This time of year is the sweetest for our town, reputed to be enshrouded in fog pretty much all the damn time.

Actually, when we were shopping and thinking about this place and this town, we listened skeptically as the locals told us that what would become our neighborhood was immune from low-hanging cloud formations. They alleged that the curve of the mountains behind our house and the beach cove down the street oceanward created a doughnut where the sun glinted pretty much 25 hours a day. Local pride and hyperbole we thought.

Sho’ nuff, though, many a morning as I head to my work-a-day toil, I don sunglasses in our bright and sparkling driveway only to drive into dank gray two, three blocks down the street. And, this fog is John Carpenter fog. Scary, dense, pea soup stuff that has you tapping your brakes and fearing the bogeyman jumping out in front of you.

Perhaps the best part of the doughnut effect and the surrounding fog is its defensive powers. Driving into town from cutting over the San Bruno Mountains and headed to Highway 1, with the sun blotted out of the sky and clouds all around you, it’s impossible to believe there could be sun down below. So, at sea level in my backyard, the crowds stay away.

M. likens his commute to the Mists of Avalon. (Not clear if he fancies himself King Arthur.) I call it Brigadoon.

This weekend, they (or we) celebrate the mists with the Fog Fest. It’s the only street fest I’ve encountered on this god-forsaken coasts that puts me in mind of my days back wandering Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. Most of the street festivals here are precious and cloying in a particular California style. Lots of chardonnay and the kind of art for sale that includes evocative, colored door ways from distant lands snapped on someone’s world tour arranged to maximize the opportunities to see ‘exotic” brown faces and evocative doors. At the Fog Fest, the art is more driftwood and beads and sea glass; homey junk I would make myself.

As we gear up for this adventure that shall be followed by a frolic in the sea with our boogie boards, I checked out photos I forgot I had taken of a surf contest last month, the Kahuna Kapuna. When I paddle around with my meager, and they are seriously meager, sponging skills, which make me unworthy to share the ocean with the likes of Kelly Slater, it’s inspiring to watch people who know what they are doing. What you can’t tell from the photos is how unrushed and stock still some of old timers looked. Apart from the fact they were floating on a board at the top of a crashing wave, they stood as though they could have been waiting for a bus.

http://dee-rob.com/zenphoto/Kahuna%20Kapuna%2C%20August%2015%2C%202009/

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