History of Cold Seasons by Joshua Harmon

Author:Joshua Harmon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History of cold seasons
ISBN: 9781936873432
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2014-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER

THE LIGHTHOUSE. Rising from the end of a narrow, rocky peninsula, the lighthouse commands a wide view of the ocean and the channel leading into the bay. It is constructed of interlocking granite blocks—designed to withstand high winds and surf—and rises four stories from the bluffs. Atop the tower, the lantern gallery houses the whale-oil-powered Fresnel lens shipped from France, which refracts the lamplight with a thousand pieces of glass. This lighthouse, unlike many, is square rather than round. On each story one window opens on a different direction, and these different views, the lighthouse keeper often thinks, give each room a unique character. The ground-level window looks north, toward land; the second-story window faces west, across the bay and the blinking lights of the channel markers, the ringing bells of the buoys; and the third- and fourth-story windows face south and east, toward the open waters of the ocean, from which ships arrive to navigate the dangerous shoals outside the channel’s mouth, and into which these same ships, loaded or unloaded, soon disappear, quickly becoming dark blurs on the waves to anyone watching their progress.

THE ORIGINAL LIGHTHOUSE. Few people now recall, or are old enough to recall the stories about it passed down by grandfathers until the children stopped listening, the original lighthouse which once stood where the current lighthouse now stands. Built before the Revolution, it was made of wood and burned to the ground several years later. Another, second lighthouse may have stood between the time the wooden lighthouse burned and the time the present lighthouse was erected, but if so, no one remembers it except as a rumor—their memories and the old stories fixed instead on the fire, the beacon visible all night along the coast.

A ROMANTIC. The lighthouse keeper is, of course, a romantic: watching every day the roll of wave against rock, the drifting fogs, the endless gray sea. Standing in the glass-enclosed lantern gallery on the top of the lighthouse, he thinks of the eroding land, the action of the sea to reclaim what once came from it. On this coast, he knows every cove, every outcropping, yet the coast will change many times even during his own life.

BEACHCOMBING. Many sorts of objects wash ashore—dashed on the rocks below the lighthouse, entangled in the dune grass and birds’ nests of the saltmarsh, abandoned on the beaches by receding tides. After a storm, driftwood and other oddments litter the sand. A pedestrian striding along the dunes may sometimes notice a figure on the flats, clad in shapeless garments, gathering whatever the seas have given. A bottle, turned opaque from years in the water, may have drifted from a wharf in Portugal or been tossed overboard from a ship in the middle of the Atlantic; or the bottle may have contained lemonade or ginger beer, handed to a careless child by one of the pushcart vendors who sell lunch to the summer crowds at the nearby beach.

POLITICS. The position of lighthouse keeper is politically appointed, though the lighthouse keeper forgets this at times.

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