The fog that feeds a desert
Nothing has rained here in a decade, and yet it is full of life. The answer arrives at four every morning, off the sea.
Nothing has rained here in a decade. The riverbeds are dry to the depth of a spade, the rock is bare, and the plants living on it have given up on water from the sky entirely.
What arrives instead is fog. It comes off the cold current before dawn, lies along the dune faces for three or four hours, and burns off by nine. That is the whole water budget.
The beetles stand on their heads to drink it. The lichen swells and turns green for an hour a day. Our guide has walked this line for fourteen years and still gets up at four to watch it happen.
We time the second morning of the desert week for it. Nobody has ever complained about the alarm.