“Meeting in the Fog” was a proposed sculptural work to be installed by the Crocker Gate trailhead at San Bruno Mountain. The accompanying poem was an immediate response and reflection to interviews with family members. The photographic collages take pictures from my family’s albums and impose them on scenes from the mountain, the foggy bay, and local flora. The arrangement of text for the sculpture later became an element of my “Why Do You Think Daly City is So Foggy?” zine while the poem would inform my later writings.

In addition to the family interviews, the poetry emerged from a community survey that we sent out during Test Plot events. Alongside utilitarian questions like, “Where do you live?” and “Is this your first time at San Bruno Mountain?” we asked more abstract questions like, “What comes to mind when you think of eucalyptus?”, and naturally: “Why do you think Daly City is so foggy?”

The answers were varied; some answering sincerely with thoughtful summations of meteorological phenomena, and others were funny (the answer was often simply “Karl”). I took the answers to some of these specific questions and wove them together into a poem that I initially proposed to be written out as a sculptural installation on the fence by the Crocker Gate trailhead.