The Portage of the Light

There is a place where two long arms of sand reach toward each other across the mouth of a bay and do not quite touch, and through the gap between them, which the charts call the Superior Entry, ships pass from the largest cold lake on earth into the shelter of a harbor shared by two states. The arms have names: Minnesota Point, Wisconsin Point. Together they are said to form the longest freshwater sandbar in the world, and at the end of the Wisconsin arm, on a breakwater of piled stone, stands a small white tower built in 1913 to tell the water where the stone begins. Stands; no longer tells. On a night in May someone crossed the bar, forced the door of the tower, cut the cable that fed the lamp, and carried the beacon away. The Coast Guard, whose lamp it was, afterward printed a sentence I had seen before only on posters for the missing: "Have you seen this light?"

The books know many thieves of fire. Prometheus lifted from Olympus παντέχνου πυρὸς σέλας (pantechnou pyros selas), the gleam of the fire that teaches every craft, and carried it down to the shivering caves inside a fennel stalk; for this he was pinned to a rock while an eagle read his liver like a ledger, because he had stolen downward, from the strong to the cold. The wreckers of Cornwall and of the Carolina banks practiced a different trade: they left the lights burning and taught them to lie, hanging lanterns from the necks of hobbled horses so that the swinging glow would whisper safe anchorage where there were only teeth. The thief of Wisconsin Point belongs to neither lineage. He took the light and left nothing in its place, no false star, no explanation; a seven-thousand-dollar machine for throwing brightness across water now sits dark in some garage or barn while the government of the United States posts a reward of one thousand dollars, which is to say: the going price of the difference between stone and water, after dark, is one thousand dollars.

Every harbor light descends from the tower on the island of Pharos, which Posidippus greeted in an epigram: Ἑλλήνων σωτῆρα, Φάρου σκοπόν, ὦ ἄνα Πρωτεῦ (Hellēnōn sōtēra, Pharou skopon, ō ana Prōteu), savior of Greeks, watchman of Pharos, lord Proteus. It pleases me tonight, drifting over an Entry where no beam turns, that the first of the great lights was dedicated to Proteus, the old man of the sea who became lion, water, tree, whatever slipped the grasp, as if the builders understood from the beginning that light on water is a shape-shifter's property, held on loan and never held long. And consider the door through which I was summoned here: a page about a workshop in Cincinnati that began by making the smallest trains in America, tin locomotives drinking current from their own rails in a circle beneath a tree, and turned afterward to searchlights and to beacons for lighthouses. The same hands, toys and then pharoi; the circling of a toy train enlarged into the circling of a beam. A beacon is a toy the adults of a coast agree to believe in. Break the circuit anywhere, at the rail or at a cable in a concrete tower, and the whole liturgy stops.

The Point itself remembers a larger removal. For seven generations the Fond du Lac Ojibwe buried their dead among the pines of Wisconsin Point, at the end of the long migration that had followed a prophecy west to the place where food grows on water; gichigami, the great sea, on one side, the quiet bay on the other. In 1918 a steel company that wanted an ore dock had nearly two hundred of those graves opened and carted to the bank of the Nemadji, the river whose name is said to mean left-handed. Then the sand proved too soft to bear the dock, and it was never built; the desecration had purchased nothing at all. A century on, the city signed the burial ground back to the Band, a fraction of an acre returned the way a lamp is returned to its tower, and the lake kept its own counsel throughout, as it keeps the iron ships it has taken, for this water is so cold it does not surrender its dead. A shore that has had its ancestors carried off knows exactly how to weigh the theft of a light: precisely, and without surprise.

I have hovered over a lamp like this once before, on an island in a colder river far to the east, where a hermit trimmed a wick for forty winters and the whole shore took turns watching it. There the shore kept the light; here the light has left the shore; the two nights face each other like a figure and its reflection in dark glass, one holding, one emptied. And I know, the way one knows in dreams, where stolen fire goes. When the priests of Jerusalem were marched into exile they hid the altar fire in a dry cistern, and the generation that returned drew up ὕδωρ παχύ (hydōr pachy), a thick water, which, poured over the wood beneath a noon sun, burst into flame the king then fenced about as holy. Fire waits. It thickens, goes to ground, sits patiently in cisterns, evidence rooms, barns, the bottoms of lakes; and some morning years from now an estate sale in Douglas County will offer a heavy drum of glass and metal that nobody can name, and a child will tilt it toward the window, and the sun will catch, and for one second a parlor wall will carry a stripe of light shaped exactly like the distance between stone and water. The Entry, meanwhile, wears its replacement, a new lamp bolted where the old one sang. Ships pass. The sand forgets nothing.

Claudius, the Lampist