When I get the feeling, I go for walks. Not as many these days, since I moved to the country, but typically I stills squeeze in a few. But there are times when they get strange…
Walks are the great undoer. They take the worries that are wrapped up in your brain and untie them, like the Gordian Knot, and the act of moving is the sword. The word “perambulate” ostensibly comes from this very action. “To walk in reverie” is one definition, I believe. Reveries themselves have a way of healing.
With that said, I am not alone in my love of walking either, and my company of walkers is not bad. Henry David Thoreau loved to stretch his legs on a walk. Virginia Woolf also enjoyed a reverie to help her compose. Darwin. Einstein. Wordsworth. And Dickens. Walking has the power, I think, to bring you the juice, as it were.
Yet, I get nervous walking in the fog, especially these days because now that I live in the country, it’s only country roads out here. No sidewalks. So, I walk along the shoulder of a road no matter what direction I take. I pass the normal stuff through the haze: a farm, a decorative display for a garden wall, trees of every variety. I also pass the odd stuff in the fog: the muddy ruts of tires run too far off the road, cairn stones, horses wearing clothes.
More specifically, the muddy tire tracks always tell me that doom is coming, so I just don’t look over my shoulder and trust the focus of drivers. Dear God, help me. The cairn stones are more common out in the country than I would like to admit. Sometimes they are shoulder to shoulder. Sometimes I can just make them out in the fog, standing my height against the gray. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson tell me to run. But I stay. Similarly, the animals seem to get funny, like the horses with clothes. I think “horse clothes” are just called “horse blankets,” but I always see the character of Boxer from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in my brain.
Long ago, in the Northlands of Michigan, I used to walk through the woods near a public library. In the woods, you saw all sorts of interesting stuff amplified to absurd levels of ominous when the fog was abound. There were signs written in the mud, and the symbols were adorned with hair and sticks. Likewise, I once saw little dolls with little teacups sitting in a tree hollow. In these woods—I forget the name—the animals watched you closer in the fog. They visibly identified you long before you knew they were there. It felt like the fog changed them. In my memory, their eyes are silver and alien.
Meanwhile, when I lived near the thumb, the fog would come in heavy by the bay. I would see all sorts of strange things during those walks. Zombie-like residents emerging from the mists only to pass me by on a trail; huge ships appearing on the river with their massive masts plunging forth under a raised bridge only to disappear again without a trace. On a Sunday walk, there was a sobbing woman on a picnic table, and all I could do was pass by silently; the clicking of my heels on the damp pavement, and the low cries of somebody in pain as I left her behind in memory.
Hence, I feel different in the fog as well. An explorer of an unknown world maybe. Everything I thought I knew in the bright, blue clear of the day becomes less familiar. I stopped listening to music during walks. I felt as though I could miss an important sound, an important signifier that death was approaching, maybe from behind me, and maybe from the murky gray.
Nevertheless, when I get home and kick off my shoes and go stick my ruddy face in the window to watch the packed, moving haze, it puts me at ease. It becomes familiar again. Fog from a distance is a friend, but a mysterious stranger in its embrace. The fog changes our surroundings. It changes my walks. It changes how I see the world when I am in it.
I suppose as long as I’m not walking in it, I think that’s okay.
