Crowds in the Fog
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Hi, this is Dave Thurlow for The Weather Notebook. The Maine coast is the foggiest place in North America. But just 200 miles north on Prince Edward Island, fog is a rare and wonderful event.

"It may surprise you to learn that fog is a rare event here on the Island. It surprised me."

Weather Notebook commentator Ann Thurlow.

"I have lived on the seacoast before - and fog was always a fact...especially a fact of early morning life. But we aren't really on the sea . We're in the Gulf of St. Lawrence - protected from the Atlantic by Nova Scotia. It means our climate is mild and the fall is long and slow and the fog, on the odd day it comes, is a big event. How do I know? Because the last time it was foggy, I decided to take a drive around the park by the harbor. I wanted to turn on my lights and experience that soupy wet density. I wanted to see the trees loom out of the mist...I wanted to see no farther than the end of my hand. What I saw instead was hundreds of people doing exactly the same thing. Turning into the park, I joined not a mystical world, but a big old line. I wanted to follow my instincts...instead, I followed the red lights on the back of someone else's car. When I came to the parking lot, I pulled over. It wasn't hard to find the parking lot...it was hard to find a spot to park. I got out of the car and stood next to everyone else. We were, as you always are in the fog, hearing everything - and seeing nothing. And we also were, for that moment, drawn together only by weather - not fighting shoulder to shoulder against a snowstorm or a flood...but brought out into the wet morning only by wonder."

Ann Thurlow comes to us from Prince Edward Island. Our show is funded by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive and by the National Science Foundation.