Fog Season on the North Coast
For three months a year the Pacific erases the shoreline every afternoon at two. The people who prefer it that way.
The summer fog on the northern California coast is not weather. It is a fixture, as reliable as a tide, and it arrives most days between one and three in the afternoon with the completeness of a curtain being drawn.
Visitors find it a disappointment. They have driven a long way for a coastline and been handed a wall of grey at fifty feet.
What it is for
The redwoods need it. In a rainless summer the trees take a substantial share of their water directly out of the air, condensing it on their needles until it falls as a private rain beneath the canopy. The whole forest is a fog-harvesting machine, and it is why the tallest trees on earth grow in a strip thirty miles wide and nowhere else.
Knowing that changes the experience of standing in it. The grey stops being an absence of view and becomes the thing you came to see.
