Flogged by Fog

May and June were peaches and cream. Sunshine, blue skies, movie stars. Apparently it’s payback time. We are experiencing the foggiest August in memory.

Well, so what? So it’s foggy. What’s the big deal? I’ll tell you.

Fog really makes work out here much more difficult. You see, most of my work requires seeing. I follow plots of cliff-nesting seabirds through the season. Sometimes it is so foggy I can’t see the cliffs, let alone the birds. So when it’s that foggy I can just stay home and play parcheezi and eat eggs right? Wrong. Generally, I go out anyway and wait for the fog to clear. And I struggle to see what’s going on. And then I wait some more. And struggle some more. Looking at a nest on a clear day I note that the adult kittiwake has a chick. The chick still has its egg-tooth and a slightly bluish hue to its eyes. In the fog sit there asking myself if the bird is standing or sitting or if it is even a kittiwake.

In the fog I am often in the company of stranded travelers. Planes aren’t able to land when it is foggy so it is common for people to get stuck out here. We haven’t had a scheduled flight land for 18 days. Stranded people tend to be grumpy people. The daily ritual for such travelers goes like this. Get up, listening to the automated weather report from the airport. Here that it is foggy. Listen to it 10 times more, noting slight variations in ceiling height and visibility. Call Pen Air and hear that the plane is on weather delay. Drive to the airport and check your baggage anyway. Wait some more. Hear that the flight is canceled. Pick up luggage and wait to do it again the next day.

And of course no planes means no food or mail as well. After a couple weeks the store shelves start to look rather bare. Note this freezer from earlier today. It features a few half gallons of ultra-pasturized milk and a box of moldy lemons. I suppose we can avoid contracting scurvy by sucking lemons. That’s something.