The Daily: 28 October 2023

I saw the moon last night. It was almost full, shining silvery white in the early darkness of the eastern horizon. To the west there were clouds in orange and fuchsia, violet and lavender, festooning lapis skies. There were stars by the time I got home from work and my Friday night errands. I almost didn’t remember how captivating a star-filled sky can be. And it continued all night long. This morning, Venus was brilliant, an apt prelude to the sun that illuminated her from below the horizon. But I did not see the sun until midmorning. The fog rolled in before the stars winked out.

It was bright and warm for a few hours today, and I thought I might see the Hunter’s Moon rise full, without even the need for a blanket against the usual All Hallow’s chill. But before I could do much more than clean up the rodent messes on my front porch, the clouds began to build. Now, it’s so dark my dark-sensing kitchen night-light decided it was time to turn on, lest the bungling biped stub her toes in the gloom. And it’s raining again. Fitful rain showers sweep through in sheets, then taper to drizzle, then open up again with newly determined downpours. I suspect there will be no dry end to this day. Maybe not the weekend. Snow is forecasted for Monday.

I have not put out the Halloween attractions. I don’t have much that is water-safe. In fact, I don’t have much that goes outside and stays outside for any length of time. For one thing, it takes away from delightful fright if the spooks and spiders are out visible in daylight weeks before trick-or-treat. But there are also teenagers… and rodents… much the same breed of walking destruction. The pumpkins I set on the porch — un-carved, mind you — are all gnawed and broken, even in relative protection. Anything sitting beyond the gate, beckoning in the little costumed beggars, is likely to be smashed in the road, left for me to clean up the mess. In the rain…

So, my house is not terribly scary this year. I also don’t have any treats to hand out. I haven’t made room in the shopping cart for that yet because I haven’t figured out how to get home and get it all set up before trick-or-treat is pretty much over. The sun sets before I am home at this time of year. The little ones are off the streets before it’s too dark. And I’m not much interested in handing out chocolate to adolescents, most of whom don’t even don a costume. Just grab a sack and a few dozen friends and troop from house to house, bawling out demands for free sugar. I hate to be a skinflint, but I just don’t feel compelled to spend what money I have on crap candy for insolent youngsters. Who will probably smash my pumpkins whether I give them treats or not…

I don’t know what the All Hallow’s version of Scrooge might be called, but that’s me this year. In fact, I’ve been a Scrooge for All Seasons ever since the flood. Maybe longer, if I’m honest with myself. I simply don’t want to put effort and expense into the popular rituals and festivities any more. I want my own holy days. I’d prefer to celebrate them with others, but if it’s a choice between a solitary observance that means something to me and an empty and noisy obligation with strangers, I’ll take solitude. So call me Ebenezer…

Or perhaps Winifred. I sat down to write a Full Moon Tale for the Hunter’s Moon, and her grumbling observations on fog and blindness came tumbling out. Seems appropriate…

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Fog (16 Winifred Mumbles)

A Full Moon Tale for the Hunter’s Moon

It’s late in the fall. Time for taking stock and remembering what stalks in the night. John Barleycorn is cut down. Kore is wearing her underworld crown. The White Woman walks abroad, setting traps for unwary travelers. Skin-walkers grin from the rocks, pushing out creaking arms with too many joints. Mara and alp, kobold and kelpie, boggart and nixie and fae, all are feeding on fears while the Norns spin fate and cut threads and old Perchta and Frau Holle gather the little lost souls into their webs.

Old Man Jack is waking and soon there will be killing frost.

But the worst: there’s fog over the valley. So impenetrable that the cottonwoods of the bosque are no more than dim silhouettes in a still lake of shadow. No canyon breezes to riffle the surface and clear away the confusion. No vistas of solid, stolid certitude sweeping off to the land of sunset. Fog is blindness. Enveloping ambiguity. Cold fingers of fear feeding our inner demons.

I’m guessing it was foggy in rusty times. All that wet and heat and rage and terror. No light to dispel the darkness and open up a way out. Fear as conduct and custom, it was. Fear and despair and fog.

With occasional small candles of desperate hope scrambling for higher ground as the clinging, cloying mist sucked all into its maw.

Desert dwellers deeply distrust the fog, feel confined and oddly vertiginous wherever we can’t see distance. We require foreknowledge on our road. Wherever it leads, we want a path cleared of obstruction for days, weeks, months, sometimes years. Fear and fog settle into the rifts, fostering footsteps of hesitancy and indecision. We don’t know where to direct our feet and so we don’t move at all, frozen in purblind doubt. Merely because we can’t know what is ahead.

Things to avoid: obfuscation

Sheep don’t like corners because in those dead ends they can’t see the way out. Possibly, this is a desert dwelling trait, human and ruminant, alike. But the ovine station has a strict rule against occlusion. Climb to the highest crag and bed down on sheer precipice rather than submit to the unseen. Comes not only from the imprint of infancy, a learned condition imbibed with mother’s milk. — All will be well with the world when you can see for empirical eternities. — No, raise a ewe fully within the barn’s four walls and she will still find her way to the hayloft window eventually. Probably jump. Can’t find peace when you can’t know what to expect. And nothing is settled and clear, even when you don’t know anything different and don’t understand that there is a world beyond blocked sight.

Of course, when you’re a sheep, you have bone certainty that everything wants to eat you.

Sheep in confinement are the skittish and suicidal creations of human ignorance. Suspect the sheep were particularly set on death in rusty times. Books from that time do hint at a near constant state of neurotic ovine agitation. Idiots. Why did they think churros grew all that wool? Not for humans to spin and weave into saddle blankets and rugs. Or not only for that, even after millennia of breeding. It’s so they don’t have to seek shelter from the cold. They carry their snug walls around as surely as a turtle’s carapace is its castle. Lying unsheltered leaves eyes open to the threats of the world. The proper way of being in sheep philosophy. 

Fog is right out in sheep-being.

I wonder what demons stalk the fever dreams of sheep. We, humans, have our wood hags and the sinister song of the lorelei. For the churros, I’d guess there are sharp claws and grasping jaws, gaping mouths of bloody teeth in serried rows, defying geometry in their prodigiousness. I suppose that’s just like our own horrors. Because our natal memories are haunted by the same helpless fear in the face of predation. Populated by the same predators, I’d say. Feline and canine and ursine and reptilian. All our flaunting of weaponry is a screen on an inherent disquiet in the soul, the innate impressions of prey. But sheep fears are fresher and include knives and bullets, all vectors of death that spring from the unseen. Possibly walls rank high among sheep terrors. Walls without doors and windows, but permeable, nevertheless, to mortality.

So… fog. And likely forest.

Aren’t many woodland ungulates. Pretty much just deer. None of the others are stupid enough to live where hunters have cover, where you can’t see what stalks you until it’s exploding out of the brush. Even humans were wise enough to leave the forests. It’s not that we lost prehensile tails and decided to make do with rocks and sticks; it’s that we aren’t very fast. By the time the leopard was visible, it was too late for our piddling limbs to carry us away from danger. Deer manage. Barely. Only live in great numbers where humans kill off the other predators and use fire and flood to make open park-lands of the dark holt.

But nobody lives in the swamp. Unless you can fly, fog is deadly to the hunted. It’s telling that most of our scary stories come packaged in murk and mist. Can’t fear what you can see. But can’t find peace in blindness.

All the more so for the desert dweller. We need our horizons just to ease away the heartburn and palpitations of anxiety. I don’t trust fog. Even when it pools in the valley, leaving foresight and blue skies above the river. What’s it hiding down there? What abominations lurk in the gloaming? Who and what is using that cloak to creep closer and when will it arrive?

Imagine that was the permanent state of rusty living. All those close towers, bending with foreboding over the city dwellers. All that smoke, swallowing up discernment. They got it so turned around that they believed fear to be good and necessary. Fear was their chain on the feckless and the flighty and the refractory. Fear was the pacifying gun in the hands of police. Fear was the benevolent cage that controlled and kept unruly masses in check. Fear glued rusty society together in a sticky, inescapable morass of inviolable fog.

Sheep were probably well and truly overwrought, whether on four legs or two.

There were wizards in that time. They stood at the boundaries of reason and fired glistening incantations of embodied will and aspiration into the ether. I’m sure it was very beautiful as the barricades to unknown unknowns came down in sparkling fury. But the indomitable fog soaked into the fortifications, found chinks and loopholes, snaked into their eyes and ears and sank into their bones. And they turned on each other when they could no longer see the real enemy. Which was very likely the same thing, given their profligate want. But want in the hands of a child is far less to be feared than the want of a discarnate corporate body of men. Those were the real monsters hidden in the mist.

Though it was the blood of children that darkened doorsteps and playgrounds. 

And that stain has never been expunged.

Desert dwellers and sheep could see it coming. Kept the innocent in the center of the ring when predators cast long shadows on the horizon. Hence we’re still here with our wise wariness. The views of urbanites were less clear and too much encumbered with fancy and nightmare. They could not find the way out, particularly when the fog rolled in on the rising tide.

Give me an expansive plain upon which to brood. Give me a broad horizon to follow, to lead my feet forward until it is time for rest. Give me open perspectives and bright prospects. 

I am naked enough that I like my walls to keep out the cold. But build those walls with plenty of doors, ways to come in, ways to get out. Even so, give me substantial locks to serve as soothing sedative when my eyes must be closed. 

And build far above the river valleys no matter the labor in hauling water. As true native to the desert, I prefer the work so that fog never finds its way to my homestead.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2023