It's Sunday night in Virginia and we are driving in humidity New Mexico never sees-let alone in November-toward Currituck Sound and the outer banks of North Carolina. My wife Sylvie and I have a week's vacation and have surfaced in a foreign land; different under our feet, different against our skin, different in our ears. At home in Santa Fe, as the name implies, the presence of religion is felt everywhere-cured in the mortar between stones, resting inside the city's mud walls-but here religion is music. We tune the radio to a show called Soul Food and spasmodic, inspired, jazz- and blues-tinged gospel carries us south.
In North Carolina darkness blots out the silhouettes of unfamiliar trees as we flow through territory so strange I never really believed a word about it in American history class. A lost colony where early settlers disappeared as completely as any Anasazi, leaving only the word "croatan" carved on a post? Murky coves where a man could actually be called Blackbeard and survive by plundering on open waters? A place called Kitty Hawk where two brothers with strange moustaches made a name for themselves by turning sticks and bicycle parts into flying machines? Unlikely. But then, here we are, now looping north up a thin finger of land lying against the Atlantic Ocean toward an improbable destination of our own: a lighthouse. With vague instructions to look for (what else?) a flashing beacon in the night sky, a blast of light visible for three seconds out of every 20 and for 18 nautical miles in any direction, we zig and zag, like moths to a flame until we are standing below a giant tower. The cycloptic eye beams its light some 160 feet above us, but on the ground the world is almost completely dark. The air smells of rotting persimmons and Russian olive.
We're lucky enough to be put up by the lighthouse keepers, staying with them and their young son in a house erected in 1876, a year after the tower itself was completed. It is more museum than home and its walls bristle with regional lore and the artifacts of the nearly mythical duty that is performed here. Everywhere the intrepid gaze of former keepers peers out from portraits, sometimes ensconced in frames made in the "tramp art" tradition, folk handcraft refined by whiling away long hours of watching the sea and scanning the distance for ship's lanterns.
In the light of morning, with the low sun cradling the raw brick of the lighthouse in blood-red light, religion comes to mind once again. Certainly, Corolla Village, where the Currituck Beach Lighthouse makes its home, has a chapel of its own, but there's no ritual here stronger than keeping the flame. Covering a mere 40 miles of the Atlantic coast that would otherwise be a splash of darkness between other lighthouses seems like a job that could be ignored for a day or two at a time, but it isn't so. Standing on the shore, maybe a quarter-mile due east of the lighthouse, the vista of striated bands-beach, water, pale horizon, deep blue atmosphere-is perfect enough to imply the still peace of a Rothko painting, but below the surface of the Atlantic, in a distance available to the naked eye, lie the carcasses of the Baltic, the Victoria, the MA Forbes and a host of brigantines, schooners and ships, all crypt-mates to more than 500 other shipwrecks along the outer banks between 1585 and 1969. Even the addition of the Currituck Lighthouse, the youngest on the banks, didn't stop the Nova Ottavia, the A Ernest Mills or the Metropolis from succumbing to the sea within sight of land according to a map of lost ships published in 1970 by National Geographic, and now sold in nearly every store along the North Carolina coast. So the keeper's job is serious indeed and as full of ritual and repetition as life in any monastery.
Everything now is controlled with electricity and the lighthouse's giant Fresnel lens is lit by a 1,000-watt incandescent bulb with a timer. Originally, though, the light was provided by mineral oil burning from five concentric wicks. Each lighthouse has a distinct timing-a navigational aid for ships to judge their progress along the coast-and in the days of mineral oil, Currituck was alight for five seconds out of every 90, achieved by rotating the lens slowly with the help of a giant clockwork mechanism, a massive weight, like those found in grandfather clocks, but much larger, hung down through the spiral staircase that winds up the interior of the tower. The keeper restocked the mineral oil every two hours and wound the clockwork every two and a half, jobs that could only be done from the top of the tower, regardless of wind and weather.
The tasks for the keeper today are less urgent, but still unavoidably ritualistic. With a pledge of modesty and quiet and the signing of a safety waiver, I wheedle my way into the lens room with the keeper (visitors are ordinarily only allowed on an iron parapet below the lens). The rippled sections of ancient cast glass that comprise the lens, a "lenticular device of the first order," create one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. Today, the keeper is cleaning the lens and he does it with all the attention to detail and concern that it must have been given 130 years ago. From this glowing perch atop more than a million bricks I am present for the religious maintenance of nothing short of illumination. So many times I've traveled to a foreign place and passed through like a ghost; not only unseen, but unable to truly see. Now, with forests and estuaries and oceans arcing out below me and life going about its business under the surety provided by the lighthouse that cradles me, I have come to the center of a strange land and I have been anointed.
