The Last Light

[1] For thirty-one years I climbed these one hundred and sixty-two steps every evening at dusk, and tonight I climb them for the last time. Tomorrow a technician will arrive from the mainland, flick a switch, and the lighthouse at Sennfoot will run itself for ever — no keeper, no watch, no human hand on the great brass lever. They tell me this is progress. I am sure they are right. I am also quite unable to make my legs move any faster than they wish to move.

[2] The light itself has not changed since my grandfather's day. It sits at the top of the tower like a vast glass beehive, a thousand prisms cut and angled so that a single lamp, no bigger than a man's fist, throws a beam that farmers have sworn they can see forty miles inland on a clear night. When it turns, the whole room fills with sliding bars of gold that sweep across the walls, across my hands, across the framed photographs of keepers long dead, and for a moment we are all of us lit up together, the living and the gone.

[3] People imagine the keeper's life to be a lonely one, and I will not pretend it is crowded. But loneliness and solitude are not the same animal. Loneliness is a hunger; solitude is a meal. I have eaten well. I have known the company of storms that shook the tower until the cutlery danced in its drawer, and the deeper company of calm nights when the sea lay flat as poured pewter and the only sound was the patient breathing of the lamp. I have watched ten thousand dawns come up out of the water, and not one of them has been the same twice.

[4] There is a duty here that the switch on the mainland can never truly replace. A machine will keep the light burning, yes. But it was not the light alone that the ships trusted. In the black winter of 1962 a trawler lost its engine two miles out, and I stood at this very window through the whole of one endless night, sounding the fog-horn every ninety seconds, so that the men aboard would know — not merely see, but know — that somewhere in all that darkness a person was awake and thinking of them. At dawn the lifeboat brought them in. The skipper never thanked me. He only gripped my hand, hard, and looked at me, and that was thanks enough to last a lifetime.

[5] I do not resent the machine. How could I? It will not grow tired at four in the morning; it will not, as I once did, oversleep by twenty terrible minutes and wake with my heart in my mouth. It is better than me in every way that can be measured. But there are things that cannot be measured, and I have spent my life among them, and I am not ashamed to say that I shall miss being the small warm human reason that a cold light shines.

[6] So tonight I will polish the brass until it burns. I will wind the mechanism and listen to it click into life. I will stand at the window and watch the beam go out across the water on its long, faithful errand, carrying its old message to anyone still out there in the dark: you are seen; you are not alone; come home. And then, at dawn, I will climb down these one hundred and sixty-two steps for the last time, and leave the light to keep itself — and I will try, very hard, not to look back.