to Dungeness about an hour before a November midnight and met a specter.
The bosunâs mate in charge at the lighthouse had phoned that he would drive in to meet us on the coastal bluff overlooking the Spit. He wavered now out of the blackness like a drunken genie, clasping a hand to half of his forehead and announcing thickly that we had to hurry to keep the tide.
Wait a minute, we said. What exactly had gone wrong with his head?
Groggy but full of duty, he recited that when he judged the time had come to drive in above the tide, he traveled fast. Racing through a bank of spume, his four-wheel-drive vehicle bounded over a log the way a foxhunterâs horse takes a hedge, and when man and machine plunged to sand again, his forehead clouted the windshield.
With woozy determination our would-be chauffeur repeated that we would lose the tide if we did not hurry. I looked at Carol, some decision happened between us, and we clambered into the four-wheel-drive.
Headlights feeling out the thin route between driftwood debris and crashing waves, our Coast Guardsman ducked us through cloud upon cloud of spume sailing thigh-deep on the beach. That spindrift journey was like being seated in a small plane slicing among puffy overcast. From that night I have the sense of what the early pilots must have felt, Saint-Exuperyâs blinded men aloft with the night mail above Patagonia, avid for âeven the flicker of an inn lamp.â We had our ray of light, leading us with tireless reliable winks, but even it could not see into our foaming route for us.
At last at the lighthouse, with the engine cut, no next encounter between four-wheel-drive and fat driftlog having been ordained, the Fresnel lens wheeling its spokes of light above our heads: we breathed out and climbed down to the Dungeness sand for our weekend stay.
Two moments stand in my memory from that next day at the tip of Dungeness Spit. The first was seeing the lens itself, coming onto the fact of its art here on a scanty ledge of sand and upcast wood. What I had expected perhaps was something like a titanic spotlight, some modern metallic capsule of unfathomable power: not a seventy-five-year-old concoction of magnifying prisms, worked by the French artisans to angles as precise and acute as those of cut-glass goblets, which employed a single thousand-watt bulb and stretched its glow across nearly twenty miles. The magnifying power from this small cabinet of glass was as pleasantly astounding as Swellâs explanation of the aurora borealis glinting up from Eskimo campfires.
The second memory is of the mustached bosunâs mate himself. With what pride he showed off his domain of Dungeness, not only the artful glass casing at the top of the lighthouse but the radio beacon apparatus and the foghorn and even the flagpole with a red storm-warning flag bucking madly at the top. âThe wind wears out about ten flags a winter,â he said to impress us, and did.
Lighthouse life dimmed a bit when he escorted us in to talk with his wife and the wife of the young petty officer on duty with him. Both proved to be edgy about the strand-of-sand way of existence. Mrs. Bosunâs Mate calculated to when their oldest child would start school, which would loft the family away to land duty: âI WANT to move inland.â Until that could happen she was forbidding the children to leave the fenced yard around the quarters because they might injure themselves in the driftwood. The petty officerâs recent bride, dwelling in the building attached to the base of the lighthouse tower itself, was disconcerted to have in her living room one huge round wall which emitted a night-long beamish hum.
The bosunâs mate heard them out, evidently not for the first time, then led the pair of us off to see any further feature of lighthouse keeping he could think of. The day, blown pure by last nightâs wind, had its own magnifying clarity. Mountains rose in white shards
The bosunâs mate in charge at the lighthouse had phoned that he would drive in to meet us on the coastal bluff overlooking the Spit. He wavered now out of the blackness like a drunken genie, clasping a hand to half of his forehead and announcing thickly that we had to hurry to keep the tide.
Wait a minute, we said. What exactly had gone wrong with his head?
Groggy but full of duty, he recited that when he judged the time had come to drive in above the tide, he traveled fast. Racing through a bank of spume, his four-wheel-drive vehicle bounded over a log the way a foxhunterâs horse takes a hedge, and when man and machine plunged to sand again, his forehead clouted the windshield.
With woozy determination our would-be chauffeur repeated that we would lose the tide if we did not hurry. I looked at Carol, some decision happened between us, and we clambered into the four-wheel-drive.
Headlights feeling out the thin route between driftwood debris and crashing waves, our Coast Guardsman ducked us through cloud upon cloud of spume sailing thigh-deep on the beach. That spindrift journey was like being seated in a small plane slicing among puffy overcast. From that night I have the sense of what the early pilots must have felt, Saint-Exuperyâs blinded men aloft with the night mail above Patagonia, avid for âeven the flicker of an inn lamp.â We had our ray of light, leading us with tireless reliable winks, but even it could not see into our foaming route for us.
At last at the lighthouse, with the engine cut, no next encounter between four-wheel-drive and fat driftlog having been ordained, the Fresnel lens wheeling its spokes of light above our heads: we breathed out and climbed down to the Dungeness sand for our weekend stay.
Two moments stand in my memory from that next day at the tip of Dungeness Spit. The first was seeing the lens itself, coming onto the fact of its art here on a scanty ledge of sand and upcast wood. What I had expected perhaps was something like a titanic spotlight, some modern metallic capsule of unfathomable power: not a seventy-five-year-old concoction of magnifying prisms, worked by the French artisans to angles as precise and acute as those of cut-glass goblets, which employed a single thousand-watt bulb and stretched its glow across nearly twenty miles. The magnifying power from this small cabinet of glass was as pleasantly astounding as Swellâs explanation of the aurora borealis glinting up from Eskimo campfires.
The second memory is of the mustached bosunâs mate himself. With what pride he showed off his domain of Dungeness, not only the artful glass casing at the top of the lighthouse but the radio beacon apparatus and the foghorn and even the flagpole with a red storm-warning flag bucking madly at the top. âThe wind wears out about ten flags a winter,â he said to impress us, and did.
Lighthouse life dimmed a bit when he escorted us in to talk with his wife and the wife of the young petty officer on duty with him. Both proved to be edgy about the strand-of-sand way of existence. Mrs. Bosunâs Mate calculated to when their oldest child would start school, which would loft the family away to land duty: âI WANT to move inland.â Until that could happen she was forbidding the children to leave the fenced yard around the quarters because they might injure themselves in the driftwood. The petty officerâs recent bride, dwelling in the building attached to the base of the lighthouse tower itself, was disconcerted to have in her living room one huge round wall which emitted a night-long beamish hum.
The bosunâs mate heard them out, evidently not for the first time, then led the pair of us off to see any further feature of lighthouse keeping he could think of. The day, blown pure by last nightâs wind, had its own magnifying clarity. Mountains rose in white shards
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