The Lightkeepers (3 page)

I once spent a grueling month in Kenya—always breathless from the altitude, always hot, right down to my bones. I once spent a week photographing the blind dolphins of the Indus River. (Centuries of living in such murky water had rendered their eyes moot.) I once flew to Australia for a three-week photographic bonanza, snapping every inch and angle of the baobab trees, their improbable silhouettes, as fat and waxy as candles.

In many of these places, there has been no Dead Letter Office. There has sometimes been no postal system at all. I could not turn to the guide who had steered me out into the glimmering stream of the Indus River, pass him an envelope—addressed simply
mom
—and tell him, “Take care of this for me, would you?” I could not toss my letters into the recycling bin or the gutter, either. I would never degrade them to that extent.

Instead, I have tucked them under boulders and tree roots. I have crammed them into the chinks of brick walls. I have stapled them to telephone poles alongside posters for missing dogs and ads for music lessons. I have pinned them to the clotheslines of strangers. I have made kites out of them, letting them soar on gusty days, then releasing my hold, watching the wind carry them away.

3

Y
OU WOULD HATE
the Farallon Islands. I can tell you this in no uncertain terms. Of all the places I have traveled, this one is the wildest, the most remote. There is no respite from the howl of the wind and the pounding of the waves. Mick—the nice one—has assured me that I will become inured to the noise, but it seems more likely that I will go off the deep end first. I am chilly all the time. I go around buried beneath so many layers of clothing that I have taken on the shape of a snowman. I arrived a week ago, but time moves strangely here. It is easy to lose track of it, to lose track of oneself. I already feel as though I have been on the islands forever.

In other places I have visited, I have been able to photograph everything I needed in a month or so. But this archipelago is something else. The islets are the central stars in a galaxy of marine life. The birds and seals are the inner constellations—permanent residents who eat, mate, and raise their young on the rough-hewn granite. There are great white sharks, periodic visitors, pulled out of their mysterious orbits to linger offshore. Whales, like far-flung comets, pass by in search of krill. There are tufted puffins. Sea otters. Comb jellies. I am slated to be on the islands for a full year. I will need all that time to capture this end-of-the-world spot.

At any hour of the day, I can watch seals on the shore. I can watch birds wafting across the sky. I can watch a bank of clouds looming in the west like a new continent in the process of forming. The occasional airplane—glinting silver in the distance, an emissary from the civilized world—strikes an incongruous note.

Then there is the cabin. The kitchen sink broke on my very first night, and to my great amazement, I found myself on my knees beneath the counter, wrench in hand, following directions as Mick shone a flashlight in my eyes. The toilet cannot be flushed very often. The television has a screen so infused with static that it is basically a large, boxy radio, offering audio only. The cabin is the sort of structure in which every single board creaks audibly whenever someone passes up or down the stairs. Food, photographic equipment, and clothes have to be stored in plastic tubs to keep out the rodents, the bird lice, and the damp.

The past week has been a bit like going back in time. There is no cell tower on the islands, no Internet, no landline. There is just a radiophone, clearly marked:
For emergencies only. Mick, this means you!!!
To communicate with anyone on the mainland, I will have to write a letter. I will have to write it by hand, since the computer is iffy at best, and the printer, old and battered, is in a perpetual state of low ink, paper jams, or some sort of complex wiring dysfunction due to the damp. Once my letter has been stamped and addressed, I will have to wait for the ferry. Days will pass without any sign of it, during which everything I have written will gradually become obsolete. When Captain Joe finally turns up, he will transport my envelope to the continent, slipping it into a mailbox
for me. Apparently it can take a month or more to send a message and receive a response.

While I am on the Farallon Islands, I will have to hang on to my letters to you. I cannot in good conscience give them to Captain Joe, asking him to transport them over miles of ocean and mail them, at the cost of considerable time and effort, to no one. I can’t even bury or burn them; we do not taint the environment by putting anything into the earth, and fires are a waste of precious wood and paper. I will have to stash my letters to you under my mattress, like porn.

Most visitors choose to leave this place immediately. The ferry stops by every other week—depending on the weather—and the new arrivals usually flee like bats out of hell at the boat’s earliest reappearance. At the moment, there are six permanent residents, not including me. All of them—spearheaded by a woman called Lucy—have made a bet about how long I will last. I overheard them snickering about it. Nobody believes that I will make it a month, let alone the full year.

I
T IS
A
UGUST
, a season of wind, clouds, and great white sharks. The stretch of ocean around the Farallon Islands is called the Red Triangle. Every year, there are more shark attacks here than everywhere else on earth combined. Yesterday I went out with my camera for the first time. I brought Evildoer, my lightest and most portable instrument. I was hoping to catch one of the sharks on film.

As I walked, the shoreline shifted and broke away beneath my boots. I had been told to be careful on the grounds. I had been
told this over and over. The granite was eighty-nine million years old and rotten—if stone can be said to rot. The islands are deceptively fragile, made of rock that is not solid. There are hollow areas, crumbling patches. I crossed the stream, a filthy yellow trickle. It looked poisonous. It was poisonous. There was a system of concrete pads, funnels, and filtration hubs to collect and purify the rainwater that falls on the archipelago. Only a crazy person would drink from that brook.

In addition, there were mice everywhere. Southeast Farallon is the most rodent-dense place in the world. They are an invasive species, carried here decades ago on ships. The creatures have been flourishing ever since. They lack natural predators. The seabirds ignore them. The seals have no interest. The sharks can’t get near them. I knew the numbers before coming to the islands, but I had not really understood their full import until I stood on the gray slope and saw motion everywhere. Tiny shapes dodged and darted in my peripheral vision. The mice were rock-colored, too small and quick to track. The overall impression was of living, moving stone.

I stopped to take a picture. I was using Dutch angles in my photographs—canting the horizon, adding inclines where there were none in real life. The islands had menace in spades, but there was no harm in adding a little more. I wanted my pictures to capture the full effect: craggy stone, black water, the smell of salt, the possibility of sharks. I remembered a professor of mine, back in college, explaining the Dutch angle to me for the first time. Used for
dramatic effect. A tilt that leaves the viewer off-balance. It can convey disorientation, unease, intoxication, even madness.

I knelt, trying to frame a shot of Saddle Rock. This was a thin slice of island far offshore, jutting against the sky like a weapon. I felt a lurch underfoot. I lost my balance, reached out wildly, and turned over a rock. It was a good-sized thing, a boulder. I began to fall. The boulder began to fall with me.

People say that time slows down in moments of extreme stress. I have done a little research on the subject, and what actually happens is that memory becomes incredibly retentive. Usually the mind only holds on to images and events that are important. We remember the big things and forget the little ones. In moments of stress, however, the mind grabs on to everything. Time itself moves the way it always does, but afterward, looking back, the impression is one of photographic recall. In retrospect, we feel as though the second hand must have slowed down, as though we were able to see the surrounding world in fantastic, specific detail.

The rock flipped over. Behind it was a waterfall of brown. Mud, I thought. But no—it was mice. Dozens of them, tumbling over one another, squeaking. Their little feet groping. Whiskers quivering. A plague of rodents.

Something made contact with my elbow. I had begun the process of landing on the ground. The blow knocked the wind out of me. There was a tearing sensation. The flesh of my torso was ripping. A sharp stone. Splattered with blood. My side had been gashed open.
I could not tell how deep the cut might be. It hurt to breathe. The boulder was still rolling toward me. It struck my thigh.

Then the mice came, falling like rain. Their cold feet on my belly. A paw in my mouth. A nose in my eye. Tails slithering all over my skin.

They kept coming. Dozens, maybe hundreds. I could only imagine that I had opened the front door to some network of their tunnels and unleashed an avalanche. I could do nothing but succumb to the onslaught—scratching my skin, covering me with their filth, leaving droppings in my hair.

At last they were gone. I held still a while longer, curled tight, my hands over my head. Then I opened my eyes.

In front of me was a horrid sight. My camera lay on the ground. Dented and smashed. Shattered glass everywhere. I cried out. This hurt more than the wound in my side. Evildoer was broken beyond repair.

M
ICK STITCHED ME
up in the kitchen. It was evening, the sky darkening, the wind roaring. The others were all around me. Making dinner. Chatting about their day. Six people, slightly out of focus. They seemed unmoved by my predicament. I had lost one of my dear cameras. My thigh was purple where the boulder had struck me. I had scrapes and bruises all over. Mick was working a needle through the flesh of my torso. But the biologists seemed to take the whole thing in stride. They did not offer me sympathy. They merely handed Mick the first aid kit and went about their
business, as though blood and mouse attacks were a part of normal life.

He had given me a shot of some numbing agent. Still, I did not look down as he shoved the needle into my skin. Mick had clearly done this before. The first aid kit on the islands was as well-stocked as an emergency room. Cuts, sprains, and dislocations could be dealt with right here. No fuss, no muss. If anyone suffered a serious wound—a broken bone, a head trauma—it would, of course, require a response from outside the islands. Captain Joe. A helicopter. Nobody wanted that. It was expensive. It was time-consuming. My injury was not worthy of such extreme measures.

Mick took up a pair of tiny scissors. With a flourish, he cut the thread.

“That should heal fine,” he said.

“What if I get an infection and die?”

He smiled. He had a pair of reading glasses perched on his nose, at odds with his rugged bone structure and shock of unruly hair.

“You’ll have a scar,” he said. “But we’ve all got them here.”

“Really?” I said.

“I slashed my thigh open a few years ago. All the way open. Knee to hip. And Lucy nearly took her ear off when she fell down Lighthouse Hill. Galen and Forest have got too many to count. You should see them naked.” He whistled between his teeth. “Marks everywhere. Like a road map.”

I glanced down and realized my hands were shaking.

“Why do you all live here?” I said. “Why the hell did you come to this place?”

There was a silence. A feeling of tension. Lucy paused on her way to the kitchen. Galen, seated at the table, froze. But I persisted.

“I’m really asking,” I said. “Why did you all come here? I want to know.”

The silence intensified. Galen stood up, unnaturally tall, his head nearly brushing the ceiling. No one was looking at him. Or at me.

He turned and left the room. Mick reached into the first aid kit and removed a pad of gauze. He began taping it over my side. Then he gave me a wink.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I went out and dug a grave for my camera. I found a shovel in an old shed. I cut right into the granite, the stone giving way before my blade. I laid Evildoer in the hole. It was terrible to see—the LCD cracked, the lens gone, the mode dial chipped, the casing fractured. I covered the poor thing with earth. I knew better than to make a headstone. It would not last, not here.

A mouse flitted past me down the hill. At once, I lifted the shovel and swung it. I wanted to smash the creature to a pulp. I aimed for the furry spine, but it was too quick for me. I made contact with the granite instead, sending a ringing jolt up both arms.

4

T
HE
F
ARALLON
I
SLANDS
have their own ghost story. I heard it for the first time today when Mick steered me outside for a walk. I did not want to go; my leg was cramping, a residual soreness from my fall, a deep ache. My side had not yet fully healed and was giving off twinges of pain. I had been overdoing it on the slick, rocky terrain, unaccustomed to this new topography. Still, I couldn’t say no. In the weeks that I’d been here, Mick had become my favorite.

I imagine you flashing that wry, maternal smirk—and I won’t say that you’re wrong. Mick is not quite handsome. He has a rough-hewn frame and a lantern jaw, and it seems that he was manufactured on too large a scale. He gestures while he talks, his burly arms sweeping through the air. He is kind. There is an easy, generous sweetness about him, a characteristic I have not found in any of the others here—a trait I would like to possess myself.

Today he showed me the coast guard house. I have been curious about this structure since my arrival. It stands perhaps a hundred feet from the cabin, and from the outside, the two buildings are as alike as twins. They share a geometric symmetry; both were clearly constructed for longevity and sturdiness rather than beauty. They have gray, drab walls, cloudy windows, and black roofs—all the
color beaten away by the wind and rain. Mick and I circled the coast guard house several times. Until today, I had not understood why it was uninhabited. It seemed wasteful to cram seven of us into one tiny cabin while another option sat right next door, empty.

Once I got a closer look at the coast guard house, however, I began to understand. Its walls had an uncertain aspect, like soldiers who no longer felt the need to stand at attention. Every window was cracked. The door sagged on its hinges. The porch was rotten. The only inhabitants appeared to be bats. Their droppings were splattered across the walls and windowsills, curdling the air with the stench of ammonia. I found myself standing at a distance, as though the whole thing might suddenly collapse. Mick shaded his eyes with a hand, looking up at the dingy walls with something like fondness. He explained that the coast guard house was a relic from another age; it had been constructed over a hundred years ago. Our cabin was equipped with modern comforts like heat and electricity, but the coast guard house never entertained such luxuries. It sat untouched and ignored by the current population, like the ruins scattered around the city of Rome. A dying place on the Islands of the Dead.

As the afternoon wore on, Mick and I wandered. You might not believe that anyone could walk so far on such a small island, but we roamed for hours. Mick led me across Blowhole Peninsula and Cormorant Blind Hill. We passed the helipad, a slab of pavement, crisp and out of place on the plateau. (Its presence there always irks me. Only an emergency of the direst sort could summon a helicopter from the mainland. A medical crisis. Life or death. The helipad is a constant reminder of menace.) Mick and I passed Sea Pigeon
Gulch, where birds floated serenely on the tide. He was able to identify them for me—an auklet, an oystercatcher, a puffin. It was a bright, cloudless afternoon, the sky an almost painful shade of blue. The ocean was so flat that my depth perception disappeared from certain angles. It looked as though the water had been pinned up like a blanket from a clothesline, a vertical fall of cloth.

I have yet to make sense of the islands’ layout. There is a map tacked to the living room wall, and I have often examined it—an image that gives the impression that a chunk of granite has been dropped from a great height, shattering and strewing islets every which way. The oddest names are printed on that map. Garbage Gulch. Funky Arch. Emperor’s Bathtub. Some of the landmarks have more prosaic, shape-oriented titles: Tower Point, Low Arch, the Tit. The rest are named after the creatures you might find there. Sea Lion Cove. Mussel Flat. Great Murre Cave. I have studied that map often enough to memorize it, yet I can never seem to get my bearings when I am out on the grounds. In fact, I am half-convinced that the islands are not rooted at all, but move around whenever my back is turned, taking up brand-new positions elsewhere.

Finally Mick and I scaled Lighthouse Hill. I was leery. This is the highest peak on the island. The climb took longer than I had expected. Mick walked directly behind me, in case of accidents. Soon I was sweating through my layers, peeling off my jacket and looping it around my waist. The ground receded beneath me. I saw Lucy and Forest heading toward the cabin together, miniature figures, paper dolls. At last, out of breath, I reached a flight of steps carved into the stone.

As I stepped into the lighthouse, I wrinkled up my nose. The walls were so smeared with guano that they resembled a Jackson Pollack painting. Lichens and moss curled in the corners. The view, however, was something to behold. In every direction, I could see for miles—not quite to California, but across the whole of the archipelago. For the first time, I got a good look at what lay to the north. A huge hand seemed to be lunging up from the bottom of the ocean, a crescent of granite spires. Eagerly I readied my camera. Mick was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. Among the northern islets, the rules of gravity seemed altered. The light was bizarre, a patchwork of shadows strewn across the waves. One rocky promontory would be outlined in gold, the next as black and empty as the night sky. There was an arch with spines like a stegosaurus. Through my telephoto lens, I saw bodies in the water. The sea lions were frolicking where no ship could ever have ventured.

“—likes your room best,” Mick was saying. “She really seems to prefer it there. Forest says he wouldn’t take that room for love or money.”

“Ah,” I said, adjusting the focus.

“I don’t mean to scare you. Just giving you fair warning. Forest hasn’t seen her personally, of course. Not like me.”

“Hm.”

“Are you even listening to me, mouse girl?”

I smiled. This sobriquet had been bestowed on me by Lucy, in a spiteful way, as though my unsettling encounter with the islands’ signature rodents had marked me for life. When Mick said it,
however, it had a different sound. It felt like an inside joke between the two of us.

Names have power. I have always believed this. I’ve never known an Anne who wasn’t docile and mild. A Karen is usually sensible, trustworthy—whereas a Shane is bad news. And a woman named Melissa is always a little crazy.

Evidently, I am doomed to be a crazy woman here. The others still call me Melissa. I have not yet found the right moment to fix the misunderstanding. At first it seemed impolite, and when a few more days had passed, I felt as though I’d waited too long, and now it would be hard to admit that for two weeks I have been responding to a name that isn’t mine. Mick usually calls me
Mel
, which I rather like. Lucy calls me
mouse girl.
Galen calls me
you.
Forest calls me nothing. Andrew calls me
Melissa
, with a sibilant hiss, the way a snake might say it.

An interesting virtue of all the traveling I have done is the possibility of adopting new identities among new people. This has happened without fail in each location. During my time in the rainforest—always wet, always hot, crouching in a blind for days in an attempt to get a decent shot of the elusive birds of paradise—I pretended to be hardy and easygoing. During my time in the arctic—always cold, always lonely, photographing the northern lights in a kind of hallucinatory daze, treating the moon like an old friend—I pretended to be solitary and serene. On the islands, it seems I have taken this process one step further.

“I’m talking about the ghost,” Mick said. “Pay attention. This is important.”

Meekly, I obeyed. We leaned together against the railing, the wind tugging my collar open and fingering my hair.

“People have died on the islands before,” Mick said. “Lots of people.”

I swallowed hard. “I know. The Islands of the Dead.”

“A long time ago, the place wasn’t like it is now. It wasn’t a marine sanctuary. There were no biologists.”

“I know that too,” I said. I had, after all, done my research.

Mick went on: “Back then, everyone wanted to see what value they could find here. Fur traders hunted the animals. Sailors set up base camp. Gold miners dug up the ground.” His expression darkened. “It went on for decades. Pirates. Eggers. Russians. Nobody cared about the sharks or the seals. They just wanted to make some dough.”

I tried to visualize the scene. Staring down at the grassy plateau, I imagined it filled with figures. It was hard to grasp the idea of the islands overrun by strangers. Even I, a nature photographer, armed with nothing more harmful than a camera, had almost been denied access. These days, the place was well protected. It sat under the umbrella of government authority. The land, the sea, and especially the animals were treated as precious, finite resources. Hunting was unheard-of. Littering was not to be considered. Intruders could be thrown in jail. Even the whale-watching tours that motored in from California were required to maintain a considerable distance. It was an ecosystem left on its own—sheltered, unrefined, and unchanged.

The wind picked up, scouring my skin. I shivered, but Mick seemed unperturbed.

“Nobody stayed for long,” he said. “The islands were just too dangerous. People broke bones, got hypothermia, drowned. People were eaten by sharks. No one could stick it out.” He shook his head. “One group would hightail it out of here, running for their lives. And then some other group would move in. Set up camp. Hunt some animals. Act like idiots. Always the same. The storms would blow in soon enough. People would start dying. A few months later, they’d bolt, too.”

In short, I thought with a surge of vicarious pride, the islands had defeated them, one and all. The marauding hordes had been driven back to their native lands, tails between their legs. I lifted my gaze to the horizon. It was a clean line between blue and deeper blue, like a fold in a sheet of paper.

Mick sighed. “Pretty soon, the murre population was hanging by a thread. The fur seals had almost been hunted into extinction.”

I shifted restlessly, and he nudged me.

“Don’t fidget,” he said. “I’m getting there. All this is background.” He paused. “You see, these people left something behind.”

I glanced up at him.

“A body,” Mick said, his voice dropping an octave. “A woman’s skeleton. They found her in a cave.”

“A cave,” I repeated.

“She might have been a pirate’s wife or daughter. Or maybe an Aleut slave. Nobody has ever been able to discover her name. Even her nationality is up for debate. She might have been lying in that cave for a year, or a decade, or a century.” Mick elbowed me in the ribs, nearly knocking me over. “The corpse was taken away. They
gave her a decent burial someplace. But”—he held up a finger—“her spirit is still here on Southeast Farallon.”

“This is starting to sound like a campfire story,” I said dubiously.

Mick ignored me. “The ghost has been seen lots of times. She wanders around the cabin at night, wearing a white dress. People have heard her footsteps. She makes the place feel cold on warm evenings.” His gestures grew more animated, and I took a hasty step back. “The ghost moves stuff around in empty rooms. She’ll knock a plate off a table or tilt a picture on the wall. She whispers in people’s ears when they’re sleeping.” He took a deep breath and concluded triumphantly, “I’ve seen her myself.”

“No way,” I said.

Mick paused, and I watched him, my eyebrows knotted.

“One night,” he said, “I was walking toward the cabin. This was last spring, maybe.” He paused again. “It had been a long day. One of the seal pups had died, and the mother was mourning. I couldn’t seem to let go of it. My brain was overloaded. I didn’t feel like myself. Then I looked up, and I saw somebody in your room.”

“
My
room?”

“The ghost likes your room,” he said, flashing a mischievous grin. “Didn’t I mention that? A thin person, very pale. Just standing at the window and staring out. I didn’t think much of it at the time. But when I got to the cabin, nobody was home. Nobody had been there all afternoon.”

In spite of myself, I felt a chill track down my spine.

I am aware that throughout history, photography has had a strong connection to the dead. Or perhaps the undead. Ghosts are
often said to turn up on film—invisible in the moment to the human eye, appearing only afterward in the darkroom. I have seen some of these images myself. Floaty, pale shapes. Figures that cannot be explained by aperture or exposure. Blurred silhouettes at the back of an empty room.

“I believe you,” I said. “I believe in ghosts.”

Mick threw me a glance I couldn’t interpret. I lifted my camera and pointed it down the hill at the cabin. I took a picture.