Tule Fog & Chippies

Tule Fog & Chippies



Where I live there are two kinds of fog. Most of the year it’s your ordinary kind of fog that blows in from time to time, enveloping everything around you. Sometimes the fog begins up high as a cloud, then descends to ground level. If you are driving from the valley up to the mountains, you can actually rise INTO the fog, but that’s really a cloud of mist.

Those are the fun kind of fogs.

Just before Old Man Winter arrives, before the first real freeze over the land, in the valley we’ll get what we locals call “Tule Fog” (Some folks call it "Tulle Fog" but I think there's really only one "l"). This is the fog that rises up from the ground, actually, OUT of the ground. It’s weird to watch it form. You can be looking out over a field of summer-burned tall weeds and things are fine. It’s cold, but you haven’t covered the outside plants yet to protect them from the frost, and it’s clear. Then, for no discernible reason, fog starts rising up from the ground into the air, almost as if the air were sucking moisture from the ground. The fog may just hang there hugging the ground, never getting higher than a couple of feet into the air, but sometimes, it’ll continue to climb as more and more fog gets sucked up.

When it’s just hugging the ground we call it “ground fog”, nothing much to worry about, in fact, it’s kind of pretty to watch.

Ground fog usually forms in the gullies and hollows of the land, down in the lowest part of the valley floor. That is where Interstate 5 is. I-5, for you folks east of the Rockies, is the freeway that runs all the way from the border of Mexico north into Oregon and is the main avenue of vehicular traffic north and south in California. Not a biggie usually, but when the fog rises higher than about 12 feet or so, it becomes tule fog.

Tule fog turns from being the pretty “ground fog” and becomes a scary killer.

It is thick, REALLY thick stuff. If you are driving in it you can only see maybe 20 feet ahead of your car. That’s if the car in front of you has taillights on. If it doesn’t, then you can sometimes only see 10 feet ahead. It gets even worse if you are coasting along I-5 at about 75 mph and you go over a little rise in the road and drop down into a hollow -- where the tule fog has just formed. It’s like running into an invisible wall. With no warning you can’t see anything and you panic. Slamming on your brakes and slowing to 35 mph so you don’t crash into the car in front of you sounds like a good idea, but if you do that the guy behind you may decide to keep on motivating at 75 and he’ll hit you from the rear at about 40 mph, which is enough to send everyone to the hospital, or the morgue.

You’ve read about the massive pileups California has had when the fog forms. Two cars tangle and grind to a stop on the road, then two more cars crash into the wreckage that now blocks both lanes of traffic. An 18-wheeler adds to the carnage and before you know it, you can have 100 or more vehicles scattered along a short stretch of road, bodies and blood intermixed with steel and plastic. It’s not a pretty sight.

Speaking of the mountains (which surround us on three sides) we have chipmunks, spotted chipmunks actually, which look exactly like “non-spotted” ones as far as I can tell, but they tell me that the chippies in the valley are different from the ones in the mountains.

I can’t tell the difference but I’ll take folks’ word for it. (Still, I’m sure that the boy chipmunks here can tell the difference in the girl chippies in the mountains.)

I only mention the chipmunks because sometimes they sit along side our rural roads. You can see them sitting on the lava rocks along the roads (there’s a nearby almost extinct volcano that spit those rocks out 10 gazillion or so years ago) and they enjoy the heat coming up from the rocks. But when the ground fog rises, those rocks are cold. It’s then the chippies somehow jump up, or crawl up, I don’t know which, I’ve never seen them actually get there, but somehow they get to the top of the fence post where they sit and watch the surrounding territory, sitting on their hindquarters, front paws held straight out, kinda like they are holding a sign, “Will Work 4 Food.”

What I am wondering, though, is when the ground fog gets tall enough to become tule fog, and is over the tops of the chippies heads, do they jump down and scurry to their burrows, or do they still sit there, peering 10 feet into the blank fog, thinking the blank thoughts…or of the female spotted chippies?



853 words.

Featured in Shadows: A Paper Doll Gang Publication Volume 1: Issue 1, May 2009



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