Forecast
After the weather turned, so did we. For many, the end of fog led to the end of patience. Though we’d heard the cool gray city might become sun-bleached as Seville by the end of the century, someday had arrived sooner than anyone predicted.
After the gloom failed to materialize in June, July, or August, a committee convened and proposed gene therapy. Like those tomatoes spliced with fish genes, we too might adapt. But funding evaporated like the fog we hadn’t known defined us.
Like love, like bankruptcy, like sleep, the wild swings happened slowly, then all at once. Amid a gale, our brawling neighbors slammed into a eucalyptus that toppled and crushed them both. During a triple-digit, triple-week heat wave, teenagers tore apart my brother’s classroom. Our grief deepened every time another ecosystem, another species blinked out here: the tiger salamander, the kangaroo rat, the marsh sandwort.
We survived largely on the belief that the fog’s absence was an anomaly. Soon we’d return to those contrarian summers, the ones as cold as winter and the blankness upon which generations of us had projected our dreams. The clouds dropping down to swaddle but also to erase. We wished for silver—not the gold of this endless summer—but that of a fog bank pouring like cream.
It’s been two years now, and, worldwide, fog is nearly extinct. The realization that my unborn child will consider it as they might a rotary phone or a Tesla leaves me unmoored.
As I wade into Ocean Beach—now merely bracing instead of heart-stopping—I ache for my firstborn, who will never dream about fog in the Avenues. Never call upon it as a metaphor, never curse the dampness that makes a home cozier upon return. Never turn porous in the mist with someone they love.
Their generation will come of age in a city where we’ve lost our taste for the temperate—our dispositions like palates scorched on too much sugar, salt, and fat. If only we hadn’t been so self-serving, we might have forestalled disaster.
I halt before going too deep in the water, struck by the thought that the extreme is how we might find a way through. Not with seawalls or another stopgap, but an idea too outlandish for anywhere else, that might take root and flourish under every color of sky.
Vanessa Hua (@vanessa_hua) is the author of the national bestsellers A River of Stars and Forbidden City, as well as Deceit and Other Possibilities, a New York Times Editors Pick. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, California Arts Council Fellowship, and a Steinbeck Fellowship, as well as honors from the de Groot Foundation. among others. Previously, she was an award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program and elsewhere.