This morning was a morning of mist and fog. Some should no doubt casually label it autumnal. I do not, quite, because I do not particularly measure by weather or by equinox: to me, Autumn has come when first I hear the geese overhead.
Fog and mist are not commonly welcome in history or law or the literary art, in the main. They are dangerous by themselves in theology as well: the mystic and the hesychast are sadly misled and likely to fall by the wayside if they have not a thorough grounding in the clarity of theology. And yet this quietude and this veiling obscurity have their uses.
Ten days or so ago was a brilliant morning. My hours are dictated by the seasons and the Sun, as I am possessed of a South-facing window in my bedroom. That morning, I looked out as I ever do: on this day, upon bright clarity. The daily, matutinal cloudbank just at and offshore was a tumbled, solid-seeming blueness behind the tree-line, an image of far blue hills beneath the dawn. We had had rain at last, after a summer of drought and oppressive Sun. My windows look over a channel which debouches into the lower Brazos a few miles away; and look over the local Roman Catholic church and the Regional Hospital, itself a Roman Catholic institution. (At my age, and in my present state of health, it is pleasant to know that, disgruntled Continuing Anglican that I am, I am within not so many yards of a validly ordained priest, though one not of my communion, and of a competent medical facility.) My smaller and more casual set of field glasses, which I keep by my bedside, I trained upon the channel. My field of view was suddenly filled and eclipsed by a raptor winging northwards, too large, too near, too fast for identification: the first I had seen in quite some time. When my vision cleared, I saw something on the channel’s waters which caused me immediately to seize my highest-powered and best field glasses and hie me to my best vantage point overlooking the channel. It had cleared and filled with the recent rains, and the Egrets were returned. That was exciting; but what gripped me was that in their midst were six Roseate Spoonbills, pink as the poster for the Barbie movie.
After a period of observation, I returned home to ring up Cousin Ann, also a birder and one rather better at it than I. (I am an enthusiastic but inexpert birder, in enthusiasm and dedication almost a twitcher, but betrayed by the limitations of my eyesight in my middle age, which is not what it was and never has been: which is curious as I, the possessor of that faculty, have ever been a has-been.) I gabbled into her voicemail with a message, being so excited that I momentarily said Flamingo and had to correct myself a few moments after. Later that afternoon, she rang me up with the news that she had driven to the bridge over the channel, which links the Roman Catholic parish church and the hospital, to photograph the Roseate Spoonbills.
That had been a day of visual clarity and good light; but so had been many previous days almost without observable birds because of the lack of rain. It had been the grateful rains which had made that observation possible and brought birds back to us.
This morning was different again. It was a morning of mist and fog. Dew pearled on every surface. Sound was hushed. And in that dove-grey nun-quiet morning, I was reminded of a great truth. There is merit and utility, there is opportunity, in fog and mist and stillness. If the birder’s eye is hampered, his ear must be the keener. His horizons limited, his eye must be sharper. The more muffled his footstep, the greater his opportunity. The less certain his footing, the sharper his attention must be. And as in birding, so also in life entire.
When was the last time you observed—not saw, but observed—the panels let into sidewalk and road for the visually impaired and those with mobility issues? They are remarkable things in their pattern. They form an arrangement of Greek crosses within Greek crosses, chess-squared with squares: in them are the memory of Mycenæan tiles as at Knossos and Pylos; of Roman pavements, floor-mosaics; of Orthodox vestments.
When last were you thrown back upon the resources of hearing for the dawn chorus and the identification of the choristers unseen?
This morning’s notable visual identification was made possible by the fog and mist, and made the more certain by them. It was a Cormorant, the first for weeks. In the monochrome world of near-silhouettes on a foggy, misty morning, it were impossible to mistake it even at a distance for an Anhinga. It was easy to identify it as a Neotropic Cormorant, Nannopterum brasilianum, rather than a Double-Crested, Nannopterum auritum, precisely because of the sharp silhouetting of the bird against the grey near-solid background. The difference in the orange facial skin at the base of the bill between these two was rather enhanced than diminished in this greyscale world of morning.
The Cormorant is always worth seeing, and particularly as it perches on a telephone wire, as this morning, and spreads its wings preparatory to preening itself for its next foray after fish. The Eagle of Greek and Russian and Germanic heraldry has its particular attitude, and that same attitude appears in its infrequent uses in Gallo-British heraldry and in the civic symbolism of the United States. Iberian and Hispano-American heraldry, as, for example, under Iturbide, and that of Bonaparte, tends to represent the eagle in the attitude of the Cormorant. The seeing eye and the retentive mind is receptive to connotation, associaton, and symbol, and has a remembrance of unlike things, and synthesizes the whole of the human experience even in the sighting of a bird.
Mist and fog can clarify can concentrate, can isolate the essential. They can direct attention to the important and mute the common noise and distraction. They can and they do force a focus upon what matters.
This is the lesson of a misty, foggy morning; and it is one worth learning and heeding: a true saying, and worthy of all men to be believed; one we do well to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.
Here endeth the Lesson.
Markham Shaw Pyle, author & historian 