The Lighthouse

They jounced through a copse of pine and Douglas fir, and immediately the rutted blacktop road sloped upward to a rise. Off to the right, the land bellied out to a distant headland; beyond that she could see the ocean again, the treacherous black rocks that jutted above its surface. Back the way they’d come, the shoreline curved and gentled and formed the southern boundary of Hilliard Bay.

She didn’t see the lighthouse when they first topped the rise; she had scrunched around a little and was looking back to the north, to where buildings and fishing boats were outlined along the shore of the bay. The distance and the steely afternoon light gave them an odd, unreal look, like miniatures set out on a giant bas-relief map. But then Jan said, “Look!” and swung the station wagon off onto the verge. She twisted around again to face forward. And there it was, at a long angle to the left, perched atop a second, much narrower headland.

Jan set the parking brake and got out. “Alix, come on.” He went ahead past the front of the car and stood shading his eyes from the cloudy sun-glare.

She stepped out, stretching cramped muscles; this was the first time they’d stopped since leaving the motel in Crescent City where they had spent the night. The wind was sharp here, and cold; it made the only sound except for the faint susurration of breakers. She zipped up her jacket and went to stand next to Jan, to peer with him at the lighthouse and its outbuildings. Her first thought was: God, it looks lonely. But it was just a thought; there was nothing negative in it. If anything, she was pleased. Cape Despair. The Cape Despair Light. With names like that, she had been prepared for a desolate crag topped by an Oregon lighthouse version of Wuthering Heights. No, this didn’t seem so bad at all.

She began to view it in a different perspective, through her artist’s eye. A round whitewashed tower-vaguely phallic with its rounded red dome-poking upward out of a white, red-roofed frame building. One large outbuilding and two smaller ones that were not much more than sheds. Clouds piled up behind the tower, dirty-looking, like soiled laundry. Cliffs falling away on both sides, on the south to a narrow beach so far away it seemed hazy and indistinct. A few wind-bent trees. Cypress? Probably. Patches of green grass, dun-colored rocks, gray-bright sky. There was a melancholy aspect to the whole, a kind of primitive beauty. Nice composition, too, seen from this vantage point and with those clouds bunched up behind it. On another day like this, she thought, it would be a challenge to try capturing that melancholy aspect on canvas. The idea both pleased and surprised her, she hadn’t painted anything noncommercial in years.

“Alix? You’re not disappointed?”

“Of course not,” she said. “Do I look disappointed?”

“Well. you were so quiet. What were you thinking?”

“That I might like to paint this someday, if I have time. This view of the lighthouse.”

Jan raised an eyebrow: the Alix Kingsley-Ryerson who had painted seriously was someone out of the past, someone he’d never known. But he said, “Good. That’s good,” and smiled at her, and she knew he was relieved that her first impression had been favorable. Behind his born-rimmed glasses, his eyes were bright-that electric-blue color that seemed so vivid when he was excited. They had been that way for almost a week now, ever since the packing and last-minute preparations for the move had begun. The boyish eagerness eased her mind. For much of the year he had been mired in one of his periods of depression, and more prone than ever to severe headaches-working too hard at the university for some reason known only to him. Unlike hers, his way was to bottle up things inside, so tightly sometimes-this last time-that she found it impossible to draw him out of himself. It hadn’t been until his application to the Oregon State Parks and Recreation Division had been approved that his depression started to lift. Now he seemed his old self again. The next year meant a great deal to him, more than she had imagined when he first broached the idea of an early sabbatical.

Jan was looking out toward the lighthouse again, bent forward slightly, his flaxen hair streaming out behind him. The wind was in his lighter blond beard too, ruffling it and pooching it out on the sides. Not for the first time, she thought he must have Viking blood. He was headstrong, forceful, independent, tenacious-all Viking characteristics. And he looked like a Viking; it required very little imagination to picture him at the helm of a Norse ship out of Novgorod, leaning into the wind with his hair streaming behind him that way. Jan the Bold. Of course, he was getting a little thick around the middle-the re-suh of his fondness for beer. Jan the Paunchy.

She laughed in spite of herself, and he said, “What’s funny?” with his gaze still on the Cape Despair Light.