Driving blind

Boy, just like old times when I lived in Fresno and driving in dense fog was routine in the wintertime. Today Karla and I went to the big city to do big city stuff. When we came back to the mountains, we drove right up into the overcast. The fog was so wet it was like drizzle, and the centerline of the road was very important for navigation. Visibility was about two car lengths. As we approached our seven miles of dirt road, both county and private, we were concerned about finding the road at all, since it seems to blend with non-road on either side. Fortunately there are white posts marking all the culverts that go under the road, and those were our guides. By the time we got to the house, it was drizzling even more. At least that will keep the horses from drying out.

Many long years ago, when I was a young punk and worked at a television station in Fresno, I lived in the boondocks on the edge of town, out where your neighbors were mostly fig trees. At night, around 8 o’clock or so, I would sometimes drive home for “lunch” (I worked the 4 PM to midnight shift). It was a ten-minute drive normally. I got into fog so thick I could only see one stripe at a time of the pavement’s centerline. When I finally got to my street, which was narrow and didn’t have a line down the center, I was creeping along in first gear, trying to see where to turn off into my driveway. All of a sudden a fig tree appeared in front of me! Right in the middle of the road!! At least that was my first reaction. I had drifted off into a fig orchard. I got out of the car and walked behind it to see if I was very far into the orchard. I didn’t want to back my still-almost-new 1960 bug-eyed Austin Healy Sprite into a tree, since it had really minimal bumpers. I managed to get back on the pavement and just headed back to work. I had already used up 45 minutes of my hour, and didn’t have any time left for eating. For the remainder of “fog season” I brown-bagged it.