Dear Reader,
Fair warning, I’m playing tricks on you a bit with this story. It is September 26th as I publish this, almost a week into being “officially Autumn”. But this week’s story asks that you suspend your disbelief and project your mind backward a week or three to early/mid September. That’s where you’ll find Fog Season in East Tennessee.
It is over before you know it.
-Charles
Someone, not me, has probably written something hopelessly romantic about hot summer nights, about inescapable mosquitoes and the persistent sheen of sweat. Surely someone has, but not me.
Fog Season
The unique beauty of Autumn lies in its identity as a “shoulder season”. The stable weather patterns of summer begin to lose their grip, but the winter doesn’t yet reign in its place. Atmospherically, its a time of turmoil. Ask any indie movie writer, there’s often unique beauty to be found in a less-than-stable personality.
But can a shoulder season have its own shoulder? In East Tennessee, the hot summer nights depart for the season ahead of the hot summer days. So for a few weeks in early/mid-September, while the days continue to be hot and humid, filling the air to almost to the dew point, the newly cool nights force all that dissolved moisture to precipitate.
For two, maybe three weeks, before fall is properly upon us, the river valleys literally overflow with an inland ocean of fog.
Someone, not me, has probably written something hopelessly romantic about hot summer nights, about inescapable mosquitoes and the persistent sheen of sweat. Surely someone has, but not me. I know my turn to wax romantic is close when the nights no longer require air conditioning, when the mild breeze through the open window unites with the whisper (rather than the roar) of the fan to lull me to sleep.
It doesn’t take too much of a temperature drop to inspire the romantic in me. Low 70’s will do. So, fog season serves as an annually recurring reminder of fleeting romances of my early teenage years. Fog season stands in for the brief flings with summer camp girlfriends-past.
My love of fog season is not a love that is widely shared. Around here, most people fall into one of two categories: summer-lovers or summer-haters. The summer-lovers only see fog season as a nuisance because it interferes with their sunbathing routine. The summer-haters have no patience for the shoulder season’s shoulder season and always seem to be outspokenly at odds with fall not arriving all at once.
The party line of the summer-haters is to endlessly malign the month of September. They hold it personally responsible for not being fall enough fast enough. There is at least one logical reason for this stance, but it is based on a common misinterpretation of the season calendar. Many Tennesseans grew up with an informal season that is best described as “lake season”. It opens the weekend of Memorial Day and closes the weekend of Labor day and is marked by a statistically significant fluctuation in the number of recreational boaters on the TVA lakes (it also coincides with the change in hydroelectric generation regimes). And so, in the minds of many residents, lake season IS summer.
Lake season ends three weeks prior to the proper onset of fall and thus tricks people into thinking of September as a fall month. It isn’t. Which means, when the weather patterns stay summery into late September people get angry, as though they aren’t behaving the way they’re “supposed to”. The trouble isn’t with the weather patterns, its with people’s expectations. But the same could often be said for fall as a whole. Folks seem to think that the shoulder seasons are supposed to mean 3 months of sweetly warm days and wistfully mild nights. As far as I can tell, Mother Nature and her seasons have never promised any such thing.
On the contrary, the shoulder seasons are when the atmospheric battle lines get re-drawn. The entrenched air masses get pushed north or south, but no territory is given over to the newly occupying air mass without a fight. The fronts that could be expected to last for a week or more in the summer are lucky to hold position over our heads for more than a couple days in the fall.
But even without the calendar telling me so, I’d know the Autumnal turmoil was close by the onset of fog season.
Summer is not without fog. But summer doesn’t have the kind of fog that fills whole valleys up their brim.
In August, if you get out for an early morning drive with the windows down, any time within thirty minutes either side of sunrise, you might find little sinks, catchments in the roll of the hills and valleys where the rare cold air drifts and pools. And if the conditions are right, these sinks will be holding onto little pockets of fog.
Then, in September, when the nights start to get cool, those pockets swell up as big as entire valleys. The long ridges of the region channel the low clouds and transform into islands in an ocean of fog. If you find yourself up on Clinch or Chilhowee Mountains in early September, you’ll see what I mean. The fog gently roils and churns like a cookpot boiling lazily, thickest where it masses overtop of the Holston, French Broad, and Pigeon Rivers.
Last, as October comes on strong, and the days no longer get above 80 degrees, the air stops being able to hold enough moisture for the big walls of fog. And just like that, true Autumn arrives and fog season evaporates in the bright sun.
Fleetingly yours,
Charles Batey