Fog Horn

Making out with the enemy

I have said before how much I fear fog; truly fear it. It's worse than the dark, which you can pin down to irrationality and combat with a torch. It's an omnipresent white-out (except at night unless you've got main-beams on, but that's get complicated to expand on here so keep such thoughts to your self, please): almost impenetrable. If you loose your way or a friend in the fog your senses have no where to turn to. Even sound can be altered; cries for help change point of origin, amplitude, and sense of distance. Creatures can grow to gargantuan proportions in fog - you know it's all in the mind but those hoof steps can reverberate through the ground to you; fur brushing through the undergrowth brings home images of Jurassic Park-like monsters...fog feeds the imagination while depriving the senses.

In the dark you have lights on vehicles (except that mad cow in the Nissan the other day - bloody hell - how'd she not notice?!)and even at a distance you can determine the hazards.

In the fog you have murk. The amount of murk depends on the amount of dampness, which in turn can depend on temperature. Get fog and dangerously if not below zero and you double your trouble, anyway. Fog arrives in banks (usually between the eyes when some sales bird in a two-piece suit and stick-on tan tries to explain compound interest again) and can lull you into a sense of normality with vision over the horizon and then, "oops", the edge of the road blurs into white-grey murk.

I recall heading North out of Colchester in a £100 Renault 11 (the push-me-pull-you thing - in white, oddly) and having to navigate the thing through Cambridgeshire by sticking my head out of the window and following the centre white lines (one after the other) as visibility closed down to 4m at night. Approaching headlights crawled forward only revealing their lamps at about 10m. It took hours to cross into Bedfordshire. Later, I traversed South through Staffordshire into Warickshire on the way to Devon through thick freezing fog. Not only could my wife and I not see much of the motorway or our neighbouring travellers plodding through the pea-soup at 30mph, but a continuous freezing of condensing atmosphere forced us to stop every 5-miles, or so, to dig out the wipers and lamps from shiny clear ice up to an inch thick.

Fog is bad. It's got poor visibility, low temperatures for the most part, and can soak the unwary in seconds. Nothing except better weather can shift it.

In grace, I find fog at night can be a little easier to handle where headlamps and tail lamps aid passage but in the day time it's hard to judge what's coming at you next. Tuesday morning and a case in point. Lines of car drivers were paying their respects to their foggy fears at 30mph where 45 to 60mph was still safely possible. I overtook when I was sure to see sufficient vehicle-free tarmac. As speeds increased though so the amount of water appeared on the visor streaming off in the wind (screen down for maximum road picture).

Up over Fareham vision waned to about 50m at times and then opened toward the Waterworks S's to about 400m. Into Droxford and all there was was murk in the sky and murk beyond the hedges on either side, with photo-effect fading of murk to about 100m front.

Toward West Meon exiting Warnford I noted the slight dark contrast on the road ahead and that any idiot would be in this soup without so much as a tail light on. I was pretty much on the brakes before I noticed the lights were, in fact, on. If I can't see a car at 50m and their lights at 10mm what chance have I on a white bike on a white day? I was relieved a fluorescent jacket remnant remains tied to a tree near there and was easily visible in contrast to everything else. Perhaps my jerkin would alert cars; fluorescent and reflective?

Bottom of Privet Hill (just North A272 and A32 junction at Loomies)

Over Privet and into the trees the ground had become saturated and the temperature fell to near 0-degrees leaving as much fog inside my helmet as out. By East Tisted the air was clearing but past Farringdon and the veil fell once more. I opted to go cross country to my first stop of the day but the mist affected my judgement (erm, an excuse forming) and I almost hit a pickup as I over-cooked a sharp corner along the muddy lane.

Beneath the frustration with the other drivers' over reaction to the fog though was a sense of challenge - of wanting to hold it together, to ride through the fog and notch up another experience under my belt. I began to look forward to the really dense banks and to measure just how much worse my vision could become; to revel in the Topsy-turvy world of white-out, of guessing where the Earth finishes and sky begins.

I relished it. I loved it. I rose to the bait and maintained speeds I knew weren't safe, only I felt the measured risk pulse through my veins. I was falling in love with riding in the fog; I had the horn*. I was exorcising my fears. I was born-again into the World of the Winter rider. I was not concentrating and missed my turn.

*The switch is too close to those indicators!