Fog
Here we are, in our houses again.
We wake to heavy fog that gets me outside almost as fast as a good snow. The veil-of-illusion atmospherics of both feel like easily accessible out-of-body experiences. Sweater, coat pulled hastily on. I clip the lead on the dog and we're quickly out into the pea-souper, not wanting to miss a moment.
The trees are brushes swirling in cloudy water, flicking rapidly in and out of view. I can see maybe 50ft. A tiny wren is my only avian interaction today. He's about the size of an Ikea meatball, and pinballs at my feet before needling at speed into a bush. The railway tunnel, usually a place of reduced visibility, is the only fog-less place left in this world. Emerging, I see a shape that looks like a large dog lying on the side of the path. Thoughts of rescue, danger, and death snowball as I get closer but it's just a branch of fir. I'm almost on top of it before I'm totally sure. The fog is befuddling. The olive branch of "clearing the air" has the opposite effect to police throwing smoke grenades. Perhaps we're all festering under the same fog, from here to halls of the Capitol.
Severnland is out of sight, inaccessible in more ways than one. Quiet roads quieter. I cleaned my bike the day we went into lockdown and it now sparkles under gathering dust at the bottom of the stairs. Midmorning and the Severn tide is low but rising. I see this on my screen, but from my window in Bristol I cannot even make out the playing field at the bottom of our road that every night glows phosphorously with artificial light. If I scooped the fog away, perhaps it too has gone or been turned upside down.
Picking up where I left off last time, I'm thinking about imagination again. Imagination is the confluence of experience and abstraction, where – in a John Berryman phrase I go back and back to – we can "add to the stock of available realities." Imagine a flat land, veiled in fog that falls on the first of December and stays for the whole of advent. When it lifts everything is different. Now my routes are necessarily internal, this is both story and travelogue. My saddlebag contains a quiet room, pencil and paper, the last of the lebkuchen. And I have no map at all.