A Valley Under Wraps

In winter’s darkest months it hunkers down like a grumpy neighbor, an unyielding enigma wrapping cold arms around the San Joaquin Valley’s belly.

Tule fog is once again shrouding and shaping life in this vast land. Outsiders know it best through news reports of hundred-car pileups on the interstate. Lore has it the fog is a curse against the white man, the ghost of a lost lake drained by a century of agribusiness, but in fact it has been around long before a settler’s plow dug the valley’s first furrow.

An endless siege of valley fog can send the strong spinning into depression. It can put off the start of school in the morning and mask the movement of criminals at night. Golf dates fade away. Pesticides and pollutants find a ready harbor in the mists. Planes are delayed, workaday commutes become a nightmare. The National Weather Service office in Hanford is fittingly located on Foggy Bottom Road.

But the story of tule fog isn’t all gloom and doom.

The cold but frostless days and nights provided by tule fog prepare the Central Valley’s bounty of fruit and nut trees for springtime bloom. And some find solace from the hubbub of modern existence in the embracing mists. Tule fog makes life go slowly.

“There is a culture of the fog that people don’t often appreciate,” said David Mas Masumoto, an author and farmer, whose 80 acres of grapes, peaches and nectarines near Del Rey lie in the heart of the fog belt. “It creates a sense of solitude that makes you feel at one with the land.”

For those who don’t go slowly, the penalty is high.

On Jan. 3, a chain-reaction crash of 77 vehicles on fogbound California Highway 58 in Kern County left one person dead and 15 injured. A week later, tule fog contributed to six pileups on a Sacramento River bridge, killing two people and closing Interstate 5 for half a day.

Authorities have tried most everything--flashing lights to warn of fog, signs to help drivers gauge distance and urge slower speeds, pavement markers to signal looming stop signs, CHP-guided convoys down zero-visibility freeways. But the fog is never defeated for long.

Locals tell of driving with the window down, braving bitter cold to crane an ear for the sound of oncoming cars at intersections. Some grade the thickness of fog by how many telephone poles they can pick out in the gloaming. There are three-pole days, two-pole, one-pole. At zero, you’d best get off the road.

The truckers and farmers forced to ply the highways even in the thickest muck rue the outsiders who come speeding into the valley, into the thick of fog. Just ask the gang at Zingo’s Cafe, a popular truck stop on California Highway 99 in Bakersfield, southern gateway to the valley.

As the mists swirled around its legendary roadside sign one recent morning, truckers--their shiny big rigs parked outside in a tidy line--sipped black coffee and ate biscuits and gravy or T-bone steak and eggs.

Outside, cars zipped into the gloom. “It’s crazy--they drive like idiots,” said Bob Patrick, a recently retired long-haul driver.

Jack Peacock, a retired pastor who frequents Zingo’s, agreed. “It’s those little cars--especially the red ones with the smart-alecks in ‘em--that cause the problems.”

The Highway Patrol can watch such racers on the radar, hitting 75 mph in situations that dictate speeds a quarter that. But in the thick fog, “we don’t even go after them,” said Eric Skidmore, a 22-year CHP veteran. “It’s unsafe to chase.”

Trucker Stanley Decker said the fog can so disorient drivers that they turn into lemmings. They grip the wheel and follow the taillights in front of them.

Consider the time years back when Decker plunged down the Grapevine into a sea of valley fog. A long queue of passenger cars trailed behind him.

When he turned off Interstate 5 onto California Highway 43 toward Wasco, “they all just followed right along,” recalled Decker, a broad grin on his well-creased face. “When we got to Wasco, my trip was done with. But they had no idea where in the heck they were.”

Consensus has the fog at its thickest in the region just south of Fresno, where the Kings and Kaweah rivers drain. This broad bowl once was dominated by a sprawling shallow inland sea dubbed Tulare Lake. Three Native American tribes plied its waters in tule reed boats, spearing salmon and harvesting turtles. Tules poking up on the shoreline gave the epic fog its name.

Early pioneers quickly discovered the perils of the mist. The old Butterfield Overland Stage used to crawl behind a lantern-toting guide. Farmers would plow a furrow from home to school so their children wouldn’t get lost, according to “The History of Kings County,” a colorful 1940 account of the region. Those that didn’t, “hunted hours, sometimes all night, for lost children.”

The worst account recalls two sportsmen on a hunting trip with some hearty sour mash. Fisticuffs followed an inebriated argument. One hunter raced away with horse and cart, leaving his companion fumbling in the fog.

It took two days for the man in the cart to find his way back. The other wandered for a week, surviving on grubs and crickets before finally stumbling half dead into Visalia.

Legend of a Curse

Starting in 1880, farmers began to divert the flow of the rivers feeding Tulare Lake. The lake slowly faded away, but the fog remained. “First the Blade,” a historical novel written in 1938 by May Merrill Miller, offers an explanation through a character named Indian Harry. You may take our lake, he explains, but the curse of the fog will remain.

That curse is, meteorologically speaking, considered radiation fog. The right ingredients are moist, cooling soil and an inversion layer that holds clouds on the ground. Thickness can range from a few thousand feet to less than a dozen. On some occasions, a man can climb a haystack and poke his head through a low-lying tule blanket, said Bill Horst, a valley historian.

While white and seemingly unsullied, this valley fog can pose a pollution hazard. As it forms, moisture carries pesticides aloft. Meanwhile, everyday pollutants are trapped under the inversion, just like a smog day in Los Angeles, said Evan Shipp, supervising meteorologist at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. Chilled denizens ignite fireplaces, adding to the toxic broth.

Out in the rows of grapes south of Fresno, farm worker Gabriel Villa and his pruning crew starts a small bonfire of branches to eke out some warmth on a foggy day. They work under the fog’s muffler of silence. Only the drip of condensed water from vines resonates. And the fog hides all. “The boss doesn’t know if you’re working,” Villa joked.

That curtain came in handy back in Prohibition days. Under the cover of fog, countless scofflaws would distill sour mash and “white lightning,” making Fresno County one of the nation’s wildest and wettest locales. Federal agents could smell the odor of the liquor, but couldn’t trace it back through the wintertime muck.

Today, the fog hides the nations’s top producers of methamphetamine. The fog defeats drug agents’ night-vision equipment and shuts down efforts to tail suspects on back-country roads.

“The fog comes in and that’s it,” said Robert Pennal, Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force commander. “We’ve already had several surveillances this year compromised.”

Above-board business ventures are also thwarted. Vern Cornell has been a painting contractor in Fresno for 40 years. He loathes fog season. “The paint don’t dry,” Cornell said. “And the fog stays days.”

Recreation is likewise curtailed. Keigm Fannin, an associate tennis pro at a Sacramento County racket club, can’t see the courts some mornings. It is, he said, “like a blanket of gravy.” After play, Fannin throws cold, soggy balls into a clothes dryer.

A typical year can see Fresno Yosemite International Airport hit by 39 days of serious fog. Flight delays were once routine. But last year the airport traded in its vacuum-tube era radar system, the nation’s most antiquated, for the latest equipment. So far, said airport spokeswoman Patti Miller, only three days have seen flights canceled this winter.

Pilots may be able to land, but they’re sometimes stumped getting to the gate. The airport has “follow-me” trucks that on bad days guide big jets safely to the terminal.

Elsewhere, people narrow their daily aspirations. Just getting to work becomes a chore. Shopping trips seem a luxury sometimes not worth taking.

“People just kind of muddle through it,” said Gerald Haslam, who grew up in Oildale and is a coauthor of “The Great Central Valley,” a collection of photos and essays. “It’s kind of an environmental inconvenience.”

As a kid, Haslam loved the fog’s climatic counterpoint to the valley’s scorching summers. The Midwest has snow days; in the Central Valley, school is delayed in winter by fog. He recalls sneaking out to neck with a girlfriend in the fog-shrouded parking lot of his high school. Fog also helped in gym class. Ordered to run a lap, some would trot into the cloud, cut undetected across the field, and return in record time.

Only a few fogs are thicker. Dr. Samuel Omolayo, a Fresno State geography professor, noted that in Chile some villages depend on water collected from the mist. Belgium is notorious for heavy fog and horrendous accidents. A 1996 chain-reaction crash crumpled 120 cars outside Brussels, killed more than a dozen motorists and injured 60.

Michael Sellens, a Sacramento environmental consultant who grew up in London, recalls youthful days of thick Thames River fog. “But the fogs here in the valley are worse,” he said. “I just try to avoid it--or I drive with my nose to the window trying to see.”

Some people manage to turn the insufferable sieges into something positive. Louise Bennicoff-Nan, assistant superintendent of the Dinuba Unified School District, saw an educational opportunity.

As a high school teacher in Corcoran, a prison town south of Fresno, she started “fog-busters” a few years back. Science students came up with ways to help drivers navigate the muck: High-tech waves of light in headlights or sonar technology to guide the fog blind, roadside sprinkler systems to knock fog from the sky.

Dozens of Fog Poems

Tule fog has been an artistic inspiration for photographers, painters, writers. A UC Davis Web page features almost 50 poems lamenting or extolling the fog. The valley’s best have found wonder in the mire. Consider William Everson’s dreary final words in 1948’s “Fog”:

There has been fog for a month and nothing has moved.

The eyes and the brain drink it, but nothing has moved for a number of days;

And the heart will not quicken.

Mas Masumoto sees the reflective beauty in tule fog.

In “Epitaph for a Peach,” his 1995 account of attempting to revive market interest in his farm’s juicy but frumpy “Sun Crest” peach, Masumoto talks of the tap dance of condensation, the enlivening chill. In the pea soup, his farmhouse would become “like a lost ship, my porch transformed into the bridge.”

Wandering through his orchards and vines one recent day, Masumoto noted how the fog is nature’s perfect refrigerator, providing the necessary 600 to 800 “chilling hours” of needed dormancy.

“If the temperature swings up and down, it’s sort of like the trees and vines never get a good nights sleep,” Masumoto said. “They get mixed up, they get grumpy.”

With early rains, this season’s fog has been the heaviest in recent years, though far from the worst, Masumoto said. When it hits, he enjoys the solitude.

“This is the reality of the valley. It’s part of who we are,” he said. “And maybe it can tell us something.

“Maybe it’s OK to drive slow once in a while. Maybe it’s OK to stop and listen more. Maybe it’s OK not to see miles ahead. Maybe it’s OK to be in the present.”

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Times staff writers Mark Arax and Jenifer Warren contributed to this report.