Hiking is a visual experience. Often we hike to the high places in anticipation of wide open, panoramic views. Your SDPB Outdoors correspondent is an advocate for escaping the closed circuit visual cubicles -- which we in media construct -- that so many of us inhabit. Breaking out is a small act of resistance in a small screen age, of reconnecting to a primal humanity, earth-centered with broad horizons far beyond the strictures of handheld voluntary confinement in a corporate-approved virtual reality -- where virtue is cosmetic and aggressively seeks acknowledgement.
Trees don't play that game.
So what happens when Nature itself obscures the long view? Should you skip that uphill hike on a foggy day? Count your correspondent as a no vote.
There's nothing like a walk up Crow Peak in milky ether, as oak and pine unfurl themselves from the haze that condenses in streamlets cut through canyons in moisture-blackened bark. Arnica flowers heave with droplets, as proudly yellow as rubber ducks. The ethereal and fleeting sea of formless white feeds a sprawling reef of green, where formal pioneers play botanical Twister in search of sun.
Biz Markie's hip hop classic "The Vapors" is about the delayed attribution of value to certain people, namely folks who happen to be broke. The moment the previously devalued individual is assigned value by a denier, the Biz would say that the new convert had "caught the Vapors."
Your correspondent often wondered what he meant. On Crow Peak, in the fog, you might find a semiotic key. Artists like Biz Markie deconstructed language to open new teleological windows within syllables and words, new avenues for thought. Through their texturization of language they conceptually unclotted arterial visual strictures -- the hallways and streets of the urban enclosure -- providing the mind's eye with room to roam.
To catch the Vapors among the haze-shrouded cedars on Crow Peak is to see into, not through, the fog -- it's not an obscurant. The fog is another manifestation of Nature, and it's good, just like (Biz insisted) Big Daddy Kane always was, long before "Long Live the Kane."
The architects of the small world can distract or discourage us from finding beauty in every formal expression of Nature or humanity, if we cede them that power.
Fog opens our eyes to infinite and shifting re-envisionings of our big natural world, but only if you get out and inhale the Vapors.