Cleo walked out of the Faith Harvest parking lot Sunday night dressed as a strawberry, holding a Tootsie Roll, and breathing like a 60-year-old roofer. I bent down to ask her if she had fun and she said “yes” in the voice of a man who has just finished a 12-hour shift at a tire plant. That is when I started smelling the parking lot.
The whole lot was inside a cloud. A low, sweet, weirdly wet cloud, the kind that clings to your jeans and stays there. I followed it back to its source, which was a black plastic box on a folding table next to the youth pastor’s Yukon, plugged into a 50-foot orange extension cord that ran into the fellowship hall. On the table next to it was a gallon jug labeled FOG JUICE in a font I would describe as Spirit Halloween cursive.
I picked up the jug and read the back, because of course I read the back. The first ingredient was propylene glycol. The second ingredient was “deionized water,” which is just water they have already removed from itself for some reason. I want to be very clear about what propylene glycol is, because the youth pastor was not clear about it. Propylene glycol is in antifreeze. You can look this up. They put it in the kind of antifreeze you are allowed to spill, but it is still in antifreeze, and our children were inhaling a hot mist of it for forty minutes between the bouncy house and the cake walk.
I texted Tess, my sister-in-law who works the front desk at the pediatric office and has watched enough nebulizer treatments to basically be a respiratory therapist, and she said, and I quote, “Brooke that is a lung event.” She said the lining of a five-year-old’s airway is the thickness of a wet Kleenex and we are out here aerosolizing car fluid at it for fun. She said she sees three croup cases a week in October and she has stopped pretending she does not know why.
I posted in Mountain Mamas Against Mystery Mist (it used to be a babywearing group, the pivot happened in August) and within twenty minutes I had 41 comments and a screenshot from a Telegram channel a woman in Weaverville follows where a former theater tech explains that fog juice is rated for adult lungs at a venue with a ventilation system, not for a Methodist parking lot in a windless cul-de-sac while toddlers eat Smarties at knee height. He called it “theatrical,” not “safe.” Those are two different words.
I asked the youth pastor where he got the machine and he said Amazon, fourteen dollars, free returns, and that the jug was four dollars and you could refill it at Guitar Center. I asked if he had read the SDS sheet and he said, “the what,” cheerfully, while a kindergartener walked past us coughing into a Buzz Lightyear bucket. He is a lovely man. He coaches my nephew. He should not be allowed to operate a vapor.
Marlene, naturally, has been complaining about the fog machine since 2019. Marlene runs her own decorations on dry ice in a rented punch bowl and a small humidifier she fills with distilled water and a sprig of rosemary, and her trunk smells like a haunted bakery and the children come out of it with pink cheeks instead of barking like seals. She has been telling the festival committee this for six years. They keep telling her dry ice is “a liability.” Glycol vapor in a child’s bronchi is, apparently, not.
I am bringing my own fog this Friday. I have a stainless kettle, a long extension cord, a bundle of rosemary from the garden, two cinnamon sticks, and one star anise pod, and I am going to set it on a hot plate next to my trunk and let it steam clean the entire end of the row. It will smell like a real October instead of like a 1997 Camry. Cleo can be a strawberry without becoming a smoker. That is the bare minimum a harvest festival owes us.
If the youth pastor wants the jug back, it is in my recycling, capped, with a Post-it on it that says “this is not for children,” which is a sentence I should not have had to write on a Sunday.