Ship's Bridge on My Balcony

By Pat Gibson (1986)

Here above Sulfur Creek we have a view that goes for miles out across the hills. We built our house to take advantage of that view and put a balcony all the way across the back of the house. From the balcony, you can look down to the banks of Barton Creek. Some mornings, especially in the fall, you can see wisps of what at first looks like smoke begin to curl in about the trees. In fact, the first few mornings I noticed it, I was afraid that we had a fire down along the creek.

The sycamores grow out on the sandbars in the creek. Cedars cover the hills and a few walnuts and other large trees keep the banks from washing away. As the morning sum rises in the east, the upper air above the creek will be heated. The difference in temperature causes the water to condense in the valley and the fog begins to build up the trees and cover the canyon with a soft, gray blanket. The fog will sometimes spill over into the meadows along the creek, but most of the time it just drifts to the top of the trees. Some mornings it just hovers over the tops of the trees as if the valley had been packed in cotton batting for shipment. You could almost expect to see a giant hand pick it up as if it were a piece of a model train set panorama. On the warmer mornings the fog will linger for a short time but as the sun warms the air, it disappears.

If the morning is cool enough or the sun slides behind a cloud, the fog will linger. It builds up the sides of the hills until my balcony looks out on to clouds as if I were poised on the bridge of a ship at sea. The gray of the clouds will blend with the pearly gray of the fog to present an empty canvas for your imagination. You wait for the deep bass note of a fog horn and hear instead the clatter of a roadrunner or the fuss of the blue jay. The image of a San Francisco or Galveston Bay quickly disperses as the common calls of Texas wild and domestic life carry to you through the mist. If you watch closely, as the sun begins to burn away the fog, the rays of the sun make the fog glow like the inside of a sea shell. A fall, foggy morning makes me want to curl up by the window with a cup of tea and enjoy the view, but not on the balcony, it just too cold.

The roadrunner doesn't seem to mind the cold. He is here all year round with his castanet call, but that's another story.