Each day I drive about thirty minutes over the interstate to school. Parking spots are in such short order that I make this drive before most students are up, which means winter drives illuminated by street lamps and roadside snow. These past few weeks have had an odd addition, though. While Utah is known for its snow, my lifetime in the state has never made it known for fog. But the drive this morning was the culmination of a week or two of foggy conditions.
At times the interstate traffic– traffic there usually \_isn’t at 6:30 in the morning– had slowed to a third the speed limit, and I found myself surprised. Unlike snow, which presents some obvious hazards, fog has never much worried me. Our visibility was about twenty yards, which I take to be more than enough with tail-lights and the global orange from the road lamps. But there are worse things than going a little slower during the sleepy hours of the morning.
I enjoy the fog, watching it swirl and dissipate in front of my car. Sometimes it is when our vision is shortened that we can see the most, and so it was with me this morning. Immune to the regular distractions of the invisible billboards and hidden cities I normally see day after day, I saw intelligence all around me. It was in the things I look past when there is no fog. I wondered at the chemistry and engineering of the asphalt my tires gripped, and the miracle of roadway design that synchronizes countless drivers like me as we hurtle peacefully at fatal speeds, at ease with only the comfort of a seat belt and a prayer. The fog seems dimmer beside me than before me, and I peer at my fellow drivers only a blind swerve’s distance away. So much intelligence is built into each vehicle, each a mind-boggling wonder of engineering. We are each encapsulated in delicate plastic-and-steel, with a hidden engine of such balance and synchrony, from the tires to the pistons, as to take my breath away. How many people hours, over how many decades, had invested their day and night’s thought into each distinct creation?
At length I arrived in Provo and headed down the quiet side-roads to my university. For the last few miles I had resumed high-speed when the fog thinned and others’ confidence had increased. Now I was approaching a bridge spanning a rail-road and the fog closed in. This time I was the lead; one pair of headlights followed distantly behind me and nothing was in front of me. I was traveling a mile or two under the limit when I corrected with a pull to the left: those weren’t street lights. They were a parked train I had been heading for, just before the rise of the overpass. I would make it to school in better time if I stayed on the road.
Sometimes we see better when our vision is shortened. But that is before the onset of fear when we can’t see. Blind fear. Now I couldn’t see; not beyond ten feet, on a road that curved, rose, and fell. I remembered from last week, on a clear day, the sign I had read: “Warning: rise obscures view.” I would probably be passing that sign soon, if I hadn’t already.
In a state of visual starvation my cold hands were tight on the wheel and my vision, hungry in the absence of cars, lamps, or even lane-paint, turned inwards. It was unnaturally dark out there; there was no trace of the street lamps I knew– knew from dozens morning-dark trips down this road in the past– should be over my head. For the first time I was not amused or delighted by the fog. For the first time my mind turned with understanding to Lehi’s dream of the mists of darkness hazarding his way.
Only this morning, crossing that stretch of road toward a stop-light I hoped I would see at the end, had I ever been in mists of darkness. Unlike the interstate fog, dispersing lamp-orange in a fuzzy circle that became our 100-foot driving world, atop the bridge the fog dispersed no light. It swallowed it. In my rear mirrors I could distantly see a single pair of headlights, belonging to a driver perhaps reassured by the guiding glow of my taillights. Approaching cars would appear like will-o’-the-wisps, vaporizing into undefined space as they approached somewhere near me. Driving straight is meaningless on a curving road but I followed the lines in my mind, written there by experienced reading of this way. I only hoped those passing had the same reading.
Sometimes we see the most when our vision is shortened. Sometimes we see God when our vision is gone. The beauty of the fog is that it fades away, but the vision it gave us doesn’t have to.