The Fog

Hidden Soundscapes - October 2023 Newsletter

The Fog

Two weeks alone enveloped in the fog along Maine’s coastline this summer was enough to confuse my senses. The shapes of buildings blurred, colors bled into one another, and I imagined car headlights in the distance that were only the lights from a neighbor’s cottage tucked in the distant woods. Fog is a “shifting blindness,” as poet laureate  W. S. Merwin suggests in his poem Foghorn, infused by the distant sound of a sad foghorn.

Not all foghorns sound sad, their long, low, bloviating voice penetrating the mist.  Some are absolutely light-headed, giddy,  even pleading for attention, their high, attenuated resonance through the fog. 

During one late afternoon walk in our small coastal village, I could hear the insistent, high-pitched sound of a fog horn that came from somewhere enveloped in nearby Rockland harbor. I searched