I’m walking into town in the early morning. Really, there are only two directions from my house, into town and into the wilderness. Today I’m walking into town.
The sun is just rising and air is foggy, really foggy.
My previous experience with fog was a couple of occassions in Vancouver. It had rolled in from over the ocean and covered the whole town. I was living at the university campus, which sits isolate out on a peninsula surrounded by ocean and rain forest. When the fog descended you couldn’t see further than an armspan around you. As you walked along the street people would emerge from the engulfing whiteness, pass by you in silence for a second, and then fade away again. Electric street lights seem like large, strange glowing balls floating above you. They make you feel like you’re in 19th century london and Jack the Ripper could be loiter and just armspan and a half away.
This fog was different. It was brighter, sharper. It was crisper and merged seemlessly with the clouds of breath that I exhaled. The temperature was well below freezing and Tulita is nowhere near the ocean so this fog wasn’t made of tiny water dropplets suspended in the air.
“Luckily the sun’s still rising before the 11am flights.” A local says to me. “Eventually they won’t be able to land anymore because the ice fog won’t be burned off in time. Then we’ll only have the evening flight.”
I’ve seen my first ice fog. Googling for it later turned up something even cooler: diamond dust. When it’s cold enough and humid enough, the tiny ice crystals seem to materialise and tumble from the blue cloudless sky.
It’s not humid here at all, so I doubt I’ll see it. But now that my sense of wonder has been saturated by amazing daily auroras, you can bet I’m going to be keeping my eyes open for diamond dust.