everything and nothing

Have you ever been so bowled over by something as simple as a foghorn, somewhere unseen deep in the mist over an open ocean, being used to its express purpose?

I can’t explain what came over me in that moment. I was sitting on a flat rock, damn near as peaceful as any person can be, taking in the view, or whatever you’d call what I was looking at, which was really just gray nothingness. There was a sea before me, evidently, but the fog was so thick I was just staring into a vast canvas of glaucous and impenetrable air. It was really quite astounding. I enjoy foggy weather, a personality quirk that I picked up growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, where dense fog envelops the world quite often. Of all the ways and means moisture finds its way back to earth, I like when it just chooses to simply encase and ensconce. Almost as if the cloud were remarking with a simple and relaxed tone, “I’m just gonna rest here a while.” I like when the fir tree branches are wet but there’s been no rain. I like when a trail I have walked a thousand times can still surprise when I can’t see what is around the corner.

So I loved this current state of things. I would every few minutes or so look to my right and left down the coast each direction, where massive firs stood like scouts protecting an encampment. An eagle flew in front me at one point and it was truly beautiful. So beautiful. You would think I’d write an essay about the eagle. Nature and symbolism, power, all that. People travel long distances to see this.

My thoughts leapt forward, crashed, retreated, and repeated like the waves below. They were damn near in time.

Then the foghorn blasted through calm straight to my eardrums, like an alarm penetrating a dream. The dog’s head whipped out of some hole between rocks to stare into the gray curtain, to identify the source of this unseen detonation. We both stared. It seemed this horn (and the boat it was presumably attached to) was directly in front of me. I couldn’t see it, but I absolutely heard it, and my eyes began squinting in an effort to spot it. Nothing. It was out there, somewhere. Proceeding slowly through the void.

I suddenly felt as though I was seeing the world in a giant cinemascope. Like I had been dropped into the cold open of that kind of drama movie where the producers say, “we wanted to make the setting like, the main character of the film, you know?”

Magic and industry shared equal space in the achromatic panorama. The image became wholly realized. Humanity’s capacity for dreams and art conceded space to engineering and work and task. Sublimity and reality did not compete; they complemented one another, and I sat at the center.

The foghorn’s blast echoed in my ears after the mist swallowed up the last of the soundwaves. 

Before me was everything and nothing. I looked at the swaying fir to my right. Its branches transitioned between visible and invisible in the fog. But I could sense its movements even when I couldn’t see. My friend.

The foghorn blew again. It was farther away now. I stood up—time to go.