We gratefully entered the building barricading ticketless visitors out and funneling paid visitors in toward this huge natural wonder. Entrance fee paid, we walked outdoors again only to exit on the Falls side into a cloud.  All we could see was the ice covered concrete beneath our feet and a half a dozen or so brave souls who were leaning over an ice encrusted fence straining to see the roaring waters that filled the air with sound.  Sliding toward the fence and leaning into it, we joined them, only to stare straight ahead at  swirling mists against  a backdrop of dense fog.

In the moisture laden air, thin sheets of ice soon froze all over our wet jackets. Our scarves and mittens were quickly covered with ice. Still, we leaned over the fence and looked and looked. We were determined. After all, we’d chosen the longer drive of Route 90 through New York to take 74 West out of Indy—just so that we could see these Falls. And now we couldn’t see them. I’d wanted to see them for years —and doubted I’d get another chance; my friend would return to Korea at semester’s end, perhaps never to return to the States. So we kept looking. We looked until everyone else had left and we alone were left hanging, coldly, over the fence.

From time to time an occasional gust of cold wind shook off the mist just enough to offer us a dim glimpse, a hope of something vaguely tangible out there beyond our eyes.  With freezing fingers, foreheads burning, and numbingly cold red noses—with iced scarves pulled up over our faces and the icy jacket hoods pulled down to our eye brows— we kept on—looking for a fuller view.

And then, after what felt like a deafening over exposure to the ear numbing roar of water, the mist thinned and almost parted.  For an instant, wan sunlight opened a real glimpse to the other side. It didn’t last long enough to give us an actual look, but oh that glimpse was tantalizing. Clouds again hugged the earth to hide our vision, but we waited on, wanting another view of all the tons of water that we could hear cascading down before our unseeing eyes. So close, yet shrouded and veiled.  But Yes! There it was again. Through the hazy mist-whitened world we were given a second, then a third and even a fourth brief view of light and energy—not at all far away.

Those glimpses, those moments of sight through the slightly lifted fog, stayed with us as we left the dense cloud for the entrance building and rode the elevator down to the tunnels below the falls. As we walked through the cold, narrow passageway beneath the falls, we stopped to peer through window after window cut through solid rock. Without words, we understood that God had been was speaking to us through the fog. Bathed in thunderous sound, ignoring our ice coated mittens and jackets and the cold penetrating through to our skin, we lingered at opening after opening, gazing in silent awe of the violent power of rushing water cascading before our eyes.  It was not a natural awe, but a holy awe. We both knew that those Falls were a natural picture of the tiniest fraction of God’s power.  His love is stronger. All powerful. We knew it. We felt it through our beings—