Merced Tule Fog

 Tule Fog

This morning I watched a YouTube video by blancolirio on flying out of Sacramento in dense tule (too-lee) fog. It brought back many memories of the unbelievably dense soup in the Central Valley of California.

Quite often is is so thick that visibility out the windshield is gone completely and anybody who has to drive somewhere learns to open the window and look for the centerline on the road. 

My uncle Roy Ostrum was involved in a minor door bender when he was driving slowly with his door open watching the center line next to the running board (remember those?) and tangled with another driver doing the same thing going the other way. Nobody was hurt, but the startle factor was off the charts as a couple of doors got slammed shut suddenly as they connected across the centerline. 

My distant cousin and best buddy Gleason Appling was visiting our family when we lived next to the Catholic school on Santa Fe Drive during the Christmas season one year. The fog was so thick that the road was invisible from the front seat of our VW Microbus. He lived out on Arboleda Drive near Le Grand Road.

Years before, my father had wrecked a 1937 Pierce-Arrow taking Gleason’s sister Marlene home and had gone off highway 99 near Le Grand road in heavy fog. Neither were seriously injured, but I knew better than to get out on the highway. Too many drivers don’t understand the illusion of slowness in deep fog and speed up to make the scenery move faster outside. 

We decided to follow highway 140 east to Arboleda Drive, since nobody was driving on that road to Yosemite at midnight. I was following the white line out my open window, and Gleason was watching the edge of the road on his side. I don’t think we ever went faster than 15 miles an hour.

When the center line stopped as we got to Tuttle, where the turn was, I stopped and Gleason got out and walked in front and guided me around the right turn onto Arboleda Drive until I got lined up on the new southbound center line. We stopped at the railroad tracks there and listened for a bit with both windows still open to make sure no trains were approaching the crossing.

We arrived at Gleason’s home safely, and both got a stern chewing out from his mother for attempting the drive on a night like this. I don’t remember how I drove back to my home, so it’s likely she made me stay until morning when the fog lifted. 

A few years later, Gleason was driving into Merced on Highway 99 in the fog. I think it was early in the morning with some sunlight filtering through the fog when he was run off the road by two trucks side by side going much faster than he was. 

He steered into the oleander bushes in the median and encountered a row of concrete pylons with a cable on top. He survived, but the 1959 Plymouth didn’t. The whole drive line from engine, transmission and rear axle were destroyed.

It’s possible that the truck drivers were above the top of the fog layers, which often stratify in weird, sharp layers. 

My father told me a story about being at the airport one morning waiting for the fog to burn off so he could go flying, and discovering that if he bent over he could see for miles, but if he stood up, he was in the soup. In aviation weather terms, there was a solid overcast with a ceiling at four feet.

I have lived in many different states since I was born and raised in Merced,   but nowhere have I ever seen tule fog like that in the Central Valley of California.