The Foghorn
Only in the middle of the night, only when all the background noise of the busy streets I lived on from 1981 to 2011 fell away, only when there were almost no cars abroad and the hum of city life died down, only when I woke up in darkness from deep sleep, did I hear the foghorns. I heard them often, and in recollection the sound seems almost like a correlative of that middle-of-the-night state of being not quite awake, not quite asleep, with a wandering mind but a body pinned down by sleep’s Jupiterian gravity.
San Francisco’s foghorns make a deep, plaintive bleat, like the call of a guardian. It’s a warning, an offer of assistance, a sound that says when seeing fails, hearing may succeed. It’s a way to give a voice to as much as a million tons an hour of water vapor on the move. We still say horn, but foghorns are now mechanical devices with deep voices, because low noises travel farther. They are also an orientation; there I was in a bed in a little apartment in the middle of a city where, the sounds told me, fog was rising up from the sea, traveling from the west, twining around the coast, sliding toward us. Designed to warn sailors at sea of unseen, unseeable obstacles, the sounds also let land-dwellers like me know what is there beyond the reach of our senses.
Fog is silent, and when you watch it from afar, it seems stealthy or even sinister — arms of fog reaching around the belly of Mount Tamalpais, then retreating; fingers pouring over the Sausalito hills, drifting with languid weight down onto the town and the bay; rafts of it sailing under or over or all around the Golden Gate Bridge; a solid layer of the stuff over western San Francisco in late summer like a sodden gray blanket, muffling sound and sense of time, as though it were six in the morning all day until darkness returns. If you were to get seasonal affective disorder, you’d get it in August, and the knowledge that inland people were sweating and wearing shorts while you were piling on sweaters and praying for a glimpse of sun wouldn’t help.
Summer is when I’d hear the foghorns most often, reminding me that I lived on a peninsula surrounded by a cold ocean. The Golden Gate Bridge foghorns are the only ones left that have the sound you think of when you think of fog and foghorns, though there are a few Coast Guard foghorns elsewhere in the bay and along the coast, and ships have their own sonorous horns I hear now from eastern San Francisco.
Maybe it is strange that a device meant to aid ships, according to the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea, was one I heard when I was securely ensconced, heavy with sleep, at home in bed. A bed is a ship of sorts, but a foghorn can’t prevent the collisions that may take place there, awake or asleep. The International Association of Lighthouse Authorities has decreed that “fog signals are no longer necessary for the needs of navigation.” We San Franciscans need them for other reasons. They tie us to the past, to the shipping that once defined this place, to the sea, to the things beyond what we can see.