On All Things Liminal and Pale in Hue

I took a drive a few days ago to the Marin Headlands to do some photographing. It’s an old, favorite place of mine. I had a studio in those parts for a year, three years ago.

When I drive out to the Headlands, especially when I am by myself, I have the distinct impression of visiting an old friend. I feel like I’ve gone back in time—like I get to, for a little while, repossess the self that I was when I used to drive there often. On Tuesday, I drove out to the Headlands because of the fog. Sitting in my office in San Francisco, watching the rain come down in short unconvincing bursts, I knew there would be clouds and thick fog just over the bridge. I left work early.

Sometimes you just have to do that.

I have never experienced fog like I have here anywhere else in the world. There is only one other place where I’ve encountered something that even comes close, and that’s in the pages of an essay by Loren Eiseley—an imagined, rather than lived, experience. Fog is liminal and indiscernible. It is a sort of in between place. To go into it means to lose all sense of space and context; to lose, for however briefly, a sense of time.

Lately, this seems to suit my mood.

The artist Roni Horn said: “…talking about the weather is talking about oneself… with each passing day, the weather increasingly becomes ours, if not us.”

The Headlands in the fog is profoundly quiet. You can park, dead center, in the middle of the road, and there will be no one around to notice. You can be, as I am trying to say, totally alone. The fog ensures that not even the view-scape can intrude on you too greatly. Vision is limited; all seeing is on the threshold of becoming.

When I returned home late that evening tired and ravenous, I made avgolemono soup. It was warming and delicate and just right. You take nothing more than eggs and lemon and whip them into chicken broth. In a matter of mere moments, your broth will turn the most beautiful pale color, white leaning toward golden. The egg and lemon base is tangy and complex. The whole process takes all of 15 minutes, making it something that you really can throw together for a late-night dinner when you are exhausted and hungry.

This is soup, but in a sort of liminal way. And because it’s light and lemony, it’s something that you could eat, really, in any season.