Preaching in the Fog

The fog stuck around most of the week. By Friday night it rendered the air fairly unbreathable, causing the back of my throat to ache and my eyes to itch. During the week I’d find myself waking up in the middle of the night clearing my throat, coughing, or blowing my nose. By Friday night the unlifting fog started having a claustrophobic weight to it: a damp heavy blanket of choking smog that seemed to hold me pinned down, leaving me lethargic and motionless.

That night I didn’t feel like cooking and neither did Sweetie. We sat in the kitchen looking out into the eerie light of the sodium vapor street lamps, thinking and wondering what might sound good for dinner. Sweetie said Le Le’s and I thought that sounded fine. Le Le’s is a little Vietnamese restaurant that makes a great bowl of Pho’, just the sort of soup to chase away the damp chill of a foggy northwest night.

Sweetie called it in and I went to get it. Though it was only six o’clock, the streets on and around M. L. King Jr. Way were empty, seeming to linger in that space between the day’s shoppers and the night’s partiers. I didn’t hear it until I was leaving with my containers of soup wrapped up in their little plastic bags: until I was standing on the empty street looking for my keys while trying to keep the styrofoam containers upright.

Someone was preaching. Someone who seemed far away in a church or storefront, the sound spilling out into the dense fog and rumbling down the street to where I was standing.

I wanted to find where the sound was coming from. I got in the car and drove slowly east with my window down, head tilted into the night to make sure I didn’t drive past it without knowing. Then right before 15th St. South I saw them. In an abandoned lot, lit only by street lights and the adjoining storefront there stood a preacher and his small congregation. Probably no more than eight of them all together, his parishioners sitting on white plastic lawn chairs and the minister standing, half facing the street half his congregation, speaking into his small, overly taxed, public address system.

I pulled over and watched the scene for a while. In the few minutes I sat there, not one other car passed by, nor did any pedestrians. The preacher continued his sermon nonstop, punctuated by small rounds of “Amen” and “Praise the Lord” from his few heavily bundled parishioners. Steam was coming off his head and shirt, mingling with his breath and the fog so that it looked as if in his religious fervor, he might have inadvertently been the cause of this week’s weather conversion.

There was something inviting in his passion and in the seeming futility of it all. As a musician I have played to fewer people than that, used less important words and sang them less eloquently, but I have never set up in a small vacant lot on a Friday night, damming the cold and fog like torpedoes and full speed ahead. For a moment I almost wanted to believe.

I put the car in gear, turned the corner and in a blink of a fog filled eye they were gone. On a dark still night, I’m left driving down orangey half-lit streets, listening to the low rumble of the 402 and thinking about god, passion and those cheap white law chairs everyone seems to have a stack of these days.