I.The Town That Is Sometimes There
The chart will tell you that Port Verrow lies at the back of a shallow bay on a coast that faces north-east, which is to say it faces nothing. What the chart cannot tell you is that on a hundred and forty days of the year the town is not, in any useful sense, there. You may stand on the mole at noon and be assured by people you trust that there is a church, a fish market and a chandler’s within two hundred yards of you, and take all three on faith.
The reason is simple enough to fit on a postcard, and the postcards sell well. A cold current comes down the coast from the north and keeps to the deep channel a mile off the harbour mouth. Behind the town the land rises through bracken to sheep pasture that warms early and gives its warmth away by afternoon. The warm air slides seaward off the hill, meets water that has never in its life been above nine degrees, and thinks better of everything. What it was carrying as vapour it sets down as weather.
The harbourmaster keeps the count. A fog day is one on which he cannot see the Skerry beacon from his office window at nine in the morning. The beacon is eleven hundred yards away, and the window, he concedes, has not been cleaned since the count began.
II.Seven Words
A place that spends two days in five indoors of its own weather acquires opinions about it. Port Verrow has seven words for fog and will correct you on every one. The lightest of them is on the page with you now: look, you can nearly see the far margin.
- fretor sea-fret
- A thin haze that takes the far shore and leaves you the near one. Boats go out in a fret. So does washing.
- smoor
- Fine wet fog that does not fall but arrives sideways. You are not rained on, exactly; you are included.
- wool weather
- Fog thick enough to snag on the gorse. Sheep become theoretical.
- the grey lady
- The bank that stands off the harbour mouth of an evening, waiting to be asked in. She always is.
- a dumb day
- Fog so close that the horn seems to come from every quarter, and therefore from none.
- a blanket
- Three days or more. There has been one worth the capital letter.
- a lifter
- Any fog expected to be gone by ten. Used chiefly as a hope: every fog in the town is declared a lifter at breakfast.
The saying that goes with them is older than anyone who says it. I had it from a net-mender on the fish quay, who did not look up.
“We do not say the fog comes in.We say the town goes out.”
III.The Horn
The horn was installed on the end of the mole in 1883, after a collier bound for somewhere else found the fish quay by touch. It is a reed horn, driven by compressed air, and it has two notes: a high one, and then a lower one that sounds like the first note’s considered reply. In fog it gives both, once, every ninety seconds.
For a hundred and four years this was simply what quiet sounded like. Children were conceived, born, schooled and courted at ninety-second intervals. Then, in 1987, the lighthouse authority declared the horn redundant — ships had radar now, and the ships agreed — and on the first of March it was switched off.
Nobody slept. The surgery filled with people complaining of a silence in the ears. A man on Tannery Row was found in his yard at three in the morning, standing, waiting for it. The petition to bring the horn back took eleven days and carried 2,306 signatures in a town of 2,140; the surplus were visitors who had been kept awake by everybody else being awake.
The horn came back on the twentieth of April and has sounded in every fog since. It has no navigational function whatever.
It is, officially,a lullaby.
IV.The Blanket of 1952
It began on Tuesday the fourteenth of October, about the time the school came out, and it was not declared a lifter by anybody. For three days the town heard itself and saw nothing. The baker delivered by counting doors. Gulls walked. You will find this part of the essay harder going than the rest, and so did they; the harbourmaster’s log for the month is at the foot of it.
The mail ferry Margit Ross, forty minutes out, felt her way in on the lead-line and made fast at a quay that seemed narrower than her mate remembered. It was. She had tied up at Sallow Haven, six miles down the coast, and her passengers spent a pleasant, puzzled hour looking for streets that were elsewhere before anyone thought to ask a native what town this was.
On the Thursday, Ellen Brack and Tom Averill were married at St Budoc’s, as arranged. The bride could not see the groom from the porch; inside it was little better, the fog having come in with the congregation. The curate conducted the service by voice alone. Each was asked to answer loudly, so that the other might be sure who was being married, and the ring went along the front pew from hand to hand, like a bucket at a fire. The register is signed in four places, one of which is the hymn board.
The fog lifted on Friday at ten, and was therefore, in the end, a lifter.
V.What Fog Is For
This morning is clear. I can see the Skerry beacon, the whole length of the mole, and a quantity of horizon I had only been told about. The town looks smaller with its edges on, and faintly embarrassed, like a man seen without his hat.
I had come intending to write about an inconvenience. But a place that vanishes two days in five learns things the continuously visible never have to. It learns to keep its promises aloud. It learns to trust that the other side of the street is still there. Port Verrow is the only place I know where people give directions by sound: down past the chandler’s, where you’ll hear the halyards; left at the drip; on until the horn is behind your right shoulder. I followed directions like these for a week and was never once lost, which is more than I can say for towns I have been able to see.
Fog, they will tell you here, is not the weather that hides the town. It is the weather in which the town can hear itself. By the time you read this, it will have gone out again.