On Lighthouses by Jazmina Barrera

Author:Jazmina Barrera [Barrera, Jazmina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781949641028
Publisher: Two Lines Press
Published: 2020-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

40° 46’ 22” N 73° 56’ 24.6” W

Blackwell Lighthouse. Cylindrical, octagonal, unpainted gneiss rock tower, 15 meters tall. Inactive since 1940. Ornamented light.

Blackwell

For the first time, I decided to go to a lighthouse on my own—to the Blackwell Lighthouse on Roosevelt Island. I took the subway to Queens and then a bus across the bridge. The bus was only half full and the few passengers there were gradually got off until I was left sitting alone in the back. I always make the mistake of doing my research after the journey, when it’s too late: I had no idea that, from the nineteenth century up to the present date, the island has accommodated prisons, hospitals, and a psychiatric facility. So when the bus dropped me at one end of the island and I found myself surrounded by elderly people in wheelchairs I didn’t know what to think. One of these people, with a badly bruised arm, gave me a kindly smile. It was a fall day, the air was clear, the sun mild, and the wind icy. I walked along the shoreline until I came to the overgrown park on the northern tip, where there were a number of geese and seagulls, plus men and women in electric wheelchairs moving slowly along the paths or sitting in the sun. The river is choppy in this stretch: the swell rises suddenly and waves break on the rocks. Constructed in 1872, the Blackwell Lighthouse (I love the idea of a lighthouse as a dark well) is small and gray. It is made from blocks of gneiss, a rock similar to granite, quarried on the island itself. The architectural style is known as Gothic Revival: a classical octagonal column with a base, shaft, and capital; leaf decoration just below the observation platform, and an octagonal light whose roof is covered in guano. During the whole time I was there, a lighthouse gull was perched there, keeping watch.

In the sky, a plane seemed to merge with a flock of seabirds; on land, the lighthouse merged with the skyscrapers and smokestacks across the river.

Roosevelt is the island of the island, the stronghold of the excluded: lunatics, the sick, criminals, and lighthouse keepers. It’s said that one of the inmates of the asylum built a fortress near his residence because he feared a British invasion. The legend goes that this man also constructed the lighthouse and had the following inscribed on a stone at its base:

THIS IS THE WORK

WAS DONE BY

JOHN MCCARTHY

WHO BUILT THE LIGHT

HOUSE FROM THE BOTTOM TO THE

TOP ALL YE WHO DO PASS BY MAY

PRAY FOR HIS SOUL WHEN HE DIES

Roosevelt Island is a satellite, attracted by the centrifugal force that is Manhattan. The residents of the Lunatic Asylum, as it was called, shared the nocturnal terrain of madness with the lighthouse keepers. As a contrast to the physical barriers that kept those marginalized people in check, I imagined the lighthouse shining through the darkness, and for the first time it seemed to me a signal asking for help rather than offering it.

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