by J T Kalnay
“The next year was in Canada, near a fresh water lake so large it seems like an ocean. A cold ocean surrounded by rock. With petroglyphs on the rock. A lighthouse and petroglyphs. The lake is so big that it has a thirteen hour tide that goes in and out an inch or two. And it has a seiche that can be as much as two feet!”
“Every year you’ve surprised me with how different each lighthouse is and how different each place is. And every year I am comforted by how we are the same, no matter what lighthouse we visit.”
There it is again. That tone. Is he telling me that he wants to visit me near my lighthouse in Ohio? Is he telling me that he thinks we will be the same even there?
I interrupt his story. “It was near Thunder Bay. I went canoeing near there for two weeks with my sister a couple years ago to look at the petroglyphs,” I say.
Joe looks over at me, wonders why I haven’t shared that fact before. I see him wondering what else I haven’t shared. How much more of my life he has missed, and how much of his I have missed. While there are ten years of ten or twelve weeks of memories, there are ten years of forty or more weeks of absences.
“It had a red metal roof and white walls like Point Reyes. But it couldn’t have been more different. It was on a break wall near the harbor. A dozen freighters went by in the days we were there. It couldn’t have been more different than the other two. Fresh water instead of salt. No breeze. And the coldest water.”
“Next year, at Cape Florida, was the warmest water. It was like bath water. With those crazy complicated currents where the ocean and the bay wrestled with every tide to see who would control that little stretch of water. We walked for hours up and down Bill Baggs State Park. Just a few miles from Miami and just a mile from the condos and hotels in Key Biscayne we walked for hours and only saw a few people. That lighthouse has been out there since 1825 and I’ll bet we were the only people who climbed it the entire time we were there. Which was a good thing, because apparently not even you could arrange a ‘private tour’…”
“We saw the cyclists and the kayakers and watched the people fishing off the break wall down below. But we were as alone up there as we are on your back porch in January. Even though they give group tours, we didn’t see anyone else climb up the all-white lighthouse to its black top with the three hundred and sixty degree view. I couldn’t believe we didn’t get caught when we stayed past closing. And then I realized you must have bribed someone to look the other way.”
“Guilty,” I reply.
“I thought so,” he answers.
“We went from Florida that year to Montauk the next. The tall lighthouse on the cliff. Red below, white on top, with the exterior walkway that somehow we were allowed onto, even when none of the other tourists were allowed. We were there just before the hurricane. If I had any doubt about the phrase ‘the calm before the storm’ it was erased on that trip. The ocean was mirror flat, with not a breath of wind. And then twenty four hours later it had twenty foot swells and breakers that crashed all the way over the boulders at the bottom of the cliff and sprayed all the way onto the roof of the clapboard museum.”
“We stayed at a hotel that had a salt water pool and a spa. We had to stay two extra days because of the storm. I’ve been back there. For business. While we were there I started talking to some people on Long Island about expanding my coffee business to Long Island. My franchises were in the City at the time, but hadn’t come out onto the island. When they decided they wanted to meet and talk I suggested the hotel. I went up the lighthouse by myself and wrote a letter to you.”
“I think I know which letter it was,” I say. “It was so different from all the others.”
“I bet you’re right,” Joe answers. He stares out over the ocean as the weak sun becomes a little weaker and the already cool temperature drops another degree.
“Montauk was commissioned by President George Washington, and it was finished in 1796. It’s not the oldest in the country, but it’s old. Old and solid, like me. They had to import the sandstone blocks to build it, and they built it sturdy. On a foundation over ten feet deep and ten feet thick. It’s sandstone. And it’s old. So old you can see what two hundred years of sea breeze has done to the rock. Sculpted amazing shapes into it. It’s actually leaning an inch inland now because the sea sides have been eroded over those hundreds of years and the weight is out of balance.”
“I sat in the hotel and watched the light blink every five seconds and tried to match my breathing to it. That’s how I started meditating.”
“You meditate?” I asked. Here was something else I didn’t know about Joe. Maybe I should have engaged him in conversation more often.
“Yes. Nearly every day. Apparently it’s an excellent outlet for my OCD tendencies.”
“I ought to try it,” I say.
“If you insist...” Joe says, letting the implication trail off.
We laugh our comfortable back porch laugh, sip our coffee, and continue to look out across the grey and foam flecked ocean.
“Sardinia was next, our seventh trip. It was the first time and last time we flew anywhere together.”
“I remember that cliff,” I say, busting in one Joe’s story telling. “You hired a guide and climbed the cliff starting from a boat. I was amazed, I am amazed. That cliff must have been three hundred feet high!”
“Three hundred and forty feet of perfect seaside limestone. The guide had climbed it before and said it was one of her favorite climbs. She was actually one of the people who drilled the bolts for the climb.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’ve gone back and climbed that cliff again are you?” I say.
“Not that cliff,” Joe answers.
“But you’ve been back to Sardinia? To go rock climbing?” I ask, amazed.
“After reading Mina’s Eyes, and knowing what they were talking about, being able to see what they saw, smell what they smelled, feel what they felt, how could I pass?”
“You have a lot of secrets Joe,” I say. I look at him.
“They’re not secrets. They’re just things I do when it’s neither January, Costa Rica, July, nor lighthouse week. That’s what I call it. ‘Lighthouse week’. They’re just things I do. Like you canoeing the lake head to see the petroglyphs.”
“I see,” I say. Somewhere inside I feel an ache for all the things I’ve missed. But I quickly put that ache aside because for everything I have missed with Joe I have done something else with myself, or with my sister, or with my family. The sum of the two is greater than if I had surrendered my life and my family to be with Joe. The exoticness of it, and the adventure, has taken me places I never would have gone if I had surrendered one or the other.
“The Mediterranean is warm, and clear. The Pacific is warm in Costa Rica, but it isn’t clear.”
“Not in the surf where we are all the time. But it’s clear farther out,” I say.
Joe turns in his chair.
“How would you know that?” he asks.
“Because I have seen pictures,” I lie. I don’t lie often to Joe, but I have just lied. I still haven’t told him about my house in Costa Rica, or about the days and months I have spent there poring over geological surveys, exploring the jungle, and surfing with Salvaro. Or about the calm days where Alvaro’s people have taken me out fishing and I’ve hooked some things that ended up being dinner for a tourist. After seeing the hurt, however small, that he felt when I told him about canoeing the petroglyphs, I think this house would cause him a bigger hurt. So I maintain the lie.
“Well it is clear in Sardinia. Just like Kane found out when he was swimming with Mina. I did practically the same thing he did. I was swimming and I saw a shiny rock on the bottom and I thought I would swim down and get it but it was too far. It was just like what happened to Kane.”
“Hopefully you didn’t end up lying on top of a naked ballerina who had almost drowned?” I ask.
“You did read Mina’s Eyes,” Joe says.
“I love that book,” I say.
For a moment we are both caught in our memories of the book, both made more visceral and instant by our memories of actually having been on Sardinia, the one time for me, more than one time for Joe.
“After Sardinia we went to England,” Joe continued.
“You had new knees and hips and you could barely walk,” I say. “I still can’t believe you had a quadruple joint replacement and didn’t tell me, didn’t want me there.”
“I didn’t tell you, but I kinda sorta wanted you there,” Joe says. His voice trails off. “But that’s not part of our deal, and I didn’t want to amend the terms unilaterally.”
“Is our deal so rigid that we can never renegotiate?” I ask. “Like when you’re having both knees and both hips replaced and are going to be in the hospital for ten days and then in a rehab facility for two weeks and then need a private nurse for a month after that?”
“Okay, under those conditions we can renegotiate.”
“Jerk,” I say.
Joe makes a face and moves on.
“Anyway, after Sardinia we went to England, where I still had a cane, which made climbing the tower to answer your wave a bit of a challenge.”
“If you recall, when I saw the cane I came down and helped you.”
“But you still made me climb the tower,” Joe says.
“If I remember right you were pretty anxious to get up there,” I say.
“You have no idea,” Joe says.
“I have a pretty good idea,” I say.
We laugh together again. I love how we can laugh together. At each other, at us collectively, and at funny things or times. We have always been able to laugh together easily. I think it is something that has made our deal work. That we are so completely together when we are together and that our laughter binds together what would be otherwise disjoint units of time. Our laughter weaves individual threads into a single whole tapestry.
“It was white on the bottom, red in the middle, and white on top and was sitting on a crumbling cliff. Point Reyes was like impenetrable granite compared to that choss,” Joe says. “That lighthouse in England has probably fallen into the ocean already.”
“It’s possible,” I say.
“Then we went to France,” Joe continues.
“We never went to France,” I interrupt.
“I know. Just checking to see if you’re listening,” Joe says.
Again we laugh. Again it brings us even closer. All those shared laughs over all those years. Laughs that disappeared from my relationship with my ex. Laughs that have always been here and that have grown and kept Joe and I together in our own way.
“It was the Olympic Peninsula,” Joe continues. “The New Dungeness lighthouse. It has different families serve as lighthouse keepers for a week at a time. And I can see why. It takes almost a whole day to get there! It’s right at the end of the Spit, and has been since 1857. That’s a long time for anything to survive near the Straights of Juan de Fuca. The Japanese actually had plans to destroy that lighthouse as part of the Pearl Harbor attack. But when the attack at Dutch Harbor started ahead of schedule all the light houses on the West Coast were darkened and the Japanese marines got lost. They were counting on just navigating in on the beacon.”
“Those people up there in Sequim are really devoted to that lighthouse. They have that place open every day for tours, always free.”
“They are devoted. So I gave them a truck. I offered to give them more, but they said that’s all they needed was a truck,” I say.
“Do you donate to every lighthouse we visit?” Joe asks.
“Yes,” I answer. “It’s one of the privileges of being an accidental billionaire. You can give away as much money as you want to whoever you want whenever you want. And if you want to give some lighthouse people who live at the edge of the world a gift and all they want is a truck then you get to give them a truck.”
“Cool,” Joe says. “I remember all the driftwood on the stony beach. Giant trees that were hundreds of feet long and a dozen feet across. Forgotten fallen giants that had washed up as driftwood. Those trees would sink any ship that ran into them I think,” Joe says.
We stare at the ocean for a while and drink our coffee and think about the driftwood and the lighthouses. This is something else I have always liked about Joe and about me and Joe. We can sit and think or sit and remember things and it is okay. We can be here and now, and we can be away, even while together. I think we may be unique this way.
“Then we went to Nova Scotia,” I say.
“Hey, who’s telling this story?” Joe asks in mock indignation. “But you’re right. We went to Nova Scotia and saw a hexagonal all white lighthouse and a pod of whales in the same moment. I’ve seen dolphins and sharks out here, and seen the billfish the fishermen bring in, and have even see the giant sea turtles. But I’d never seen a whale before. That was some trip.”
“Yes it was,” I add. I too recall seeing the whales and not knowing what they were at first and then becoming mesmerized by them. “We stayed an extra week just to go whale watching,” I say.
“Well…. There was something else going on besides whale watching,” Joe says.
Again we laugh. This is a great conversation. I didn’t know, not even after all these years together, that Joe was so fun to talk to. Our “conversations” over the years have been brief, our silences long, and our subject matter limited. Is this something else about Joe that I have missed out on? Or has waiting this long to have a conversation like this made it all the better for the wait? Like a wine of a fine vintage that should only be opened on a certain day in a certain year. Perhaps this conversation is a Chateau Lafitte because it has waited and anything rushed would have been an unsatisfying and unsophisticated Beaujolais Nouveau?
“The little fishing villages were an education,” Joe says. “People living in the clapboard houses their grandparents or great grandparents had built. Little houses that it looks like the first stiff breeze would blow away, but that have endured hurricanes and nor’easters. Like the people there. They were a surprise. So weathered and wizened, and yet friendly to us.”
“I think some of the women married to the fishermen got us,” Joe says.
“No-one gets us,” she says. “How could they?”
“I think the wives of the fishermen got us,” he answers. “Their men go out on the fishing boats for thirty days in a row, then they are in port for five or six days, and then they are back out again for twenty or thirty days. Sometimes more. And there’s no communication when they’re out. But when they’re in port, from what I gather they are completely there.”
“Or completely passed out drunk,” I add.
“Not the ones who are married. That’s not what they told me. It made me think about how much time we actually get to spend together. When you and I are together in January, in Costa Rica, and at the lighthouses, we spend about twelve hours a day together, give or take. So that’s fifty days times twelve hours a day to get six hundred hours. And then in July we spend about four hours together for about twenty five days. So that’s another hundred hours. For a total of seven hundred hours.”
“Doesn’t sound like a lot,” I say.
“No it doesn’t. But when you compare it to Joe lunch pail and his soccer mom wife, it’s an astounding number. During the week they spend maybe a half hour together in the morning and maybe an hour together at night, so that’s about eight hours from Monday to Friday. Then maybe two hours on Saturday and three on Sunday. So that’s another five, which makes thirteen hours a week. Thirteen times fifty is about six hundred and fifty hours. I figure on two weeks of vacation they spend four hours a day together, for another sixty five hours. Comes out to a little more than seven hundred hours.”
“So they spend more time together than we do,” I say. “Nice math Joe. Really made your point.”
“Wait for it. Out of those seven hundred hours, how much time are they really together? I mean really together. Like you and me now, or u
s on the beach, or us in bed. How much time are they completely and totally in the moment with each other and not chasing after a kid or watching the television or doing something else? I’m guessing not a lot.”
“Okay, now I get it,” I say. He has made an excellent point. Maybe our deal is the way other people could live too. Do your own thing for long chunks of time and then be together for long chunks of time. Really together, not half-assing it, not only paying partial attention.
“But you’re right,” he says. “Because even the fishermen’s wives didn’t really get us. They couldn’t figure out how we stay together when you live in Ohio and I live in North Carolina.”
“It works for me,” I say.
“Me too,” Joe says. “So what lighthouse are we going to next?” he asks.
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I answer.
We laugh again. At the same answer to the same question he has asked all these past years. It is one of our traditions, part of who we are. Part of our routines and part of our habits and as predictable as the tide. Yes we are like the tide. For although we are predictable, although you can tell precisely when we will occur, you can never predict what will wash up on each tide, and what will be left behind when that tide is gone.
Shannon and Joe
“How’d the race go?” Joe asks.
“I came fifty ninth out of 250,” Shannon answers.
“Fifth or ninth is pretty good. You’re nearly fifty you know.”
“Fifty-ninth. The number after fifty eight, the number close to how old you are,” Shannon says.
“Oh,” Joe says. “What happened?”
“I couldn’t keep up,” Shannon answers. “I think my training is out of whack. I might have to start doing some speed work on the track,” Shannon says.
Joe shakes his head and surveys the woman who has been in his life for ten years. Her hair is more gray, the lines near her eyes are more pronounced, and there are a few spots on her hands. Her posture is erect with no sign of the osteoporosis that is epidemic amongst American women. She seems the same to him as ever. Except for the disappointment of having come 59 in a race in which she usually finishes in the top three and won in her second try.
