Location Taken: Mount St. Helens, Washington
Time Taken: June 2010
Fog is naturally beautiful. It softens the world and makes you focus on things that normally would get lost in the background. Like rain, it brightens the colors of the world by washing away the dust, in a way that makes things look truly alive. But it also equalizes the colors by blocking the harsh sunlight. It may lose the dynamics of light, but gains the much rarer dynamics of focus.
And yet, it is also naturally scary. We humans react poorly to limited sight. The caveman inside all of us is convinced there could be a lion just lurking out there, ready to make a meal of us. Night is worse, but is more expected. Fog brings this fear into the day, where you may need to be out gathering your own food and can’t just hide away. Even in the modern day, fog is dangerous. There have been many pile-ups on highways from sudden fog, when visibility instantly drops to less than the distance to the car in front of you. It’s truly terrifying to suddenly see nothing and then, the sounds of crunching metal come from all around you and all you can do is pray you’re not about to join the piles of death…
It does take a combination of landscape and fog to make both the danger and the beauty apparent. Something like the blasted land around Mount St. Helens. It may have been several decades since the volcano erupted, but the land is still not recovered. And it shows. There’s few trees and the land is covered with weeds, which prefer this sort of disturbed land. It may be a natural scene with healthy plants, but if you know anything about how wild lands usually look, it looks wrong. And the fog just adds to that by making you focus on the weeds. Normally you wouldn’t even notice them, for the area is full of fascinating landscape, most notably the volcano.
It’s no wonder fog is used so often in horror games like Silent Hill or Slender. It makes it far easier to get lost and far easier to hide enemies, which ramps up the fear level immensely.
Still, I do love foggy days.
