“When I see the fog I want to drive down there and be in it. I’ve done that before and when I got there it had disappeared. Damn. I was cheated. It’s exciting, it’s romantic.” – Peter Johnston, UCT climate scientist
Telford Vice / Cape Town
YOU can see it but not touch it. Instead it touches you. It lines your ear with cold, wet velvet. It tastes of tenderness and smells of solidity. It is the stuff of dreams, nightmares and movie scenes. Cape Town’s fog is all of these things and none. It simply is.
It’s around for, on average, 50 days a year — making the city the foggiest place in the country — comes in two types, has had music composed in its honour, and shifts the shape of our reality.
It soaks up the Atlantic Seaboard’s superiority complex and turns Table Mountain into a staircase from heaven, tendrils tumbling down crusty cliffs. The Cape Flats skulk, flatter still, under its smoothing brush. The City Bowl runneth over with its becalmed alabaster gloom. It refuses to grace the beige banality of suburbia: coolth itself couldn’t very well hang with the terminally uncool.
It can materialise as suddenly as light after loadshedding, or lurk low and languid nearby; unattainable but not unseen. If Cape Town was a novel its fog would be a central character. Two characters, actually.
What covers and comes off the mountain is common or garden cloud, made of moisture the south-easter scoops up as it scuds over False Bay. What approaches from the north, rolling over the Flats, the harbour and the city, is the real thing. That’s if it’s thick enough: visibility of anything more than a kilometre means it’s mist, not fog.
“If you’re on top of Table Mountain you’re in the way of a cloud. It’s not a special deal. But fog at ground level is special.” That’s Dr Peter Johnston, a University of Cape Town climate scientist.
“Fog is basically cloud on the ground. Cool or warm air, depending on the temperature differential and the situation, comes over you and suddenly you’re in mist or fog. It happens when moist air is on the move and is forced to cool down; if it goes over a cold ocean or cold coastline. The temperature inside the mass of air reaches dew point, which is when the water vapour in the air condenses around nuclei and forms water droplets and what we call a cloud.
“The water droplets become opaque. Even though you think you can see through them you can’t because they’re refracting light in all sorts of directions. Essentially all you see is white.”
Fog and its movements are notoriously difficult to predict, but meteorologists keep trying to do so for the benefit of transport industries.
“It’s dangerous to drive in, and it causes delays for ships and aeroplanes and that has an economic impact,” Johnston said. Indeed, aircraft do not take off or land in visibility of less than 5,000 metres.
“You’d think we’re in the radar age, where planes can land blind. They don’t. They see the risk as too high. They don’t think passengers have appetite for risk. Passengers don’t see anything, just clouds out the window. Then, all of a sudden, there’s a bump. They think that’s irresponsible.
“Pilots can land blind. If there’s an emergency they will, but not if they can avoid it. That’s why flights are delayed for hours on end if there’s fog. And you do get fog around some airports, because nobody thought of that when they were siting the airport.”
Jonathan de Vries, the composer, wouldn’t have been thinking about that when he sat on a rock on Robben Island, tape recorder in hand, making audio notes of the sounds that would inspire the plaintive music played on September 24, 1997 at the opening of the Robben Island Museum to an audience that included Nelson Mandela. The haunting piece took some of its main cues from the lonely song of the island’s foghorn — which on December 9, 1942 successfully conveyed to a 6,000-ton ship lost in the spectral soup that it was about to run aground. The warning was heeded and a crisis averted. The foghorn was less loved by prisoners, who couldn’t get to sleep what with it booming every 30 seconds.
Even hardened rationalists like Dr Johnston have a soft spot for fog: “People tend to treat it as this mystical thing that no-one understands or can predict. Fog confuses us. I love looking at it and being in it. Where I live I look down on the docks, and when I see the fog I want to drive down there and be in it. I’ve done that before and when I got there it had disappeared. Damn. I was cheated. It’s exciting, it’s romantic.”
It is. When it swallows the Sea Point Promenade whole you couldn’t possibly want to be anywhere else. Except, perhaps, on Signal Hill looking down on the dream and wondering where it will take its magic next.
Sunday Times Lifestyle
Bulletproof Truth 