The Edge of the Earth

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For Ben and Nicky

and in memory of Margaret Meyer, who walked on her own feet,

and Scout

Jane

1977

I
’M NOT GOING
to let on I was born here. People always ask what it was like to grow up in a lighthouse, and then they’re disappointed by the answer. I’m not much of a storyteller. Anyway, growing up in a lighthouse isn’t all that remarkable when you don’t know anything different, and I didn’t know anything different until I left Point Lucia at nineteen.

Which was in 1912. And I haven’t been back since. Not that I wouldn’t have been glad to visit, but it was a lot of trouble back then, back before Route 1 came through. I allowed the usual preoccupations—studying and teaching, marriage and children—to chivvy me on, away from the place of my childhood.

I wish that my grandson Danny and I could be climbing the morro alone now, without this straggling handful of tourists who, in their very charmlessness, remind me that Mrs. Swann is no longer at the top.

∗ ∗ ∗

I remember the day she came to us from the sea. The mountains behind us were too tall and squeezed together to let anyone through, but the ocean before and below us was like a carpet and ships slid past on it every day, some with big white sails stretching out in the wind, some puffing steam like a whale’s spout.

My father was chief keeper, but Point Lucia was important enough to need three, and red-faced Mr. Finnegan went to Cuba to kill the Butcher, so we were getting someone new. We children hoped he would bring along more of our kind.

My brothers were first to see the tender, and then we all shouted, “The Madrone! The Madrone!” and ran to the edge of the morro.

“Stand back, Jane!” My sister took my hand, but I knew better than to fall off a mountain, so I snatched my fingers away and stood where, straight below, the milky foam spilled around the black rocks.

The wind was blowing hard enough to lean on, and sometimes when the waves were that big, the tender would anchor and wait for better weather, so we were prepared for disappointment. Soon enough, though, the longboat full of barrels was dropped into the ocean. It was always a nervous thing, watching a longboat come in. Plenty of times it would swamp, and we would have to do without flour or sugar or library books or Christmas oranges.

We couldn’t be certain until they’d rowed in a ways that the creature with a hat tied around her head was a lady. Childishly expecting Mrs. Swann to be a large white bird with the neck of an eel, like the letter “S” in my alphabet book, I was a bit let down. My father came with the spyglass and held it for each of us in turn. The woman’s face was covered with a cloth.

“She must be very ugly,” one of my brothers whispered.

∗ ∗ ∗

Gertrude Swann. Danny—I suppose I should call him Dan now, but grandmothers are forgiven these lapses—had come across her name in a book assigned for one of his courses down in San Diego. Did I know, he asked when he phoned, that an early marine biologist had lived and worked at Point Lucia? A woman who studied the tide pools.

Of course I knew. I’d introduced her to her first anemone. Or at least one of my brothers or my sister had. Danny was impressed that my world might, after all, have a snippet of relevance to his. Infuriating, obviously, but I take what I can get. Riding high on our moment of connection, I told him I’d read that the lighthouse was open to visitors; maybe the two of us should go and see it.

I meant only, I think, to talk and plan with Danny; I didn’t believe such an outing would actually come to pass. But up to San Jose he came, driving his little Japanese box with its back window stuck halfway down, his shaggy blond head nearly touching the roof. I treated him to crepes at Rosemary and Tim and grilled him about college life and so on, and this morning we got up early and here we are, in a place unsullied by the current cultural detritus.

“Actually, there were a few other female lighthouse keepers in those days.” The volunteer guide is responding to a question from a wide-shouldered woman in an olive-green anorak who has clearly done some, if not much, homework. The guide tells about Charlotte Layton, who stayed on as keeper at Point Pinos after her husband was shot by a bandit, and fashionable Emily Fish, who kept racehorses and painted china. “And often,” the docent goes on, “wives served informally as keepers. The lighthouse service encouraged men to bring their families, because the women and children would work as assistants—unpaid, of course.” Even now, in 1977, the ladies in our group nod and pull their mouths into bitter little smiles, acknowledging the obvious truth.

The docent stops walking. She’s a retiree in knit trousers, her hair an unnatural shade of apricot beneath the rubberized hood of the raincoat on which the drizzle is beading. “Are you doing okay?” she asks me in the high tone reserved for children, pets, and the elderly, although it’s really she who needs to catch her breath, what with all the talking.

It’s a steep, very long climb to the top of the morro on which the lighthouse and its attendant buildings stand, along a narrow road that girdles the rock and was cut long after my time here. The volunteer, Linda or Lydia—I couldn’t quite make it out—tried to discourage me at the bottom. Not wanting a heart attack on her hands, no doubt. It’s true that I’m wizened as an apple doll—no point trying to deny my age, now that I’ve confessed actual dates—but, still, I’m a walker. I can go miles if I pace myself. Besides, I used to scramble up this mountain on all fours; I could do it again, if need be.

The drizzle has stopped. I look west over the ocean, an old habit, and am rewarded with a pale sheen in the sky. In an hour or so, before we start down again, I know it will be clear.

Our little group is breaking apart. Two sullen teenagers and their parents, intent on getting the climb over with, have taken the lead. Behind them, a little boy drifts, drawn by the sight of the waves tirelessly hurling themselves against the black rocks far below, and his young mother yanks him back, though he’s nowhere near falling. We children spent a lot of time lying on our stomachs looking over the edge or standing with our toes jutting into the air. I don’t believe we were foolhardy. We knew what was possible and what was unreasonably dangerous. I suppose that at any time the ground might have slid out from under us, but in fact, there was very little erosion. A morro is, after all, made of the hard stuff that remains after the softer rock falls away.

A thin-haired man and his brassy wife are arguing over who left the camera in the car. Now the anorak woman is asking more questions about the lady lighthouse keeper here at Point Lucia. The lady lighthouse keeper! As if she were a talking horse!

“She was from Minnesota,” Linda—or Lydia—answers.

“Wisconsin,” I whisper to Danny.

The child begs to be carried. The docent calls ahead to the teenagers, her voice shrill with anxiety. “Please stay together, everyone!” Thin Hair and Brassy are avoiding each other’s eyes.

Danny spots a pod of dolphins surprisingly close to the shore, which gives us all a lift, pulls us forward another thirty yards. Someone asks how far out the light can be seen.

To keep our minds off the work of the climb, the docent tells us about shipwrecks: some boats foundered because the captain was drunk; some were smashed in storms or ran aground in fog; but most went down simply because people made mistakes and steered directly into what they should have avoided. All manner of goods were lost—beer and barley, paint and salt, lumber and butter and chrome—although in most cases, the crew survived. She tells one especially sad story that I remember hearing from my mother about a lighthouse keeper whose skiff overturned after he’d collected pay for himself and his men from the tender. He drowned because the gold in his pockets weighed him down. That’s why my father was never paid in cash.

Finally, we reach the light. We’re not yet at the top. The light had to be placed about a third of the way down, or it would have been smothered too often in the fog that settles around the summit. It’s impossible, now that the sky has cleared, to imagine the kind of dense fog that’s inevitable here, fog that hovers so close it blurs your vision and makes you lose perspective. Even I can hardly recall that kind of fog when the sun is shining.

The light tower itself isn’t the tall, graceful cylinder one might expect in a place of such grandeur but, rather, a squat, four-cornered, medieval castle–like structure of heavy gray stone. It’s even shorter than I remember. Otherwise, from the outside, it’s remained essentially unchanged in seventy-odd years (while I have suffered the usual ravages). Inside the base, where the boiler once roared and hissed, it’s quiet as a crypt. And vacant.

When I was a girl, that space was a sort of clubhouse, a game of solitaire and some piece of greasy machinery to be tinkered with on the table; the all-important keeper’s log and a cup of yellow pencils on a shelf, along with a book or two, including one called Flags of Many Lands from which we liked to choose our favorites; the big black toolbox, full of useful devices we were not allowed to borrow, in its special spot at the foot of the stairs, beside the basket of mending with which the women passed the time. All of that has been cleared away. Then it smelled of pipe tobacco, kerosene, oil, and woodsmoke; now it smells only of stone.

Linda summons us to the winding staircase at the back, and we march up single file. I find myself gripping the metal banister as I did when I was five, afraid to put my faith in my feet. At the top, we pack into the small platform that extends between the light and the windows, the lamproom. We’re expected to marvel at the lens—an enormous scalloped jewel—and Thin Hair obliges. The men generally are gung ho about the mechanical details. But I’m impatient. I resent that we can’t move about as we please. The light, marvel of nineteenth-century scientific achievement and my family’s bread and butter, was serious business and therefore not the scene of my childhood. It’s not what I’ve come here to see.

There are bullet holes in nearly all of the windows.

“Vandals,” Linda explains.

I imagine them trudging up here, going so far out of their way to casually destroy whatever strikes their fancy. There’s modern life for you. It’s true that in my day, we had our share of broken windows, though at least there was nothing casual about that destruction.

What is this? We’ve been shunted onto the catwalk outside to observe the view, but it’s the exterior wall that grabs my attention. It’s covered in a mosaic of stones, and abalone, mussel, and periwinkle shells. Here is the dried husk of a sea star. And here a bit of a sea urchin’s shell. Here is the carapace of a crab. I touch the pieces, imagining her deft fingers pushing them into the soft cement, for I need no docent to tell me who’s constructed this mermaid’s castle.

Finally, we’re trailing along the path on which I walked and ran every day for sixteen years. The surface is different—asphalt instead of rocky dirt—but the vistas are so much the same that I might be a girl again, my pinafore whipping in the wind. We shuffle through the workshop with its drill press and saws and whetstone—all manner of tools neatly organized—and pass the small barn where my family kept a cow and a few chickens, presumably empty now, and come at last to the big stone triplex where the keepers lived. As of three years ago, when electricity finally came to this remote outpost, no one need live in this building again.

“Most of Gertrude Swann’s collections were scattered when she died,” Linda says, wiggling her key in the lock, “but we’ve found a few of her things and a copy of the catalog she compiled.”

We step inside, and I experience that disorienting feeling inevitable when you revisit after a long absence a place that was once as familiar as your skin. The few furnishings—a modern sofa in the parlor, a kitchen obviously outfitted in the fifties—are all wrong, but the big windows and wide window ledges are the same, and the narrow floorboards haven’t been carpeted. Artfully arranged on a table in the parlor are some dried urchin shells—she did much of her work with urchins—and a few pretty curio slides she made with a bubble of glass and fancy paper. “Amusements,” she called them, a little sheepishly, for they were not of scientific value. One contains a tiny starfish, another a curl of delicate seaweed.

“Eeew! There’s hair in these!” one of the teenagers says.

It’s my hair, my old, true color, and that of my brothers and sister. She cut the strands for keepsakes as, one by one, we moved away from Point Lucia. I was the youngest, the last to go.

A copy of her catalog is opened to a page devoted to kelp. “Among the rippling kelp lived a family of otters,” I can hear her saying, for she was my first teacher and a storyteller, and I was an eager listener.

“She was pretty strange and secretive,” Linda says. “She insisted on living alone after the original keeper and his wife retired, even though the station was meant to be operated by three keepers. The machinery was less labor-intensive by that time.”

“I read that a kind of Loch Ness monster killed her husband.” It’s Anorak again.

I can see Danny, young scientist that he is, turning away to hide a smile at such a fantasy. Several others, however, who no doubt were beginning to think about the Bloody Marys they would order at Nepenthe or the comic books they’d left on the seat of the car, perk up.

“People think that it may have been a shark or an orca,” Linda says. “Back then they didn’t know what we do.”

Such condescension toward the past is to be expected, but I know better.

After Mrs. Swann died, my siblings and I discovered that she’d willed things to us. Mary got the collections of slides and specimens—they’re mine now; and Edward was to have her scientific instruments—he’d predeceased her, although she didn’t know it—those are mine, too; Nicholas got the original hand-inked catalog; and I got a manuscript.

At the top of the first page, in the handwriting I knew as well as my own, she’d written a note:

My dearest Jane,

I wrote this some time ago, and I’d like for you to have it. I hope it will interest you—you, of all the Crawley children, are the most intimately involved in this story. As I come to the end of my life, I suddenly find that I want someone to know how she lived.