Fog

When I was a girl in Duluth, fog came off the lake so thick you could lose the house across the street. On those nights the foghorn on the ship canal would start, low and long, again and again, all night. From our house in Lakeside it was miles off and you could still hear it through a closed window. It wasn't loud. It was deep, the kind of sound you feel in the floor before you hear it.

I loved it. I know people who grew up near a horn like that and say it kept them awake for years. It never kept me awake. It meant the boats were out there, my father on one of them some nights, and that someone on the shore was telling them where the land was. I fell asleep counting the gaps between the blasts the way other children count sheep. I never got very far.

There's a story every Duluth kid hears at some point about the old horn, how it was so loud people complained, and how when they took it away people complained louder. I don't know how much of that is true. My mother says all of it, and she was there.

Seattle fog is different. It comes in from the Sound in the mornings this time of year and sits in the low places, and from the top of my hill you can look down on it, all white, with the tops of the downtown towers standing up out of it like something left behind when the tide went out. By noon it's usually gone. It doesn't have the weight of lake fog. Lake fog arrives like it means to stay the winter.

But some mornings the ferries sound their horns crossing the bay, and if the wind is right I can hear them from my kitchen. Not the same note. Higher, shorter, more businesslike. It still does the thing to me, though. I stand at the counter with my coffee and listen for the next one, and for a second I'm nine, and it's dark, and the house is warm, and somewhere out on the water there's a boat finding its way in.

Now and then the fog doesn't lift until the afternoon. On one of those days last week I walked down to the water in it and could see about half a block in any direction. Everyone I passed came out of it all at once, very close, and said hello in a slightly surprised voice, as if we'd met somewhere unexpected.

Is there a sound from where you grew up that you still listen for?