Fog 2
July 2024 Newsletter
Fog 2
Never let a summer citiot* navigate. Many summers ago, when we first came to Maine’s rocky coast, my husband and I got a small boat and headed out to sea to explore some islands nearby. We got the navigation charts out (pre-GPS era) and were even a little smug about our precocious plotting around the abundant buoys and markers that fill Penobscot Bay. We chanted “red, right, returning” when entering a port, or what we surmised might qualify as a port. We used a compass, even a plotter and divider sometimes, to draw our path from one destination to another. We, the cool summer visitors who could navigate the world through pure intuition and magic.
* "Citiot": a summer visitor who pretends to be competent in the outdoors when they have no clue
Then one day, on our small boat, weaving through a granite archipelago offshore, the fog rolled in. Fog often arrives uninvited and unanticipated. On some days, you can be sailing in the sunshine while hearing a foghorn around the corner. Fog can hang around in a distant bank for hours and suddenly disappear or transport itself to your exact location. We thought we could beat the fog that day, surveying our nautical charts, and hunting down one buoy after another. Each time we found a buoy that we anticipated due to our profound mapping talents, we celebrated. Suddenly, we came upon a buoy that we hadn’t anticipated.
In a single moment, we were both exultant and terrified. At least we were somewhere, even though we hadn’t a clue where. My husband looked at the charts to find the buoy on the chart that matched the one we encountered. We wanted a green can and instead found a red nun, in the parlance of others who actually know how to use navigational aids.