On Lighthouses

There are experiences that are lived in a historical present for as long as their memory is evoked, with the full knowledge that the memory will be revisited in the future. It was a twenty-minute drive to the Yaquina Head Light, followed by a ten-minute walk from the parking lot. Formerly known as the Cape Foulweather Lighthouse, it is a twenty-eight-meter white tower with a black tip.

The lighthouse comes slowly into view between hills covered by a patchwork of, yellow and white flowers, and those grasses that move in the wind, which Virginia Woolf might say always on the point of fleeing “into some moon country, uninhabited of men.” It grows, closes in, and shows first its tip, then the lens with its copper belly, followed by the observation platform, the tower, and the door to the house beneath. Woolf describes her lighthouse as “distant, austere.” And she goes on to write, “So much depends…upon distance,” From afar, a lighthouse is a ghost, or rather a myth, a symbol. At close quarters it is a beautiful building. Once you’re inside, it ceases to be that, because a lighthouse is direction and never a point of arrival. Even when I was inside, I continued moving, up the iron spiral staircase leading to the tip, where the Fresnel lens, whose light is visible at a distance of thirty-one kilometers, was located.

The Pharos, the faro, the phare, the farol, the far: the house that is not only home to and protector of the light, but also transforms it into language. Its light speaks. Gives warning of points of danger, sandbanks, reefs; it signals a nearby port; tells how far away it is and identifies itself by its blink pattern. The Yaquina Head Light flashes two seconds on, two seconds off, two seconds on, fourteen seconds off. The lighthouse that Mrs. Ramsay sees in Woolf’s novel has two short flashes followed by a single long one.

We spent only a few minutes inside the lighthouse. Once back in the open air, we were stopped by a sign saying, “Look for Whales!” And scarcely a minute had gone by before we saw two (or were there three or four?) humpbacks. Gray on gray: the whales, the waves. I’ve read that no one knows for certain why they leap from the water, and I’d like that to always remain the case.

We then went down to a small beach replete with perfectly smooth black pebbles and strings of green seaweed. There are two photographs of me sitting on a large rock on that beach. My face isn’t visible; I’m looking out toward a horizon outside the frame of the photo. I wonder, now, what was there. Clouds? Ships? I seem to recall some black birds hopping nearby on the rocks.

What I definitely remember is turning to look at the lighthouse and having the sensation that it was very distant. As if it had never been there. Because even when you reach the observation deck look out over the vast ocean to the horizon, there by the light source itself, one never reaches the lighthouse. And neither did James, who was disillusioned to find that the one he finally visited didn’t match his childhood imagining. Experience sometimes falls short of memory, and sometimes it’s memory that can’t achieve the heights of experience. The memory of this trip, my words telling what I recall, will fall short of what it was. The preposition in the title to Woolf’s novel contains the whole of story, always approaching the lighthouse, which is above all an ideal, memory, promise: the inaccessible. What moves us.