This morning was to be an early one, dressed and rushing by 7am, piled into the boat by 730 and shooting off across the gulf of mexico, out to Timbalier Island. But spring is groaning and clanking, not quite waking up yet, but turning over in her sleep and mumbling a little, so we have a brief burst of warmth for a few days. This means, on top of the Grackles grackling and the overjoyed gnats fast remembering who and where to bite, that there is amazing fog in the morning, as the cold of the water meets the warmth of the air and condenses. Every morning I get up at 7, check the weather over my grits (grits! who knew they were so perfect?) and wait for the call from my boss, who lives up in Baton Rouge, 3 hours from the coast, and who thus should be treated with respect and duly ignored.
A week ago, in similar warmth and weather, I made the call to venture out, at 7:30 and before the fog warning had been lifted, into Terrebonne Bay, the body of water that lies within the embrace of the barrier islands separating it from the Gulf, -- it seemed clear when I looked out the door in my underwear, blinking in the sun, still half asleep. Because we work in part for the National Government, a body called NRDA (Natural Resource Damage Assessment, a small arm of the fed. gov.) there are numerous, repetitive safety precautions that we must go through every morning -- turn on our spot tracker (a radio beacon in case of emergency) radio NRDA to establish of area of operation, don our gargantuan flotation suits that we take off as soon as we are out of eyesight, etc etc...
This rigamarole takes a good long while, and JUST as soon as we finished it, while putting out towards the open water of the Bay, we thlopped into a bank of fog so thick, so like pudding, that up became down and all sound was muffled. It was eerie, beautiful, and terrifying... Fog this thick refracts the sun until, through the woolen blanket of mist, light seems to trickle weakly in from everywhere and nowhere at all, creating the illusion of being suspended in what I imagine blindness to be like. This is not necessarily bad; at times, fog rolls in and you can simply drop anchor and wait it out. But we had just entered the main shipping channel, where enormous monster ships with fog-thwarting instruments and interstellar horns boom up and down at highway speeds, running by watching only the radar screen, certainly not thinking to encounter a small bobbing cork in the grey flannel morning, and who would likely not even know it if they ran us down.
All of which is to say: this morning, this foggy morning, we take our time, we eat our grits in bed, and I write here as the world changes back from slate to color once more.
