crystal clarity of icy fog

Gloomy. Oppressive. Bone-chilling. Disorienting. The way of icy valley fog pressing down on Central Oregon can be all those things until the weight of the inversion lifts and blue sky showers us in glimmering, lacy, feathery, spiky ice crystals on leaves, needles, and stems in one ephemeral burst of art before the melt.

In the sunshine, I’m missing the glamour of the hoar frost only possible because of the fog. When the icy fingers of mist shiver the land again, I’m longing for warmth.

How to embrace the present dangerous moment of our country gripped by fascism? There are lessons for all of us who resist in the seesaw weather in a winter with little snow in the mountains and an uneasiness in the air and in our lives.

When hoar frost jewels the branches, needles, bunchgrasses, and leaves, I wander within nature’s sculpture garden, marveling at the details I too often gloss over when there’s no enunciation. In this close scrutiny of hoar frost, I am reminded again of how entwined I am with this living, breathing, highly evolved, and glorious Earth.

The hoar frost is a momentary art, like the intricate sand paintings of Tibetan Buddhist monks they deliberately erase to remind us of impermanence.

Definition: Hoar frost proper: A deposit of ice that generally assumes the form of scales, needles, features or fans and which forms on objects the surface of which is sufficiently cooled, generally by nocturnal radiation, to bring about the deposition of the water vapour contained in the ambient air. — World Meteorological Association

I admit, it’s challenging to be a lover of fog without the hoar frost. I’m terrified of brain fog. I want clarity, sharpness, snappiness, sharp outlines, shadows, and sun so bright I have to squint and avert my eyes. I hold my face to the light like a plant gathering the rays to photosynthesize.

My spirits rise in sunshine. I want to stay outdoors as long as possible to be nourished among the pines and the tinkling chimes of Dark-eyed Juncos fluttering in the manzanitas where California Quail take shelter. I want to cross the jumbled, 7000-year-old lava flow near our home to the Kipuka (Hawaiian term for a place where hot lava parted and went around to create an island of refuge). There, the great ancient pines cloaked in their sheathes of icy needles from days in the fog rise up to form a sailing ship to carry me away to safety.

In contrast, when I’m immersed in a clammy foggy inversion (where valleys are bitter cold and clouded and mountains clear and warmed by sun), I can feel an iron clamp on my spirits. I put in the word “can” because of the hoarfrost gift that grows ever more spectacular the longer the fog lasts.

As I write this at 8 a.m. with my bare feet warmed by the wood stove fire, I see the fog has lifted, and to the west the ponderosa treetops, so white with hoar frost they give the illusion of snowfall I yearn for, are netting the first light from the east. The sky is the blue river. I cannot stay here longer–it’s time to bundle up and enter the flow at 18 degrees and with our Labrador Pepper eager to romp with joy, nose down to sniff a perfumerie of scents, like the musk of mule deer.

Return. Notes from my walk. A raven pitched across the dazzled treetops, a black cursor upon the sky page. The gravelly crawk punctuated my own exclamation. Pygmy Nuthatches nattered among the pine branches, every squeaky call a rusty hinge swinging my gate open to the day.

On the black lava ridge, the twisted langourous sprawl of a ponderosa –dwarfed in size, old in the ways of rooting among rocks with little soil– is about to shed her wooly glittery sweater of hoar frost. Back in our yard, a flock of House Finches garnishes the sky in cardamom rose.

My cheeks burn with cold. I’m fully alive –ready to rise with the flocks of kindred souls so brave in this dangerous world. When my way feels murky, my spirit despondent, and despair begins to seep in to freeze my will to act, I know the worst thing possible is to curl up in a ball and wait for a sunnier day. Instead, I will be part of the millions of peacefully protesting Americans diamonding the streets in a beauty that can never be measured in dollars–only in love. I believe the sun will shine on America again, because we are not closing our eyes, not giving up, and pressing onward every day.

“To Know the Dark”
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
― Wendell Berry, Terrapin