Toby Olson - Seaview

It had been coming in slowly and for a while. It was thick, damp, and heavy. As it moved, it pushed against a clear line of sunlight. There were no clouds in the sky in front of it. When it had reached close to the beach below the cliff, the woman and her two children had packed up and left. They were tourists. It was their first time on the Cape, and the organic-looking density of the approaching fog had frightened them. The jagged lines of lobster-pot markers looked like fairy lights for a moment as the fog passed over them, the sun shining in the space between the wake and the fog bottom, and then they blinked out like small, serial firecrackers. From the cliff the fog could be seen as a distinct mass between the sea and the wispy layer of mist above it, and above the mist the air was clear and the sun still bright. When the fog got fifty yards from the shore, a young man on the path in the rough noticed it, and with his head turned back over his shoulder, he reached out and touched the young woman with him, causing her to turn and see it also. They looked at it for a moment, and then the young man struck a kind of sunwor-shiper pose, his arms wide apart and his head elevated in a kind of joke. They were on their way to the beach when they had stopped to watch the hang-glider float inland and fall to the fairway. Then they had, with the others, watched the goings on with the golfers, the contraption, and the kite. But now they wanted the sun to take the fog away. It would spoil their beach day, and he lifted his arms to pray to it. His young woman friend could not contain herself, and she yelled out.

“Look at the fog! Look at the fog!”

Many in the group of senior citizens heard her, and most of them turned from the sights on the fairway to look. By this time the fog had reached the sand, and after it crossed the beach and hit against the base of the cliff, having nowhere else to go, it started to fold in on itself, to thicken, and to climb. Many of the elderly people got nervous, the flowers on the dresses shifted; their line on the path broke as they looked, piecemeal, out at the cliff, over at the fairway, and back at the bus near the lighthouse in the parking lot. The fog came over the crest first where the light-house was, covered the bottom half of it, and then it sucked up the bus. Some of the people had started back that way, but when the bus disappeared they stopped; and others of them turned, only to find that the fog was coming over the whole length of the cliff edge, folding and moving toward them.

Out in the fairway, the golfers had disentangled the line of the kite. The Chief rested in his sling. Sammy and Eddie got up, and the kite flyer, when the line was loose, trotted back toward the rough, pulling his string, watching the kite rise quickly. The golfers watched him get up and go, and then they saw the

flowered dresses and the bathers and the fog behind them. The flyer stopped when he reached the edge of the rough, but his kite kept rising, and as he watched it go it disappeared, and he was left holding a rigid string that stood up straight in the air. Most of the old women and a few of the baggy-suited men started to come together in a kind of common purpose. Their line was disheveled in the rough, but when their feet hit the fairway it firmed up again. They came to the hardpan running and hopping, occasional clamshells thumping into the ground among them.

The golfers recognized their force immediately, and they headed for the power carts, hoping to get the carts between themselves and the oncoming flowers that were now losing their colors as the fog touched them. The Chief in the contraption was out front and vulnerable. He wound his fingers in the netting of the sling and braced his feet. Sammy and Eddie held tight to the pull-cart handles, and Sammy used his other hand to hold the crown of his hat. Wall and the hangglider pilot, though they were to one side at a place where only a few bathers would pass them, struggled to move the grounded glider out of harm’s way. A little breeze had come up, and the glider was fighting them; their arms extended above it, they tried hard to hold it down. It lifted one or the other of them occasionally above tiptoe.

When the oncoming tide of flowered dresses and baggy suits tucked in the front of the fog gained the middle of the fairway, the Chair was the first to fall. He had been caught in a moment of indecision between the possible safety behind the power carts and that at the edge of the line beyond the hang-glider. He had started for the glider, but when it began to lift, he had pulled up and watched it. Then he had turned back toward the carts, but saw that he could not make it in time, and stopped and put his hands up.

“It’s okay, don’t panic! Don’t panic!” he yelled. But the Chair, had a panicked kind of yell, and when they heard it they only came on quicker. The first to get to him were two very heavy women. One was ahead of the other. They were probably neighbors, and the one had reached back to get the other’s hand so they would not get separated. Just as their hands linked, they came upon the Chair, and though their hands broke apart when they hit his chest, there was enough force in their weight and movement to lift him off the ground and throw him back. As he stumbled, trying to keep his footing, he reached out for support. What he seized was a flowered sleeve. It ripped, and the whole front of the dress came away with it. At the sound of the rip, the woman clouted him with a small pearled bag, knocking his golf cap off, quaking his skull. As he fell backward, grabbing at the bag in defense of himself, he brought the three of them down in a heap, the one with the ripped dress fighting to get her hand and the bag free of the sleeve.

Now they were all in the fog. It was like the inside of a cloud. Most of the phalanx passed and entered the next fairway and disappeared. Wall and the hang-glider were out of sight to the right. Three women had run into the cluster of power carts and stuck there, holding tight and shaking. One thin old man had run up against the Chief’s contraption, shuddering the netting and ropes, swaying the Chief a little in his sling. The old man had grabbed Eddie’s cart handle and held fast to it. He looked down at the Chief in embarrassment. He was the same size and build as the Chief, but he was a good fifteen years older, about ninety. The Chief could see that the elder thought it had been unseemly for him to run from fog while this younger man, the Chief himself, watched him do it. The Chief smiled reassuringly up at him, and the man relaxed some, smiling back. He had a bushy gray mustache and equally bushy gray hair.

“This is a pip; this is a hell of a note, boy!” he said to the Chief, his eyes sparkling.

“That is correct, Father,” the Chief answered. “Pretty good fun too!” And they both laughed, like a flute and a piccolo, in the fog.

When the Chair had disengaged himself from the two women and had helped them get loose from each other, he got his rain slicker out of the pouch in his golf bag and tried to help the woman with the front of her dress ripped away put it on. She saw him with it, and she lifted her hands and pushed at the air in the fog before her.

“Don’t look! Don’t look!” she hissed at him, and he gave the slicker to the other woman, who helped the embarrassed one on with it. Then he took their arms and led them over to the power carts. When he got them there, one of the men spoke up.

“What’ll we do now, Chair?” Before the Chair could answer, Sammy spoke from near the contraption that was parked in front of them.

“We’ll call the tournament for a while, scores stand, we’ll play the holes we’re on over again. This stuff’ll pass shortly. Dick, you take two of the ladies in in the cart. Crow, you take a couple, then come back and get some others. Eddie and I’ll take the Chief in. The rest of us’ll walk.”