Fog In The Mountains Quotes

moonlight disappears down the hills mountains vanish into fog and i vanish into poetry.

Sometimes, Gansey forgot how much he liked school and how good he was at it. But he couldn't forget it on mornings like this one—fall fog rising out of the fields and lifting in front of the mountains, the Pig running cool and loud, Ronan climbing out of the passenger seat and knocking knuckles on the roof with teeth flashing, dewy grass misting the black toes of his shoes, bag slung over his blazer, narrow-eyed Adam bumping fists as they met on the sidewalk, boys around them laughing and calling to one another, making space for the three of them because this had been a thing for so long: Gansey-Lynch-Parrish.

I have woken up…quite sloshed from night-mingled rains a little drugged, by mountain fogs I have been kidnapped for years....by a mere kiss.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, but I chose neither one. Instead, I set sail in my little boat to watch a sunset from a different view that couldn't be seen from shore. Then I climbed the tallest mountain peak to watch the amber sun through the clouds. Finally, I traveled to the darkest part of the valley to see the last glimmering rays of light through the misty fog. It was every perspective I experienced on my journey that left the leaves trodden black, and that has made all the difference.

I like winter and I like the dark and I like cats and I like the rain and I like walking up mountains and sitting at the top in the fog . That's all I need to know about my life right now. It's pretty simple

I returned to the courtyard and saw that the sun had grown weaker. Beautiful and clear as it had been, the morning (as the day approached the completion of its first half) was becoming damp and misty. Heavy clouds moved from the north and were invading the top of the mountain, covering it with a light brume. It seemed to be fog, and perhaps fog was also rising from the ground, but at that altitude it was difficult to distinguish the mists that rose from below and those that come down from above. It was becoming hard to discern the bulk of the more distant buildings.

He calculated the number of bricks in the wall, first in twos and then in tens and finally in sixteens. The numbers formed up and marched past his brain in terrified obedience. Division and multiplication were discovered. Algebra was invented and provided an interesting diversion for a minute or two. And then he felt the fog of numbers drift away, and looked up and saw the sparkling, distant mountains of calculus.

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fog in the valleys; cellos, dark window-panes, snow.

The man she had loved as a father was a fraud. He kissed the back of her hands and advocated war; he had played with her on the carpet with toy soldiers, and all along he had been planning the extinction of an entire people. There would be no resettlement in the east. No carefully orchestrated exodus of Jews from Germany, no trains wending through the mountains, carrying Jews to another home in another country. There would be no peaceful expulsion. It was obvious now; Hitler had said it himself tonight. The internal purification of the Jewish spirit is not possible. She understood. In Hitler's Germany, the Jews would have no place at all.

I ride over my beautiful ranch. Betwen my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain, wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive.

Every sunset is different, because every day sun is different, clouds are different, space is different, reflections are different, mountains are different, fogs are different, and above all, we are different!

Life is reverie and dream, calm day, breaking sea and so, skerry and strong stream, storm, fog, and powdery snow. Blossom and sunbeams, we mustn't forget. But behind the mountains heaven-high- none has caught sight yet.

. . . They had skies of pure azure and walls of fog moving in and out of the canyons with invisible feet, hills in winter of emerald green and in summer mountain upon mountain of pure gold. They had even more, for there was ever the unfathomable silence of the forest, the blazing immensity of the Pacific, days drenched with sun and nights spangled with stars. . .

The valleys are covered with fog; mountains are covered with fog; everywhere is covered with fog! What to do? Don't worry, if your mind is not covered with fog, you will find your path! When mind's vision is clear, you can always see everywhere!

Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves ankle-deep on a gusty autumn road; bonfires and fogs in the valleys; cellos, dark windowpanes, snow.

Many a soul will turn back to accustomed marshlands of defeat rather than brave the fogs of frustration; but the mountain peaks rise high above the rain and gloom.

The storm is a glazier. Then fog passes through, touches the cold trees to add to the ice already there. Here the wind spins glass from the water it has stolen off the sea and the lakes, off the hair on my head and the breath out of my mouth, the storm takes the water from us all everywhere, to make of a mountain range a stained-glass depiction of a saint no one knows.

...there was no escaping the monsters, not even on this island, no bigger on a map than a grain of sand, protected by mountains of fog and sharp rocks and seething tides. Not anywhere. That was the awful truth...

The mountain is calm when there is a storm; the mountain is calm when there is fog; the mountain is calm when there is sun! Calmness is the wisdom of the mountains! Those who have lived everything are always calm!

The essence of meditation is to induce a mind which is totally relaxed and at the same time totally aware. If you get into a lovely, dreamy, peaceful state where you don't want to move and you feel you could just sit for hours, completely blissed out and peaceful, but in a vague fog, you have gone completely astray.

Is the journey still worthwhile if the mountain turns out to be enshrouded in fog at the top?

She floundered in a fog of his hatreds and desires, his

He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinitely and their own bones mark the boundaries.

Two friends were trekking a mountain. One was motivating the other. “Come on! Think of the magical view from the peak. It will be worth the struggle.” When they reached the peak, they got to see nothing but fog.” Universe is the lover you can’t fool around with. You must love truly. You must love the whole journey. Then only you will get the magical view at the peak.

It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future. The locked and rusted gate that stood before us, with wisps of river fog threading its spikes like the mountain paths, remains in my mind now as the symbol of my exile. That is why I have begun this account of it with the aftermath of our swim, in which I, the torturer’s apprentice Severian, had so nearly drowned.

Thursday afternoon, the dark clouds closed in, and by Friday morning a heavy rain was falling. The mountain peaks were hazy sentinels, disappearing into misty fog that clung to the valley.

And yet this is not always an easy place to be. The weather is unpredictable. Because Paul is buried on the windward side of the mountains, I have visited him in blazing sun, shrouding fog, and cold, stinging rain. It can be as uncomfortable as it is peaceful, both communal and lonely—like death, like grief—but there is beauty in all of it, and I think this is good and right.

Nobody in Faha could remember when it started. Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dripping, and an out-and-out downpour. It came the fine day, the bright day, and the day promised dry. It came at any time of the day and night, and in all seasons, regardless of calendar and forecast, until in Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. It came off the grey vastness of an Atlantic that threw itself against the land like a lover once spurned and resolved not to be so again. It came accompanied by seagulls and smells of salt and seaweed. It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgment, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes—why not?—on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them.

Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge no monument’s in sight but fog prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog no icon lifts a lamp here history’s breath blotting the air over Gold Mountain

In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea. You could not see the tops of the mountains. The plateau was dull and gloomy, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed. I walked out beyond the town to look at the weather. The bad weather was coming over the mountains from the sea. The flags in the square hung wet form the with poles and the banners were wet and hung damp against the front of the houses, and in between the steady drizzle the rain came down and drove every one under the arcades and made pools of water in the square, and the streets were dark and deserted; yet the fiesta kept up without any pause. It was only driven under covers. The covered seats of the bull-ring had been crowded with people sitting out of the rain watching the concourse of Basque and Navarrais dancers and singers, and afterward the Val Carlos dancers in their costumes danced down the street in the rain, the drums sounding hallow and damp, and the chiefs of the bands riding ahead of their big, heavy-footed horse, their costumes wet, the horses’ coats wet in the rain. The crowd was in the cafés and the dancers came in, too, and sat, their tight-wound white legs under the tables, shaking the water from their belled caps, and spreading their red and purple jackets over the chairs to dry. It was raining hard outside.

Anyways, the guys try to be cool. They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing - you won't believe this - they hear chamber music. They hear violins and cellos. They hear this terrific mama-san soprano. Then after a while they hear gook opera and and a glee club and the Haiphong Boys Choir and a barbershop quartet and and all kinds of wierd chanting and Buddha-Buddha stuff. All the whole time, in the background, there's stil that cocktail party going on. All these different voices. Not human voices, though. Because it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock, it's TALKING. And the fog, too, and the grass and the goddamn mongooses. Everything talks. The trees talk politics, the monnkeys talk religion. The whole country. Vietnam. The place talks. It talks. Understand? Nam - it truly TALKS.

For five hundred won, you could gaze at North Korea. I slid a coin in the slot. It was so cold our eyelids stuck to the metal frames. To the right, the ocean. To the left, a wall of mountains. Ahead of us, fog. Not much a of a view, but what could you expect with this weather?

Inside my skin is the beach, and the sand, the redwoods and pond water, the feel of a kiss, wet on my lips, a mountain climbed, and fog forever, boogie boards, and sleeping mats, stories and stories, and real friends. None of it heavy water. Just me moving forward, finding m own story. -Ari

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

Few things in nature can compare to the long, mournful wail of a loon echoing across water and through the forest. It’s an evocative sound that will stick with you for the rest of your life and make you nostalgic for things that never even happened to you. Eerie, yet beautiful, the sound will conjure up images of solitude near mountain lakes and ponds, shrouded in fog during the early morning or late dusk, surrounded by the silhouettes of pine trees. It’s a sound that relaxes and submerges you into the tranquility of nature. I don’t think there is another sound in the world that reminds me of the wilderness more so than the wail of a loon.

He joined because he was trapped like a caged animal. He joined because a man who gets up at 4 a.m. every morning, climbs a mountain in rain or fog or killing heat, and sweats all day with mosquitoes in his mouth does not need an empire telling him how to live, which flag to wave, what language to speak, and what heroes to worship.

Most states’ missing persons statistical figures climb irregularly upward; however, many of the missing on public wildlands aren’t counted. Or they’re not separated from the urban missing. In most states, no one even knows who should be counting. It seems a special mess considering the technological resources we have in our pockets. Sometimes the lost are found, but often not. The mountains are shrouded in fog.

People think Baja California is the desert, and the desert is one single, flat, lonely space. Baja California is mountain ridges, clouds of fog spreading over the land, the salt fields, the shocking sight of a valley shaded by date palms, the orchards where olives grow, the stone missions with sun-dried adobe bricks left to crumble into dust, ancient caves decorated with two-headed serpents, —and yes, the desert dotted with cacti.

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship. But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.

Wander with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barleycorn. I ride out over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse. The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalised, organic. I move, I have the power of movement, I command movement of the live thing I bestride. I am possessed with the pomps of being, and know proud passions and inspirations. I have ten thousand august connotations. I am a king in the kingdom of sense, and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust.... And yet, with jaundiced eye I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me, and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me. I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me. As if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable! These men passed. I, too, shall pass. These men toiled, and cleared, and planted, gazed with aching eyes, while they rested their labour-stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets, at the autumn glory of the grape, and at the fog-wisps stealing across the mountain. And they are gone. And I know that I, too, shall some day, and soon, be gone.

From his corner office on the ground floor of the St. Cyril station house, Inspector Dick has a fine view of the parking lot. Six Dumpsters plated and hooped like iron maidens against bears. Beyond the Dumpsters a subalpine meadow, and then the snow¬ capped ghetto wall that keeps the Jews at bay. Dick is slouched against the back of his two-thirds-scale desk chair, arms crossed, chin sunk to his chest, star¬ing out the casement window. Not at the mountains or the meadow, grayish green in the late light, tufted with wisps of fog, or even at the armored Dumpsters. His gaze travels no farther than the parking lot—no farther than his 1961 Royal Enfield Crusader. Lands¬man recognizes the expression on Dick's face. It's the expression that goes with the feeling Landsman gets when he looks at his Chevelle Super Sport, or at the face of Bina Gelbfish. The face of a man who feels he was born into the wrong world. A mistake has been made; he is not where he belongs. Every so often he feels his heart catch, like a kite on a telephone wire, on something that seems to promise him a home in the world or a means of getting there. An American car manufactured in his far-off boyhood, say, or a motor¬cycle that once belonged to the future king of England, or the face of a woman worthier than himself of being loved.

Sometimes, Gansey forgot how much he liked school and how good he was at it. But he couldn't forget it on mornings like this one--fall fog rising out of the fields and lifting in front of the mountains, the Pig running cool and loud, Ronan climbing out of the passenger seat and knocking knuckles on the roof with teeth flashing, dewy grass misting the black toes of his shoes, bag slung over his blazer, narrow-eyed Adam bumping fists as they met on the sidewalk, boys around them laughing and calling to one another, making space for the three of them because this had been a thing for so long: Gansey-Lynch-Parrish. Mornings like this one were made for memories.

...when the morning wind caught up with us, and with it some quite unexpected fog - soft and rolling. It would roll down the open channels in great round masses - hesitate for an island, and then roll over it and on. It would fill up all the bays - searching and exploring. It came on board and felt us all over with soft, damp fingers, and we hoisted our sails and fled before it. ...A little farther on, the wind blew harder, but it was steadier...The mountains grew higher and higher, and gossiped together across our heads. And somewhere down at their feet, on that narrow ribbon of water, our boat with the white sails flew swiftly along, completely dwarfed by its surroundings.

Many of the gifts were for me. There were jewels and gowns and furs and paintings--- done on ice canvases that made everything bleed together far more than watercolors---and a strange, empty box with a base of some sort of pale velvet that the faerie claimed would sprout white roses with diamonds in them if left outside at midday, and blue roses with rubies if left outside at midnight. There were other nonsensical presents along these lines, including a saddle of shapeless grey leather that would allow me to ride the mountain fog, though no explanation was given as to why I should wish to do this. The only presents I truly appreciated came in the form of ice cream, which the Hidden Ones are obsessed with and cover with sea salt and nectar from their winter flowers.

The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves. It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before long; but fog and rain did not go together.

An hour after they’d left the clearing, a heavy layer of fog filled the valley like a moist blanket. The trees grew into amorphous shapes, mountains gone. Ash stopped dead in his tracks. He stared into the forest with wide eyes. “Whoa! D’you see that?!” Vale jerked to a stop. “What? Where?!” “There in the trees.” He pointed into the forest to where the rainy undergrowth grew thick with a hazy veil of grey-white mist. “The haze.” “What about it?” “Looks like game lag. But like… real lag. Real life lag.” Ash grinned at her, his brown eyes sparkling. “Like the forest is supposed to be there, but it’s not totally loaded by the computer yet.” “That’s going to be trouble.” “Why?” Vale nodded to where Ash knew the mountaintops should be, but were no longer visible, caught in an otherworldly lag. “It means we can’t see the mountains.” “So?” “So we can’t see where we are going anymore.” Ash frowned. “Er… yeah.” “C’mon. Let’s keep walking.

I come here sometimes just to be in the presence of such ancient beings. The sides of the boulder are festooned with Umbilicaria americana in raggedy ruffles of brown and green, the most magnificent of northeastern lichens. Unlike those of its tiny crustose forebearers, the Umbilicaria’s thallus—its body—can span an outstretched hand. The largest one recorded was measured at just over two feet. Light streams through holes over the heads of young trees while their grandmothers loom in shadows, great buttressed trunks eight feet in diameter. You want to be quiet in instinctive deference to the cathedral hush and because nothing you could possibly say would add a thing. Here is where the fog drips. Here is where the moisture laden air from the Pacific rises against the mountains to produce upward of one hundred inches of rain a year, watering an ecosystem rivaled nowhere else on earth. The biggest trees in the world. Trees that were born before Columbus sailed.

Sitting on the poop deck with my infinitely beloved wife who has acquired an even greater weight of love. I keep on mentally looking around to make sure she's there. For why this new and massive re-affirmation of adoration and worship and a promise to myself that I shall never be nasty to her ever again? I will tell you for why. For because for about three minutes this afternoon I thought that I was about to be killed instantaneously and at once, without time to re-tell her how much I love her, to apologize for breaking my contract to look after her forever, for letting her down with a bang (hysterical pun intended) and for having no time to tell her the million things yet to be told and for not realizing and demonstrating my full potential as a husband, provider, lover, and all. (He goes on to describe how he was in a helicopter with others going to a film location in some mountainous area in Sarajevo in the fog and the came right up to some mountains and barely swerved just in time, this went of for a full three minutes of desperate danger) He goes on to say, "There was one blazing mental image that seemed to last right through the enormity. it was E lying in bed on the yacht with a book open at the page where she'd stopped reading with the title front cover and publisher's blurb on the other face up on the bed near her right hand which was out of the covers. She was wearing one of my favorite nightgowns, a blue thing and shorty which she may have been wearing this morning when I said goodbye to her. (I just asked her and she was) She had one leg bent and the other straight. On another level I was telling her over and over again that I loved her, I loved her...The mind is a remarkable instrument. If I wrote down everything I could remember from those interminable seconds it would be a million words....A shorter catastrophe of this kind happened to me before when I was perhaps 19-20 years old but I hadn't learned to love then and to love obsessively.

There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay. If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco. When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs. Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands. Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.

What are they doing?” he whispered. The pinball machine’s scoreboard was full, the bank’s windows fogged. They were so involved- so cofaithed- that they didn’t know we were there. The VW’s face joined, “Are they hurting each other?” I took a breath. “There’s risk involved, because of what they can’t see. Plus the risk of trust. But no-they’re not hurting each other.” The bank whispered something in the pinball machine’s ear and the pinball machine giggled. “What are they saying to each other?” the VW said. “They’re expressing their faith, VW-sharing it.” Just then I heard a rustle, soft at first, then louder…Distracted by other things-the VW, the faith in the trees- I had forgotten to keep the mountain straight in my mind. I had let it go, and now it was changing, reversing itself, growing young: the leaves were turning from brown back to green… THIS was western Massachusetts-unpredictable; a changing moving bitch; a switcher of faces…how could I have many any progress here when mountains were mountains one moment and something else the next; when people were here one day and then GONE?

The immigrants pour into the cities, and the edges of the neighborhoods fray, then braid themselves into new American patterns. These new Americans push out into this country one step ahead of ancestors touching spectral fingers to the generations of the diaspora. Go, they whisper, but do not forget us. Outside a redbrick prison, protestors set up for another day of placards and marches, cries for justice that go unheard by the two Italian anarchists inside—a fishmonger and a shoemaker, seekers of the American dream now appealing their fate in its court while the electric chair bides its time. The lady in the harbor hoists her torch. The Gold Mountain twinkles in the early-morning fog hugging the shoreline of California, a pretty mirage. The atoms vibrate, always on the verge of some new shift. Shift and the electrons lean toward particle or wave. Shift and the action requires a reaction. Shift and the stroke of a typewriter elevates i to I, changes God to god. Shift and the beast acquires a thumb; the thumb, a weapon. Shift and rights become wrongs; the wrongs, justification. It’s all in the perspective.

What does it help me now to think back on the reeling despair that seized me and declare it a mistake! Should I have set out in high spirits with a spring in my step? I did not. Should I have had more faith in the earth's friendly forces and felt certain and invulnerable at the wounding sight of flame-hued horizons? I could not do it, I was terribly vulnerable. Should I have justified myself, raising my eyes to the mountains? Oh, I tried, and always in vain... And so one day I wanted to break away, not knowing exactly from which fate, seeming to grasp only that I had been struck by calamity, as anyone can be, and now must stand apart, silent. How do the others live, I asked myself, how do they bear this land and the day to come, how do they bear it? But should the dusk of rapture fall once more, this shadowless day ebb, the deer stand on the sloping winter meadow already cloaked in fog; should I be granted one more such innocent hour, I will lower my eyes and repent, and never again lead myself into temptation, but admit: we are at home in but a narrow precinct, can cover but a tiny distance - and beyond, at an immeasurable distance, the ships land on the death's shores.

Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a gravesite and a tombstone in Queens, New York,after living apart for more than thirty years.In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beauséjour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills, “Kote w ye frè m?” Brother, where are you? And the other one quickly answers, “Mwen la. Right here, brother. I’mright here.

They climbed through the fog, trusting their guide, whose sheepdog ran ahead of them, unearthing a hedgehog among the crags. As they got higher, ‘the ground appeared to brighten’. A flash of light illuminated the turf and, all of a sudden, the moon was out. Wordsworth looked down. They were above the mist, which now resembled a sea with the peaks of the surrounding mountains emerging like the backs of whales. In the distance, they saw the mist dipping and swirling into the real sea. And somewhere between the mountains and the sea, they spotted ‘a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour’, A deep and gloomy breathing-place thro’ which Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams Innumerable, roaring with one voice. ‘In that breach’, Wordsworth writes in The Prelude, ‘Through which the homeless voice of waters rose’, Nature had lodged ‘The soul, the imagination of the whole’.37 This idea of the imagination filling a gap, emerging from an abyss of emptiness, and indeed of homelessness, is at the core of Wordsworth’s vocation. His poetry, the work of his imagination, filled the void of the losses – of parents, of home, of political ideals, and later of friends, siblings and children – that afflicted him.

Psalm How leaky are the borders of man-made states! How many clouds float over them scot-free, how much desert sand sifts from country to country, how many mountain pebbles roll onto foreign turf in provocative leaps! Need I cite each and every bird as it flies, or alights, as now, on the lowered gate? Even if be a sparrow—its tail is abroad, Though its beak is still home. As if that weren’t enough—it keeps fidgeting! Out of countless insects I will single out the ant, who, between the guard’s left and right boots, feels unobliged to answer questions of origin and destination. If only this whole mess could be seen at once in detail on every continent! Isn’t that a privet on the opposite bank smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river? Who else but the squid, brazenly long-armed, would violate the sacred territorial waters.? How can we speak of any semblance of order when we can’t rearrange the stars to know which one shines for whom? Not to mention the reprehensible spreading of fog! Or the dusting of the steppe over its entire range as though it weren’t split in two! Or voices carried over accommodating air waves: summoning squeals and suggestive gurgles! Only what’s human can be truly alien. The rest is mixed forest, undermining moles, and wind.

Elizabeth, we’re going to have to stop.” Elizabeth’s swirling senses began to return to reality, slowly at first, and then with a sickening plummet. Passion gave way to fear and then to anguished shame as she realized she was lying in a man’s arms, her shirt unfastened, her flesh exposed to his gaze and touch. Closing her eyes, she fought back the sting of tears and shoved his hand away, lurching into an upright position. “Let me rise, please,” she whispered, her voice strangled with self-revulsion. Her skin flinched as he began to fasten her shirt, but in order to do it he had to release his hold on her, and the moment he did, she scrambled to her feet. Turning her back to him, she fastened her shirt with shaking hands and snatched her jacket from the peg beside the fire. He moved so silently that she had no idea he’d stood until his hands settled on her stiff shoulders. “Don’t be frightened of what is between us. I’ll be able to provide for you-“ All of Elizabeth’s confusion and anguish exploded in a burst of tempestuous, sobbing fury that was directed at herself, but which she hurtled at him. Tearing free of his grasp, she whirled around. “Provide for me,” she cried. “Provide what? A-a hovel in Scotland where I’ll stay while you dress the part of an English gentleman so you can gamble away everything-“ “If things go on as I expect,” he interrupted her in a voice of taut calm, “I’ll be one of the richest men in England within a year-two at the most. If they don’t, you’ll still be well provided for.” Elizabeth snatched her bonnet and backed away from him in a fear that was partly of him and partly of her own weakness. “This is madness. Utter madness.” Turning, she headed for the door. “I know,” he said gently. She reached for the door handle and jerked the door open. Behind her, his voice stopped her in midstep. “If you change your mind after we leave in the morning, you can reach me at Hammund’s town house in Upper Brook Street until Wednesday. After that I’d intended to leave for India. I’ll be gone until winter.” “I-I hope you have a safe voyage,” she said, too overwrought to wonder about the sharp tug of loss she felt at the realization he was leaving. “If you change your mind in time,” he teased, “I’ll take you with me.” Elizabeth fled in sheer terror from the gentle confidence she’d heard in his smiling voice. As she galloped through the thick fog and wet underbrush she was no longer the sensible, confident young lady she’d been before; instead she was a terrified, bewildered girl with a mountain of responsibilities and an upbringing that convinced her the wild attraction she felt for Ian Thornton was sordid and unforgivable.

She goes to the window, curious to look out, and her senses awaken. It was only a moment ago (for sleep knows no time) that the flat horizon was a loamy gray swell merging into the fog behind the icy glass. But now rocky, powerful mountains are massing out of the ground (where have they come from?), a vast, strange overwhelming sight. This is her first glimpse of the unimaginable majesty of the Alps, and she sways with surprise. Just now a first ray of sun through the pass to the east is shattering into a million reflections on the ice field covering the highest peak. The white purity of this unfiltered light is so dazzling and sharp that she has to close her eyes for a moment, but now she's wide awake. One push and the window bangs down, to bring this marvel closer, and fresh air - ice-cold, glass-sharp, and with a bracing dash of snow - streams through her lips, parted in astonishment, and into her lungs, the deepest, purest breath of her life. She spreads her arms to take in this first reckless gulp, and immediately, her chest expanding, feels a luxurious warmth rise through her veins - marvelous, marvelous. Inflamed with cold, she takes in the scene to the left and the right; her eyes (thawed out now) follow each of the granite slops up to the icy epaulet at the top, discovering, with growing excitement, new magnificence everywhere - here a white waterfall tumbling headlong into a valley, there neat little stone houses tucked into crevices like birds' nests, farther off an eagle circling proudly over the very highest heights, and above it all a wonderfully pure, sumptuous blue whose lush, exhilarating power she would never have thought possible. Again and again she returns to these Alps sprung overnight from her sleep, an incredible sight to someone leaving her narrow world for the first time. These immense granite mountains must have been here for thousands of years; they'll probably still be here millions and millions of years from now, every one of them immovably where it's always been, and if not for the accident of this journey, she herself would have died, rotted away, and turned to dust with no inkling of their glory, She's been living as though all this didn't exist, never saw it, hardly cared to; like a fool she dozed off in this tiny room, hardly longer than her arm, hardly wide enough for her feet, just a night away, a day away from this infinitude, these manifold immensities! Indifferent and without desires before, now she's beginning to realize what she's been missing. This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel's disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.

But he did not follow the explanation. In the management of his life he was foolish. In mathematics, moronic. His IQ must have halved, for here was another of those moments when he knew he had reached the summit of his understanding. A ceiling, a mountain fog through which he could not pass. His eleven-year-old son was on higher ground, in a clear space his father would never know. As he walked he thought that, apart from raising a child, all else in his life had been and remained formless and he could not see how to change it. Money could not save him. Nothing achieved. What happened to the tune he had started to write more than thirty years ago and was going to send to the Beatles? Nothing. What had he made since? Nothing, beyond a million tennis strokes, a thousand renditions of “Climb Every Mountain.” He blushed now to read his earnest poems. His father was cut down in an instant. His mother was beginning a decline into mindlessness. He knew that a scan would confirm it. Both fates spoke to his own. In theirs he saw the measure of his own existence. He remembered his parents well enough at his age now. From then onwards nothing changed for them apart from physical decline and illness. How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision. Except to leave school. No, that too was a reaction. He supposed he had put together a sort of education for himself, but that was messily done in a spirit of embarrassment or shame.

Monday, January 26 Be Strong and Courageous “So be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid and do not panic before them! For the LORD your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you.” DEUTERONOMY 31:6 NLT In The Horse and His Boy, one of the books in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis, we see a beautiful picture of how the Lord gives us strength and courage to do His will. The boy, Shasta, runs away from home. Along the way he meets up with a talking horse from Narnia and a nobly born girl, Aravis, with her talking horse. They decide to take their horses to Narnia, but their plans fall apart when they have to go through the Calormene capitol city, Tashbaan. Several times as they travel, they are chased by lions, harassed by cats, and generally persecuted by various members of the cat family. Finally, on one particularly dark night, Shasta crosses over a mountain pass alone. In the dark and fog Shasta senses rather than sees a creature walking along beside him. And he’s terrified. Later, when he meets Aslan, Shasta learns that all the cats were Aslan, guiding them, pushing them, and yes, terrifying them into doing what they needed to do. Aslan was also his protector as he crossed the steep and dangerous mountain pass in the dark. Shasta is angry until he realizes that Aslan did everything out of love, even hurting Aravis when her pride was keeping them from the mission they’d been given. Father, thank You for the beautiful picture of Your protection and courage to those who are Yours.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as hav­ing, late at night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the view-point of any sea-creature one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.” The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.” Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant and Bierce into one book? Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito—out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch—gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer—lost! Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like—in the finale—Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been ra­zored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention—shot dead. Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture? How did I react to all of the above? By “firing” the whole lot. By sending rejection slips to each and every one. By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

A small figure in crimson stood before the bench, sleeves rolled to the elbow, muttering. Dumai cleared her throat. “Master Kiprun?” The alchemist whipped around. He wore round amber panes over his eyes, clipped to his nose, huge and misty with steam. “I did ask for duck feathers,” he said, in a tone of sincere annoyance. Dumai could only blink. His cheeks were flushed, threads of hair were stuck to his forehead, and he brandished a grey feather. “You brought me goose feathers. Goose,” he barked, making her jump. “You do know the difference between a duck and a goose, don’t you? One quacks and the other honks, not to mention the neck. The neck alone—” “Master Kiprun,” Kanifa interjected, “this is Noziken pa Dumai, Crown Princess of Seiiki.” The alchemist sleeved the fog from his eyeglasses. “Ah. Yes.” He interlocked his fingers. Each bore a ring of a different metal: gold, iron, copper. “Princess Dumai. I am Master Kiprun, who shines—well, flickers really—for the Munificent Empress. And you?” he said to Kanifa. “Who are you, the Prince of Seiiki?” “No.” Kanifa cleared his throat. “I’m just a guard, a friend to Princess Dumai. Not a noble.” “Is it not noble to be a guard?” Master Kiprun wafted a brown hand, webbed with scars from burns, like his arms. “No matter. I never understand these things. Yes, your message caught my interest, Princess Dumai of the Faraway Isle. You don’t look much like a princess,” he said, cocking his head. “Aren’t you suppose to wear a crown, or something?” Dumai reunited with her tongue. “Well,” she said, indicating her headpiece, “this is—” “Madam, that is a fish.” After a moment, Dumai decided not to kick against the current. “It is a fish,” she agreed, taking a step toward him. “My fish and I flew here to seek your help, Master Kiprun.” “Yes, I did fear as much. Last time, it was a king who disturbed my work. He found me in the mountains, just to annoy me.” The alchemist snorted. “Once, it was the poor who sought my services, asking me to turn grass to gold. They were, at least, polite, if wildly optimistic. Now I am summoned hither and thither, disturbed by everyone from Golümtan to Ginura.

He embraced her. And touched her. And found her. Yennefer, in some astonishing way hard and soft at the same time, sighed loudly. The words they had uttered broke off, perished among the sighs and quickened breaths, ceased to have any meaning and were dissipated. So they remained silent, and focused on the search for one another, on the search for the truth. They searched for a long time, lovingly and very thoroughly, fearful of needless haste, recklessness and nonchalance. They searched vigorously, intensively and passionately, fearful of needless self-doubt and indecision. They searched cautiously, fearful of needless tactlessness. They found one another, conquered their fear and, a moment later, found the truth, which exploded under their eyelids with a terrible, blinding clarity, tore apart the lips pursed in determination with a moan. Then time shuddered spasmodically and froze, everything vanished, and touch became the only functioning sense. An eternity passed, reality returned and time shuddered once more and set off again, slowly, ponderously, like a great, fully laden cart. Geralt looked through the window. The moon was still hanging in the sky, although what had just happened ought in principle to have struck it down from the sky. ‘Oh heavens, oh heavens,’ said Yennefer much later, slowly wiping a tear from her cheek. They lay still among the dishevelled sheets, among thrills, among steaming warmth and waning happiness and among silence, and all around whirled vague darkness, permeated by the scent of the night and the voices of cicadas. Geralt knew that, in moments like this, the enchantress’s telepathic abilities were sharpened and very powerful, so he thought about beautiful matters and beautiful things. About things which would give her joy. About the exploding brightness of the sunrise. About fog suspended over a mountain lake at dawn. About crystal waterfalls, with salmon leaping up them, gleaming as though made of solid silver. About warm drops of rain hitting burdock leaves, heavy with dew. He thought for her and Yennefer smiled, listening to his thoughts. The smile quivered on her cheek along with the crescent shadows of her eyelashes.

SEA” Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur “SEA” Cherson! Cherson! You aint just whistlin Dixie, Sea— Cherson! Cherson! We calcimine fathers here below! Kitchen lights on— Sea Engines from Russia seabirding here below— When rocks outsea froth I’ll know Hawaii cracked up & scramble up my doublelegged cliff to the silt of a million years— Shoo—Shaw—Shirsh— Go on die salt light You billion yeared rock knocker Gavroom Seabird Gabroobird Sad as wife & hill Loved as mother & fog Oh! Oh! Oh! Sea! Osh! Where’s yr little Neppytune tonight? These gentle tree pulp pages which’ve nothing to do with yr crash roar, liar sea, ah, were made for rock tumble seabird digdown footstep hollow weed move bedarvaling crash? Ah again? Wine is salt here? Tidal wave kitchen? Engines of Russia in yr soft talk— Les poissons de la mer parle Breton— Mon nom es Lebris de Keroack— Parle, Poissons, Loti, parle— Parlning Ocean sanding crash the billion rocks— Ker plotsch— Shore—shoe— god—brash— The headland looks like a longnosed Collie sleeping with his light on his nose, as the ocean, obeying its accomodations of mind, crashes in rhythm which could & will intrude, in thy rhythm of sand thought— —Big frigging shoulders on that sonofabitch Parle, O, parle, mer, parle, Sea speak to me, speak to me, your silver you light Where hole opened up in Alaska Gray—shh—wind in The canyon wind in the rain Wind in the rolling rash Moving and t wedel Sea sea Diving sea O bird—la vengeance De la roche Cossez Ah Rare, he rammed the gate rare over by Cherson, Cherson, we calcify fathers here below —a watery cross, with weeds entwined—This grins restoredly, low sleep—Wave—Oh, no, shush—Shirk—Boom plop Neptune now his arms extends while one millions of souls sit lit in caves of darkness —What old bark? The dog mountain? Down by the Sea Engines? God rush—Shore— Shaw—Shoo—Oh soft sigh we wait hair twined like larks—Pissit—Rest not —Plottit, bisp tesh, cashes, re tav, plo, aravow, shirsh,—Who’s whispering over there—the silly earthen creek! The fog thunders—We put silver light on face—We took the heroes in—A billion years aint nothing— O the cities here below! The men with a thousand arms! the stanchions of their upward gaze! the coral of their poetry! the sea dragons tenderized, meat for fleshy fish— Navark, navark, the fishes of the Sea speak Breton— wash as soft as people’s dreams—We got peoples in & out the shore, they call it shore, sea call it pish rip plosh—The 5 billion years since earth we saw substantial chan—Chinese are the waves—the woods are dreaming

She stared out. She saw a vastness, a rising shape, indistinct in the rain, gray in the misty drizzle. At first she had thought it was a cloud, a great bank of fog drifting up over the mountains, but now she realized with a cold awe that it was real, a vast building climbing the mountainside, rising in a countless series of rooms, stairways, balconies, and galleries, far away and immense, its topmost roofs white with snow. And up there, like a needle sharp with ice, one uttermost pinnacle flew the remote black pennant of the Watch. The Tower of Song.

was just one of those days that had no reason to be bad beyond the inexplicable fog of depression. Pat was eager to go home, fix himself something for dinner, sit on his well-worn couch with a book, and wait for the day to be over. He was just getting ready to

Holy shit, dude,” called out an amused voice from behind them. “Whatever you two are doing back there is fogging up the windows of your squad car on the street. Keep it up and forest animals will start coming out of the mountains.

The Mountain One moment, the mountain is clear in strong morning sunlight. The next, vanished in fog. I returned to Tu Fu, afraid to look up again from my reading and find in the window moonlight - but when I do, the fog is still there, and only the ancient poet's hair has turned gray while a single wild goose passed him, silently climbing.

they were everywhere,

THE SHEER COMPLEXITY OF PLUTO The diversity of phenomena seen on Pluto was far beyond what anyone, even New Horizons team members, expected to find on such a small planet so cold and far from the Sun. Ground fogs, high-altitude hazes, possible clouds, canyons, towering mountains, faults, polar caps, apparent dune fields, suspected ice volcanoes, glaciers, evidence for flowing (and even standing) liquids in the past, and more. This little red planet perched 3 billion miles away in the Kuiper Belt packed more punch than any other known small world explored, and indeed more punch than many much larger worlds. The variety of terrains, its complex interactions between the surface and the atmosphere, and the wide range of surface ages even prompted the New Horizons team to adopt the slogan “Pluto is the new Mars.

While they rested, he searched for landmarks. The mountains they’d walked into were gone, a hazy gray ceiling of storm clouds in their place. It gave him the unsettling feeling of being caught inside a box. Ash turned and looked back the other direction. His attention caught on the forked top of a pine tree and he frowned. What the hell…? That looks like the same tree we passed fifteen minutes ago. It felt for a moment like he was in a poorly designed game and had just come across a repeating landscape. His gaze dropped down to the path where they’d just passed. His stomach churned uneasily. The trail was a faded smudge, the line of it almost too faint to follow in the gathering darkness, but there was a small outcrop of rocks in the trees that also looked familiar. His attention jumped back to the pronged top of the branches. “What the…?

Queen, we have unearthed a prophecy that greatly concerns you. You must evacuate the temple at once—tonight—before a demon rises out of the depths of the mountain and devours you all.

It's barely 8:00 a.m., but my train mates waste little time in breaking out the picnic material. But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography. From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate. We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy three more. Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.

No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.” His words were very enlightening to me. Later, after I thought about it a bit, I realized that it wasn’t Buddhist philosophy at all, but was more akin to some modern physics theories. The abbot also told me he wasn’t going to discuss Buddhism with me. His reason was the same as my high school teacher’s: With my sort, he’d just be wasting his time. That first night, I couldn’t sleep in the tiny room in the temple. I didn’t realize that this refuge from the world would be so uncomfortable. My blanket and sheet both became damp in the mountain fog, and the bed was so hard. In order to make myself sleep, I tried to follow the abbot’s advice and fill myself with “emptiness.” In my mind, the first “emptiness” I created was the infinity of space. There was nothing in it, not even light. But soon I knew that this empty universe could not make me feel peace. Instead, it filled me with a nameless anxiety, like a drowning man wanting to grab on to anything at hand. So I created a sphere in this infinite space for myself: not too big, though possessing mass. My mental state didn’t improve, however. The sphere floated in the middle of “emptiness”—in infinite space, anywhere could be the middle. The universe had nothing that could act on it, and it could act on nothing. It hung there, never moving, never changing, like a perfect interpretation for death. I created a second sphere whose mass was equal to the first one’s. Both had perfectly reflective surfaces. They reflected each other’s images, displaying the only existence in the universe other than itself. But the situation didn’t improve much. If the spheres had no initial movement—that is, if I didn’t push them at first—they would be quickly pulled together by their own gravitational attraction. Then the two spheres would stay together and hang there without moving, a symbol for death. If they did have initial movement and didn’t collide, then they would revolve around each other under the influence of gravity. No matter what the initial conditions, the revolutions would eventually stabilize and become unchanging: the dance of death. I then introduced a third sphere, and to my astonishment, the situation changed completely. Like I said, any geometric figure turns into numbers in the depths of my mind. The sphereless, one-sphere, and two-sphere universes all showed up as a single equation or a few equations, like a few lonesome leaves in late fall. But this third sphere gave “emptiness” life. The three spheres, given initial movements, went through complex, seemingly never-repeating movements. The descriptive equations rained down in a thunderstorm without end. Just like that, I fell asleep. The three spheres continued to dance in my dream, a patternless, never-repeating dance. Yet, in the depths of my mind, the dance did possess a rhythm; it was just that its period of repetition was infinitely long. This mesmerized me. I wanted to describe the whole period, or at least a part of it. The next day I kept on thinking about the three spheres dancing in “emptiness.” My attention had never been so completely engaged. It got to the point where one of the monks asked the abbot whether I was having mental health issues. The abbot laughed and said, “Don’t worry. He has found emptiness.” Yes, I had found emptiness. Now I could be at peace in a bustling city. Even in the midst of a noisy crowd, my heart would be completely tranquil.

Stories are the legends we tell ourselves while sitting around campfires early in the morning, steam rising in coils from coffee cups scented with wood smoke dripping fog wet beyond the rim of what we see; the creations of myths told and collective extrapolations remembered limited only by our vision. Yesterday and today blend and twine into one, only to be pulled apart as the dichotomy of their existence is merged. Spiraling ever outward their memories are carried on the winds, carried to the west, the south, over the edge of the world and back. The winds of spirits gone and of those yet to come. What we dream today, we dream tomorrow for their existence is the same. There is no contextual difference. No separate language. And so the winds that blow across the mountains and plains today commingle with those whose existence began before their stories were born, dancing as they do so through the night. A night of songs. A night of dreaming and distance. A night wherein the ghosts of everything commune as one, forever seeking dissolution from the boundaries of the civilized world beyond...

But love wasn’t just the lightness in the air and sunny days with mountain views that stretched for miles. It was the clouds and the weights and the fog that blocked even your own feet sometimes. Real love required finding a way, not walking away.

So laced and lush is this ecosystem that we walk our several miles through it today without making a footfall, only scuffs. Carol tells me that these Olympic rain forests and the rough coast to their west provide her the greatest calm of any place she has been. That she can walk in this rain forest and only be walking in this rain forest, moving in simple existence. Surprising, that, because neither of us thinks we are at all mystic. Perhaps, efficient dwellers we try to be, we simply admire the deft fit of life systems in the rain forest. The flow of growth out of growth, out of death . . . I do not quite ease off into beingness as she can. Memories and ideas leap to mind. I remember that Callenbach’s young foresters of Ecotopia would stop in the forest to hug a fir and murmur into its bark, brother tree. . . . This Hoh forest is not a gathering of brothers to humankind, but of elders. The dampness in the air, patches of fog snagged in the tree tops above, tells me another story out of memory, of having read of a visitor who rode through the California redwood forest in the first years of this century. He noted to his guide that the sun was dissipating the chilly fog from around them. No, said the guide looking to canyon walls of wood like these, no, “The trees is drinkin’ it. That’s what they live on mostly. When they git done breakfast you’ll git warm enough.” For a time, the river seduces me from the forest. This season, before the glacier melt begins to pour from the Olympic peaks, the water of the Hoh is a painfully lovely slate blue, a moving blade of delicate gloss. The boulder-stropped, the fog-polished Hoh. Question: why must rivers have names? Tentative answer: for the same reason gods do. These Peninsula rivers, their names a tumbled poem of several tongues—Quinault, Quillayute, Hoh, Bogashiel, Soleduck, Elwha, Dungeness, Gray Wolf—are as holy to me as anything I know. Forest again. For comparison’s sake I veer from the trail to take a look at the largest Sitka spruce along this valley bottom. The Park Service has honored it with a sign, giving the tree’s dimensions as sixteen feet four inches in diameter, one hundred eighty feet in height, but now the sign is propped against the prone body of the giant. Toppled, it lies like a huge extracted tunnel bore. Clambering onto its upper surface I find that the Sitka has burls, warts on the wood, bigger around than my body. For all that, I calculate that it is barely larger, if any, than the standard nineteenth-century target that Highpockets and his calendar crew are offhandedly devastating in my writing room. Evening, and west to Kalaloch through portals of sawed-through windfalls, to the campground next to the ocean. In fewer than fifty miles, mountain and ocean, arteried by this pulsing valley.

She looked out at the city. All of Tevanne was smeared with starlit smoke and steam, a ghostly cityscape sinking into the fog. The huge white campo walls surfaced among the ramble of the Commons like the bones ofa bleached whale. Behind them stood the towers of the campos, which glowed with soft, colorful luminescence. Among them was the Michiel clock tower, its face a bright, cheery pink, and beyond that was the Mountain of the Candianos, the biggest structure in all of Tevanne, a huge dome that reminded her of a fat, swollen tick, sitting in the center of the Candiano campo. She felt lonely, and small. Sancia had always been alone. But feeling lonely was different from just being alone.

He stood there in the deepest black of night, and Misty knew that he was praying for her. She could almost feel the words lift up between the trees like fog rising from the mountains.

Geralt knew that, in moments like this, the enchantress’s telepathic abilities were sharpened and very powerful, so he thought about beautiful matters and beautiful things. About things which would give her joy. About the exploding brightness of the sunrise. About fog suspended over a mountain lake at dawn. About crystal waterfalls, with salmon leaping up them, gleaming as though made of solid silver. About warm drops of rain hitting burdock leaves, heavy with dew. He thought for her and Yennefer smiled, listening to his thoughts. The smile quivered on her cheek along with the crescent shadows of her eyelashes.

You have never done this well in school. You have never made this much money. You have never received so many compliments on your appearance, for your body is shrinking into a landless skeletal border, and a landless skeletal border is your nation’s preferred female shape. You have never been so close to killing yourself, not with drugs, which are merely a symptom, but with overwork—your real disease. It’s a disease you were born with, fertilized with mountain fog—the desire to flee small-town Appalachia, the guilt of doing so, the suspicion that you are, at your core, a fraud. The only cure is to work more. Work harder than anyone else.

The mountains I saw through the break in the fog were familiar, and yet something was off about them. They seemed too dark, somehow, and the nearest was riddled with hollows where tiny lights glimmered. The fog shifted again, and I was gazing at a luxuriant rose garden. The flowers were fat and healthy, but the garden itself was overgrown and had the air of abandonment, the rosebushes almost swallowing their trellises, some of which had collapsed. A little wind blew back the heads of the nearest roses, and I felt as if they were turning to gaze at me.

Our life is full of mountains we believe to be forbidden or that we feel incapable of climbing, but the fog that prevents us from seeing the path ahead is usually on the lens through which we are viewing it.

I pull sufficient tape free of its roll, the sound like the cracking of ice over a frozen lake, what I felt beneath my feet as a boy with my father in the north mountains.

he did retain some elements that make it possible to pin down a little better the personality and nature of Alberîch. The dwarf lives in a mountainous country, or even inside a mountain—one where treasure has been hidden. The inhabitants of these lands remain imprecisely defined, but there are giants and most likely dwarfs, those over whom Alberîch is ruler. The names of the sovereigns of this land are quite revealing. Nibelung is formed from nibel-, “mist, fog, cloud” (cf. Old Norse nifl; it is also related to Latin nebula) and -ing/-ung, a Germanic suffix that establishes a relationship of belonging and kinship or lineage, such as we find in the word Merovingians, the sons of Merovech. Etymologically, Nibelung therefore refers to the “descendant or son of the mist,” which makes the land that takes its name from him a mythical empire comparable to the Norse Niflheimr, the “World of the Mist,” one of the names given to the realm of the dead in ancient Scandinavian mythology. It is essential that we do not underestimate the importance of this revelation.

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

Harley Diekerhoff looked up from peeling potatoes to glance out the kitchen window. It was still snowing... even harder than it had been this morning. So much white, it dazzled. Hands still, breath catching, she watched the thick, white flakes blow past the ranch house at a dizzying pace, enthralled by the flurry of the lacy snowflakes. So beautiful. Magical A mysterious silent ballet in all white, the snow swirling, twirling just like it did in her favorite scene from the Nutcracker—the one with the Snow Queen and her breathtaking corps in their white tutus with their precision and speed—and then that dazzling snow at the end, the delicate flakes powdering the stage. Harley’s chest ached. She gripped the peeler more tightly, and focused on her breathing. She didn’t want to remember. She wasn’t going to remember. Wasn’t going to go there, not now, not today. Not when she had six hungry men to feed in a little over two hours. She picked up a potato, started peeling. She’d come to Montana to work. She’d taken the temporary job at Copper Mountain Ranch to get some distance from her family this Christmas, and working on the Paradise Valley cattle ranch would give her new memories. Like the snow piling up outside the window. She’d never lived in a place that snowed like this. Where she came from in Central California, they didn’t have snow, they had fog. Thick soupy Tule fog that blanketed the entire valley, socking in airports, making driving nearly impossible. And on the nights when the fog lifted and temperatures dropped beneath the cold clear sky, the citrus growers rushed to light smudge pots to protect their valuable, vulnerable orange crops. Her family didn’t grow oranges. Her family were Dutch dairy people. Harley had been raised on a big dairy farm in Visalia, and she’d marry a dairyman in college, and they’d had their own dairy, too. But that’s the part she needed to forget. That’s why she’d come to Montana, with its jagged mountains and rugged river valleys and long cold winters. She’d arrived here the Sunday following Thanksgiving and would work through mid-January, when Brock Sheenan’s housekeeper returned from a personal leave of absence. In January, Harley would either return to California or look for another job in Crawford County. Harley was tempted to stay, as the Bozeman employment agency assured her they’d have no problem finding her a permanent position if she wanted one.

The eagle of the Alps is sometimes beaten down by the tempest into the narrow defiles of the mountains. Storm clouds shut in this mighty bird of the forest, their dark masses separating her from the sunny heights where she has made her home. Her efforts to escape seem fruitless. She dashes to and fro, beating the air with her strong wings, and waking the mountain echoes with her cries. At length, with a note of triumph, she darts upward, and, piercing the clouds, is once more in the clear sunlight, with the darkness and tempest far beneath. So we may be surrounded with difficulties, discouragement, and darkness. Falsehood, calamity, injustice, shut us in. There are clouds that we cannot dispel. We battle with circumstances in vain. There is one, and but one, way of escape. The mists and fogs cling to the earth; beyond the clouds God’s light is shining. Into the sunlight of His presence we may rise on the wings of faith.—Education, p. 118.

In our ascent we were often among the clouds hovering about the mountain, and for a while would be enveloped in fog and mist, or even rain, until we mounted above them into clear sunlight again.

I’ve always been intrigued, for example, by the way that many people use the analogy of a train to describe their companies. Massive and powerful, the train moves inexorably down the track, over mountains and across vast plains, through the densest fog and darkest night. When things go wrong, we talk of getting “derailed” and of experiencing a “train wreck.” And I’ve heard people refer to Pixar’s production group as a finely tuned locomotive that they would love the chance to drive. What interests me is the number of people who believe that they have the ability to drive the train and who think that this is the power position—that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.

Every beauty must be completed by another beauty: Windows with flowers, trees with birds, mountains with fogs, life with goodness…

tension coiled tightly in his neck, nothing else about today had been particularly agreeable. It was just one of those days that had no reason to be bad beyond the inexplicable fog of depression.

mountains

rubble of his own castle.” Tom felt a wave of relief surge through him as he embraced Aduro, but this was quickly replaced with panic. Where was Arcta? Had the giant somehow been pulled back into Gorgonia? “Arcta has returned to his rightful place – in the mountains,” said King Hugo, sensing his worry. He rose from his throne. “Well done, Tom. You are truly Avantia’s greatest champion.” Tom bowed his head. While the King thanked Elenna for all her help, Tom looked out of one of the throne-room windows. The sky was sapphire-blue, and the sun shone gently down on the green land that surrounded the castle. Brightly coloured flags and pennants fluttered on the houses in the distance. They had escaped the swirling red fog of evil Gorgonia for ever. “We are holding a feast in your honour in the Great Hall today,” King Hugo announced, as he stroked Storm and Silver in turn. “Avantia is impatient to welcome home her heroes.” A liveried servant walked in and draped a soft woollen blanket over Storm’s back, before leading the stallion away for food and a warm stable full of fresh bedding. Tom looked down at the purple jewel that still lay in his hand. He slipped it into his belt. The row of six jewels glowed fiercely, filling the throne room with a rainbow of light and power. The others looked on in wonder. Then King Hugo clapped an arm around Tom’s shoulder, and Aduro walked between Elenna and Silver. Together,

I could smell fog even at this level now. It was rolling down from the mountains, flooding out the moon, as well as rising from the sea. The

Also, the Bible does not explicitly say that it was only due to the water’s recession (which all sides agree is indeed a factor) as to why mountaintops were seen. The text says “the tops of the mountains were seen” (Genesis 8:5). This involves two things: water level (1) and visibility (2). This second factor that is often overlooked is the conditions that may affect visibility. The warmer ocean water (which is expected from the Flood with continental shifting, rising basalts from the mantle, and possibly some nuclear decay would surely generate heat and volcanism) gives off vapors and mists that form low-lying fog and clouds. Hence, visibility would likely be rather low. Genesis 8:5 may well be discussing the state of visibility and atmospheric condition regarding clouds and fog from the heated ocean just as much at it discusses water level.

Later, when she wakes up, the sun has set and the light in the car is violet and jade. Her mouth is dry as cotton and she lets her face fall toward the window. And there they are, behind her: not mountains, not really, just some fog-shrouded cardboard cutouts retreating in the distance. “One of the most colossal disappointments in my whole life,” she called them, more than fifty years later. “Not a goddamn mountain in sight.

You feel mystified by which path to take. Perplexed, you can feel as if we’re navigating through a dense fog. As you trek up the steep mountain, you can’t clearly see what lies ahead. There are obstacles, ditches, and windy paths along the way. Take heart, dear soul. For there is a higher path ahead of you. Never underestimate the power of courage, perseverance, and hopefulness. It can lead you to your divine destination.

...[i]t was always there, the sea, a silent witness to the human theater of this island city. Its omnipresence reminded Remy of his first visit to Seattle. He had gone for a run on a damp, foggy Sunday morning. But the fog had lifted as he ran, and at one point he'd turned around, and there behind him, squatting like the Buddha, like God himself, was Mount Rainier, in all its majestic, snowcapped glory. Remy had stopped, thunderstruck, feeling as if he were staring at the face of God. The fact that the mountain had been there all along, watching him from behind the curtain of the morning fog, had made its sudden appearance seem more mystical.

Stories are the legends we tell ourselves while sitting around campfires early in the morning, steam rising in coils from coffee cups scented with wood smoke dripping fog wet beyond the rim of what we see; the creations of myths told and collective extrapolations remembered limited only by our vision. Yesterday and today blend and twine into one, only to be pulled apart as the dichotomy of their existence is merged. Spiraling ever outward, their memories are carried on the winds, carried to the west, the south, over the edge of the world and back. The winds of spirits gone and of those yet to come. What we dream today, we dream tomorrow for their existence is the same. There is no contextual difference. No separate language. And so the winds that blow across the mountains and plains today commingle with those whose existence began before their stories were born, dancing as they do so through the night. A night of songs. A night of dreaming and distance. A night wherein the ghosts of everything commune as one, forever seeking dissolution from the boundaries of the civilized world beyond...