Any Way You Cut It, You Usually Have To : One Thing’s Clear in Nova Scotia--It’s Foggy

Fog is to the south coast of Nova Scotia what peppers are to Mexican cooking.

And like peppers, fog can sometimes overwhelm. It can linger for days, dripping like a winter cold. Its clammy persistence at times cools the otherwise warm hospitality of coastal Nova Scotians. A man down the way in Lower West Pubnico passed judgment on it this summer in a nine-word phrase, the last word being fog and the other eight unprintable.

He pronounced the word fog as the locals do, as though it rhymed with vogue .

Eskimos have 26 words or more to describe snow. This man uses eight, always the same eight, to define “fogue.”

Growing Fog

Fog grows as it moves up New England. Along Long Island Sound it’s light and sketchy. But in Nova Scotia, it’s thick and persistent.

Basically this is because the farther north one goes, the colder the water--70 degrees in summer in Connecticut, 50 degrees near Halifax. Moist, warm air from the south is shocked into fog during summer when it encounters the frigid Nova Scotia water, which condenses its vapor. In winter the process is different, but the result is the same. Winter fog is called sea smoke.

In summer you might be admiring the bouldered crags and berry thickets of Rogue’s Roost one minute. The next you could just as well be locked in a steamer trunk. Nova Scotia, with no land to the southwest to hide behind, gets the fog right in the kisser.

Busy Foghorn

A high point for Maine was the year the foghorn on Seguin Island blew 2,734 hours or 113.92 days. A Nova Scotian horn near Cape Sable, however, set a record that likely will never be surpassed. One July it blew its dull lament every minute for the entire month.

Carl Sandburg poetized about fog coming in on little cat feet. Sandburg was from Illinois. If he’d been from Nova Scotia, he’d have seen fog come in like a cheetah. The scenery dissolves like a blown TV tube, and there you are--blind, alone with your thoughts.

The assortment of fog is inexhaustible: fog straight, fog with drizzle, fog with rain, patchy fog, cottony fog, gray fog and fog as black as the inside of a boot. There is up-periscope fog, such as the eight-foot bank that rolled in off the Bay of Fundy this summer. You could stand on the deck of a small boat with your feet invisible in the murk and your head in brilliant sunshine, the tops of fishing boats and the coastline visible for miles. That is surface fog.

Seafaring Nova Scotians endure such facts of life as camels do deserts. Fishermen catch a smoke atop their nets until the fog lifts enough to clear the dock, then disappear into the gloom.

Nature’s Dominance

Sable Island is a monument of sorts to such perseverance. It is a long strip of sand 120 miles offshore where nature has combined fog, currents and shallows to show fishermen who’s boss. You can buy posters in souvenir shops with a locater map of the island and its hundreds of wrecks. One schooner captain about to be wrecked on the island in a gale gambled he could sail over it in the wild surf. He bumped several times but made it. There is no poster of him.

In Maine, Nova Scotians are called “blue noses” for an obvious reason. The blue noses, though, believe that whatever they get, Newfoundland to the east gets worse. A shipyard in Lunenburg posted this letter from a Newfoundland mother to her son:

“It only rained twice last week. Once for three days and once for four. The wind blew so hard one day the hen laid the same egg four times.”

Modern electronics such as radar and Loran have made the fog easier to get along with. A modern local trawler carries two, three and even four of each. In addition, the coast boasts an anvil chorus of gongs, bells, whistles and horns.

Senses Fail

Nonetheless, when visibility is down to zero and one is playing blindman’s buff through the rocks to port, the only sound audible may be the thumping of the navigator’s heart. The human senses fail. The eyes are useless. The ears lie. If you can touch it, it’s too late; you’ve already hit it. Only the nose still functions, trying to pick up the aroma of a bait barrel on a dock.

Remarkably, few blue noses seem willing to give it up and head for Florida or Saskatchewan, where fog is only a three-letter word.

A fisherman’s widow in Port Latour said she tried it for a while, moving in with a sister in Los Angeles. She couldn’t hack it.

“They don’t have fog there. But they do have smog,” she said, pronouncing it, of course, smogue.