Fog and Magic.

Some days we lace up our shoes and go for a run and expect nothing in return. An average run, distance, pace... familiar route, time of the day. Then somewhere along the way the magic occurs...when we least expect it. And we are rocketed into a fourth dimension.

Running on one of my favorite trails in the Carolina Beach State Park yesterday, I heard a low moaning bellow coming from what seemed like somewhere down the Cape Fear River. A few moments later I heard the same sonorous bawling again, this time a bit louder. I recognized it then as the sound of a fog horn from a ship... apparently out on the river.

I continued along a section of the trail that cuts through the woods and periodically kept hearing this fog horn, gradually getting louder as I made my way southward, towards the part of the Cape Fear River that eventually widens into a larger bay before entering the Atlantic Ocean.

Then almost as if in a dream, I saw a wispy white wall of fog rolling thru the trees like smoke from a raging wild fire. From the ground up this apparition like tide swallowed up the trees by the dozen as it continued to advance unimpeded off the nearby waters. All the while the ship's horn kept up its eerie bellowing at regular intervals which pierced the air, demarcating her nautical position someplace out in the atmospherically birthed void.

As I crested Sugar Loaf Hill and gazed to where the river should be, I could only see a chalky white colossal mass... looking like it was discharged from the heavens. And suddenly it was all wildly lyrical... like Jack Kerouac wrote about when he was aboard a freighter ship coming into the Port of Seattle in Dharma Bums. As if the immensity of life was almost too big at that moment for him to fully grasp...like I was feeling myself right then and there. Really, really alive.

I lingered for a few moments longer on top of the hill...just so I could take it all in.