The Fog Hides the Sun
Last night from my hotel room high above the Mississippi, a thunderstorm worked overhead. I heard, no, felt, ship captains lay on fog horns to warn of their passage ’round the river bend at New Orleans. Be warned. I am here.
This morning, I slipped out of the Westin before dawn, into the cool dark of Woldenberg Park and claimed a bench under a lamppost by the river. Last night’s fog still drifted wide and low, soft, aimless. A few benches away, an old man held court alone. He had the gray, braided beard of a dwarf of Middle Earth. To no one in particular, to the world, he preached truth as he saw it. He did not need an audience. He would grow silent for a while, then return to the work.
He roared indignities he had suffered and about something he did in 1976, or was it 1965?; the story changed, as stories do. He loved the fog and demanded respect for it. He shouted of the paddlewheeler Creole Queen, invisible upriver docked somewhere in the mist.
“She’s the queen of the river,” he insisted. “She’s my boat. Mine!”
He preached the bitter facts of the recent National Football Conference Championship Game.
“Here come the Rams. From Los Angeles, California. The Saints got their ass kicked in the Superdome. Fifty-seven yard field goal. Who Dat, goddammit! Who Dat.”
A woman in a motorized park security cart rolled by and smiled at him. She wagged a finger and called, “You hush down, now.” He hollered back at her. She rolled on.
He was a voice of caution in a city that is always in danger. He called upon the righteous and sinners alike to grieve her losses and adore her charms while they last. His warnings thundered, then dissolved into the fog.
In the distance, the sun struggled low in the clouds to expose the world for what it really was, yet the fog lingered, for the old lady preferred the night and was not ready to draw open the curtains. In this twilight, New Orleans is her true, fickle, lazy, childish, indulgent self. She plays house with truth and illusion, dressing them to look the same and letting them have beignets for breakfast.
It began to sprinkle. The riverside preacher rose, gathered his jacket and shuffled toward me, perhaps in search of some dry place where he could try again. As he passed, he smiled and told me the truth.
“The fog will be on the river all day. The fog hides the sun.”
He pointed downriver to the steamboat Natchez, ghostly at her moorings.
“Look at my boat,” he said. “Look at her in the fog.”
Guy D. Johnson is a writer and marketing communications professional. Previously an animation studio owner, daily newspaper editor, reporter and photographer, volunteer fireman, railroad bridge gang helper, FM radio station underling and cave guide. He has lived on farmland trusted to the sun and rain; atop a wooded hill; beside great rivers; upon an arid, high plateau; and at the subtropical coast of the Gulf of Mexico. For 20 years, he worked and wrote in New Orleans.
This is one of my favorite pieces of your work.