Edge Effect: Trails and Portrayals

Genius of Fog at Ecola Creek Mouth

Genius of Fog at Ecola Creek Mouth The horse meadow quartersroots aslarge as if they'd cantered from the stable. They lie in salt rush and spiky large-headed sedge. They recline in bird's-foot trefoil the horses crop. Loggers'drift-stumps, they rave at the root end, but on their misery-whipped plane light springwood bands, dark summerwood rings, weathered and fuzzed. Up to the woods of small alders, they gallop in heavy recumbencies. One swirling wooden mane holds a crow. When fog in the spirit of blue harbor seal skin suffuses this pasture, the great roots can't be told from beings that changeplaces; and, superimposed, true horses, in fact, drift from back in the nebula to the immediate drizzly foreground, with the dark burgeoning aspect of old growth logs tumbled into seeds for birds. The landscape is felted, hushed, as the line of horses moves, sinew and tracheid, out to sea. Crouched on the uprush edge, focusing low to the sand and tracking coppery, tinny mica tracings— jet, pewter, bronze, as if tannin gilded a fish-scale or an oak leaf fell across a vein of pyrite— I can only see up to the herd's approaching, jaunty knees. Their burl-brown, spherule, liquid eyes have not seen me. They are quieted byfog, their riders as lofty as littletrees. When I evade, spring up like beach wood twisted by a wave, I am not surprised 75 T W O : T R A I L S they go straight through my station on the lacy swash. Such dense luminosity—I inch back to the inland of grayed black-blooded Himalayan berries, silvered rummy pink spirea. But fog makes it all one field of direction, our bearings and our contours corresponding, vaporous human torsos, humid pasterns, fogged-in cannons and fetlocks, misty lungs, and true fog-mind neither blurred nor mumbled, amnesic nor censorious. Its genius is to be unafraid so near breakers you cannot hear, that do not roar in a climate so huge, diffuse, and tender. 76 ...