VL-IV - page 37 Tule fogs

[Bekah]

I was catching up last night and this passage caught my eye - page 37:

"After work, unable to sleep, the Corvairs liked to go out and play  
motorhead valley roulette in the tule fogs.  These white presences,  
full of blindness and sudden highway death, moved, as if conscious,  
unpredictably over the landscape.  There were few satellite photos  
back then, so people had only the ground-level view.  No clear  
bounded shape all at once, there in the road, a critter in a movie,  
too quick to be true, there it'd be.  The idea was to enter the pale  
wall at a speed meaningfully over the limit, to bet that the white  
passage held no other vehicles, no curves, no construction, only  
smooth, level, empty roadway to an indefinite distance - a motorhead  
variation on a surfer's dream."


Tule fogs are weird.  They don't roll in like other fogs.  Tule fogs  
come up from the ground - they rise.  The cloud aspect of a fog is  
created right where you stand because of the relationship of  
temperature (low not freezing) to humidity (very high) in that  
specific place.   These are the killer fogs which you hear about  
having caused the deaths of people on the highway from Bakersfield to  
Sacramento (and maybe north of there, even).    The color varies  
between grey and bright white and they can appear sometimes like a  
wall in one place and not at all 10 feet later.   Driving in it give  
you hallucinations (like you think you see a curve or a car or a dog  
or something but there's nothing there).   They can be misty and  
ghostlike dancing a few feet off the surface of the road.   They can  
be so thick you have to open your car door to see the white line.    
Tales are told of a string of cars following a lead car through the  
tule fog all nice and neat and then all following smack into a  
field.   I've lived here a significant part of my life (including  
late teen years) and I've never (ever) heard of anyone playing games  
as described in the above passage- but you never know ...

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?o=1&f=/chronicle/archive/ 
2002/02/11/MN43998.DTL
http://kathysdustytrails.blogspot.com/2007/11/tule-fog.html  (pretty  
pictures)
http://flickr.com/photos/emdot/73257388/in/photostream/  (sometimes  
you can't see the hood of your car)
http://www.visaliatimesdelta.com/article/20081210/NEWS01/81210009   
(recent wreck)

One time,  (I have to tell this story and I'll hush),  a few years  
ago a really,  really stuuuuupid truck driver  decided to make a u- 
turn on Highway 65 between Bakersfield and Porterville in the bad-ass  
killer fog.   He killed 6 people all told.   I heard the news on the  
radio.  I was sooooo mad.   He didn't see anyone coming???  Well -  
duh!   You can't see the trees alongside the road in that kind of fog.

I try to not drive when the fog is so thick - schools are delayed -  
businesses give okays to be late due to fog,  airports are shut  
down.   It's worst in the central valley - (eh Robin?)  not so much  
around the edges where the elevation is a bit higher.

Bekah