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The wet air curls against me as I sit in the boat without seeing through the fog. I’m without my bearings, lost between the elements of air and water. It happens this way, that sometimes, when a person sits on a boat surrounded by water and fog so thick, so deep, there is a dizziness.

It seems the boat has turned over and is rising, moving upward through sky like a vanishing cloud. Or it descends to new depths in the world beneath, as if to fall into underground rivers and be carried away.

Without her bearings this person loses her place in the world. She must sit still, without panic, and wait for a glimpse of something to emerge from the fog. Maybe there will be a clearing through which a tree branch is seen, or a shard of blue sky…. Or it might be a wading bird that appears out of the thick whiteness, and since its feet touch bottom, you can tell which way is up, which is down. You can tell where gravity lives. Then, only then, can you believe there is something solid in the world.

And so I sit here in fog and air and wait for something to become visible.

Excerpted from Linda Hogan’s novel Power, published in 1998 by W. W. Norton and Company.