Howdy folks. Glen Blamstead here. I tried to catch some fog last week. I mist.
I know. I heard it too. I said it out loud in the shop on Tuesday morning and Tanner looked at me the way a border collie looks at a sheep that is walking the wrong direction on purpose. Kind of tilted his head. Waited to see if I was going to explain myself. I did not. There is nothing to explain. The pun stands on its own two feet.
Anyway, there was fog. Real, honest, Minnesota August fog, the kind that rolls in off the Snake River overnight when the daytime hits the low seventies and the ground has been giving off warmth all summer. You drive out of Mora at half past six and the whole county looks like a bowl of soup that somebody stirred with a two-by-four. You cannot see the mailbox until you are past it. You cannot see the neighbor's cows until they moo at you personally.
I like fog. It reminds me that the world is not obligated to hold still and let you look at it. Some mornings, God pulls a blanket up over the whole thing and says, take a day off, Glen, you have looked at that same tree line for sixty years.
The problem with fog, if you are a builder, is that customers still expect you to show up. Fog does not appear in the contract. Fog is not an act of God per the state of Minnesota, apparently, only an inconvenience of atmosphere. So Tuesday morning we loaded the trucks anyway and headed east toward a barndominium job outside Ogilvie, and I could not see the front of my own truck until I was sitting in it.
The Fog Also Had Opinions
When we got to the site, fog was the boss. You could not sight down a post. You could not see the truss you were supposed to lift up to. You could barely see the crew member on the other end of a twenty-foot board. Tanner suggested we call it off for an hour and drink coffee, which was the smartest thing anybody had said that morning. So we sat on the tailgate of the pickup and watched the world be gray.
The customer came out with a thermos and three cups. He is a good man, Tim, who has now been reading about post-frame construction for so long that he uses the word "purlin" more than he uses the word "please." He asked what the delay was. I said, Tim, we cannot see the building. He looked at the building, then at the fog, then at me, and said, oh. Then he sat down on the tailgate with us and drank coffee. He is coming along.
There is a specific quiet you get on a Minnesota morning inside a fog. Sound goes soft. Birds are more of a rumor than a fact. Every so often a car goes by out on the highway and it sounds like it is underwater. If you are the kind of person who normally struggles to sit still, fog fixes you. Everybody stops. Everybody drinks coffee. Everybody reflects. For about forty minutes I was practically a monk.
Then the sun came up over the tree line and the fog burned off in about six minutes flat, and I went from monk back to builder like flipping a switch. That is the other thing about fog. It never lasts. Which is good, because I do not have the temperament for permanent enlightenment.
The Dog Was Fine With It
I brought the auction dog with me because my wife had two people coming to look at a table on Facebook Marketplace and did not want the dog charging out to greet them as if she owned the property, which technically she does but she should not be so obvious about it. The dog handled the fog beautifully. She sat in the passenger seat and stared into the gray and looked like she was seeing something profound. She was not. She was watching a moth. But she looked profound doing it, and I appreciated the performance.
The crew set up around ten once we could actually see the corners of the building, and we got a good half-day of work in. Fog does not owe you a day. Sometimes it takes one and gives you back an hour or two. You take what the weather gives you and you send the customer a text if you are running late and you make sure the crew is warm and caffeinated. That is about the whole trick.
The pun, though. I am telling you. I tried to catch some fog last week. I mist. It is not a great pun. It is a competent pun. It is the pun equivalent of a screw that will hold but that you would not brag about at a family reunion. I said it three times that day to three different people and got a chuckle, a groan, and one long silent stare. I count all three as wins.
If you are out our way in Kanabec or Pine or Aitkin county and you see something moving in the fog that might be a mailbox or might be a person, give it a small wave anyway. Odds are it is one or the other and you cannot really lose. And if you need a hand thinking through a pole barn or a barndominium, stop by Sherman or holler at us. Just call ahead. Some mornings we cannot see the front of the shop until nine.
