now that you mention it...

The PNW gave its all for a damp day yesterday, transitioning seamlessly from mist to rain to fog to more rain and back to fog. The air has a delicious, unfamiliar smell, like the arid, resinous spice of California mixed with the salt of the Atlantic coast I grew up with. On Sunday one of the locals was warning me about the capricious weather, the vast and rapid changes a single day can bring. It was no good to tell her I grew up in New England, that I've lived in California for twenty years and the primary thing I've hated about it has been the monotonous weather. It never does any good. It's like telling someone, "Oh, thanks, I'm not vegan, I just really prefer the taste of the ice cream substitute made from oat milk and xanthan gum."

I accept that if I'd spent the past twenty years shoveling show for several months of the year, California's eight straight months of cloudless, blinding sky would look a lot more appealing. I hate it anyway.

Not what I'm writing about, though. No, the misted-over Puget Sound has me thinking about fog.

Ancient sailors--on the Mediterranean, for example--used to sail along the coast during the day, and beach their ships at night. If you know anything about sailing, you'll understand that this is an incredible pain in the ass. You have to know all the landing spots for thousands of miles of coastline, and spot them correctly, and hope the wind will actually carry you there. Logically enough, a sailboat can't sail directly into the wind, but modern boats can get shockingly close. Not ancient ones, as a rule, so if the wind is coming from the direction you need to go? You have problems.

(This is the non-deity part of Odysseus's long journey home, and it slowed down Alexander the Great's invasion of India considerably.)

Long ago, I did a course at the Hurricane Island Outward Bound School, sailing a 30-foot wooden boat around the thousands of islands of Penobscot Bay. Currents and winds being what they are, we did a fair bit of night and fog sailing (sometimes both). GPS was mostly limited to the military then; LORAN was okay for coastal navigation in North America, but in any case, electronics were expensive and took batteries, and we had neither engines nor generators nor solar panels. (Now, by comparison, though it doesn't alway feel that way, electronics are dirt cheap and power efficient, and battery technology is much better.) We navigated anyway! Without dying! Or even coming close. Looking out on foggy water, that certainly feels insane, even though I've been reading nautical charts since I could read, and I helped my classmates.

Here is the infrastructure and information purchased by your tax dollars and recorded on a chart:

• High-granularity depth and sea bottom surveys.
• Terrain surveys, contour lines, and landmarks.
• Automated lighthouses/buoys with foghorns, each of which has light/sound patterns unique within some large radius.

Say you're in motion, with your compass telling you you're headed due northwest. You see one light with a pattern "[white] [green] [pause 2 seconds]" and another going "[red] [pause 1 second] [red] [pause 2 seconds]". You now know exactly where you are. You can measure their angles relative to the boat if you want, but you don't really have to, because the system is designed to prevent you mistaking one lighthouse for another. Only got one lighthouse? Use the terrain details to find a hill or a water tower or something.

(Boat hit something? Your navigational skills might not be as good as you thought! But maybe you can use that to figure out where you are. Make lemons with that lemonade!)

Here is what I realized, looking out on the foggy entrance to Puget Sound:

Our sailing ancestors were batshit insane.

I have no idea what they did when fog appeared in these rocky, island-studded coastal areas. Did they just drop anchor at the first remotely safe spot? Without navigational aids, you're stuck with "dead reckoning," which is a neat exercise if you're doing it for fun, but might be all too literal otherwise.

No wonder ships wrecked all the time.