What Ridge Fog Does to a Morning Shoot

I woke up early one morning this spring to a fog so thick over the ridge I was supposed to be shooting that I could hear a truck on the road below before I could see it. It nestled down into the whole valley, sat there past sunrise, the kind of fog that makes the trees look like they’re floating without trunks under them. Pretty, if you’re not the one trying to get a clear line of sight through it with a total station.

People who don’t do this work assume rain is the enemy, and rain’s annoying, sure, but fog is worse in a specific way rain isn’t. Rain you can work around, throw a cover over the equipment, push through if the job’s got a deadline. Fog just erases the thing you need to see. Chattanooga sits in a bowl surrounded by ridges, and the temperature difference between the valley floor and the higher ground does this to us more mornings than people who just commute through it on 27 probably notice. I check the fog forecast before I check the actual weather now, which took me a couple of wasted mornings early on to learn.

There’s a particular kind of patience this job asks for that I don’t think translates well to people who’ve never had to just wait somewhere for visibility to come back. You can’t rush fog. You can drink coffee in the truck, you can review the deed one more time, you can call the crew and push the start time back an hour, but the ridge clears when it clears and not a minute before, and the only thing you control is whether you’re ready the second it does.

I’ve come to actually like those mornings, if I’m honest, even the wasted ones. There’s something about sitting in a truck on a ridge above a whole valley you can’t see, knowing it’s all still down there, that puts a normal frustrating delay into a different kind of context. Most of my work is precise to the inch. Fog is the one part of the job that doesn’t care how precise I want to be, and I’ve made a kind of peace with that being the trade for getting to work somewhere this pretty in the first place.