The Fog Opened

My grandson talked me into typing this up, says I tell it better out loud but he wants it written down before I forget the details, so here goes. Been shrimping out of Charleston harbor since I was nine years old on my daddy's boat, fifty-some years on the water by now. You'd think a man would've seen everything the sea has to show him by this point. He hasn't. It was a Tuesday morning, I remember because Tuesday's when we'd run the far nets, out past the markers where the water gets that dark glass color. Fog had rolled in heavier than the forecast said it would, thick enough that I was steering more by feel than sight, the way your hands learn after enough years out there. And then the fog opened up right in front of the boat. Not lifted. Opened, like somebody pulled a curtain back in the exact shape of the channel I needed, not an inch wider than that. I could see the markers clear as anything inside that gap, with a wall of gray pressing in on both sides of it. I cut the engine back and just sat looking at it a minute. My mate, young fella named Tre, saw the same thing, so I know it wasn't just an old man's eyes acting up, though that happens plenty these days too. Neither one of us said a word about it right then. We just ran the boat through what it gave us. I've turned that morning over more times than I can count since. Heard plenty of preachers talk about the Lord making a way where there wasn't one, always took that for sermon talk, the kind of thing you say from a pulpit and not something that actually happens to a tired man running shrimp nets. But I watched it happen with my own eyes. Not the whole sea parting, nothing that big. Just enough water for one small boat to find its way home.