N 43° 55.116 W 069° 15.653

from Local Treasures

N 43° 55.116 W 069° 15.653

When Rob and I began spending time in Maine, and he was first encountering sea-thick fog, I regaled my Missouri-born husband with half-remembered bits of a childhood book. The little girl hero of the story could time-travel through fog, go back a century to visit people in the town that once abutted her own. The town had faded away; just a few house holes remained in her present day. In telling it to him, I remembered how much I’d loved it; I wanted to find it but could only recall scattered bits, was half-afraid I’d made it up. With a little sleuthing, Rob managed to find a copy for me; it turns out that Fog Magic, by Julia Sauer, remains a much-beloved children’s story.

Though I’ve not time-traveled by walking through fog, I have place-traveled. Fog makes the familiar new, the ordinary breathtaking, the world beyond vision an improbable fiction. Details soften, colors shift, light follows different rules. At this park where Marshall Point Lighthouse marks the entrance to Port Clyde Harbor, the fog has thoroughly recast space. My sister and her family are visiting from Kansas, so we decide we’ll try to geocache despite the blanket of fog. We can’t even see twenty feet ahead. Undaunted, Carli and Chip, my young niece and nephew, take charge of the GPS, and lead us all into a small stand of trees, where the fog is markedly less dense. I’m surprised to find the remains of a stone wall and a route to the harbor. I’ve been to this park dozens of times, never realized this area was part of it. After we find the cache, we decide to go toward the harbor, walk on the water’s edge and take the long way ‘round to the seaside parking area. While we scramble over the rocks, more and more of the water comes into focus. The fog is lifting. Some spots are almost clear, others still enshrouded. I don’t know how—maybe refraction off the water, or light bouncing off the misty molecules—but the fog’s begun to glow from within. And I suspect fog (much like a cache) makes places new not so much by obscuring what is, as by revealing what else is, what else has been there, unnoted, all along.