Tag Archives: Carl Sandburg

Listening To The Fog

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2016-05-28ListeningToTheFog7810

Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about the fog saying that it crept in on little cat feet, sat on its haunches and then moved away. When you are at 14,000′ and the fog moves in you can hear the sound of those little cat feet. Sound travels magically in the fog. You can hear little hooves click on the boulders a half a mile away. You can hear the rustle of the fog moving over the lichen. There is no wind when the fog comes in, but you feel the movement of the fog as it envelopes you and goes along its way.

The inhabitants of Mt. Evans are used to the comings and goings of the fog. They are comfortable with it. Although there are few predators up this high, none the less they listen to what information the fog brings them. Mountain lions have been known to walk through this high country seeking the unwary kid and in a fog like this when you can barely see the wool in front of your eyes, the sound travels best. Even the sound of big cat feet moving silently. So you listen to the fog. And you listen close.

Little Cat Feet

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LittleCatFeet027click to enlarge

When Mr. Sandburg was writing about fog coming in on little cat feet he had obviously never been to where I live. When we get fog, which is not all that often, there’s no little cat feet involved. It comes in like a freight train and slams into your house like a kid home from college. It doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, what your politics are or whether you like Jesus, you’re going to get treated like all the rest which is total involvement on your part. There’s no sitting this one out around here.

One thing about the mountains, we don’t get little weather. We get big weather. Some might argue the fact that sometimes it tries to rain a little but doesn’t quite get the job done, or clouds might build up and pretend to look threatening, but that’s not weather, that’s just meteorological foreplay. When the real deal hits, you know it. If you want a real rush come stand on the deck here while a thunder and lightning storm rolls through the valley at tree top-level, or when our wind will kick up and hit 80-90 mph on the wind gauge, that’s when the weather comes right into your soul and you become part of it. It’s a test of will power to see how long you can immerse yourself in it before you have to give up and run into the safety of the house like a frightened school child. There’s no shame in that folks, this can be some scary, scary stuff, but man, what a rush.

Mountain living can be the best of times or the worst, but it is rarely boring. That old adage about ‘If you don’t like the weather wait 5 minutes and it will change’ is not true. Actually the span is about 3 1/2 to 28 minutes, maybe a little more if its going to be the storm of the century, those seem to come around every two or three years. People tend to live in the mountains because everything that happens here seems to fit the scale of the mountains. Big, larger than life and it is never the same, but then why would you want it to be.