Misery Loves Company

He had been warned.

The interview process was short and to the point. “Can you do the job and not kill yourself or anyone else before the spring thaw? We don’t need another ‘Shining’ type episode here.”

“Another” should have been the code word to make him run. The truth was he didn’t mind the solitude. Jake actually welcomed it. He had plenty of things on his mind and the lack of distractions would help to clear his head.

Plus the money was great, relatively speaking. Significantly better than the salmon boat he worked on in Alaska, and as far as he could tell, a hell of a lot safer.

The solitude never bothered him. Nor did the cold.

It was the grey.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road spent the majority of the book describing the “grey” dreary scenery. Jake wasn’t much for books, but he knew the descriptions didn’t match what he experienced every day. It was like living inside a tunnel full of frozen exhaust fumes. He was engulfed in a cloud of dirty, frozen cotton candy. When he stared long enough, the monotony that ensued instilled a sense of vertigo.

On land, he never thought much about the snow squalls and frozen, foggy haze that rolled in from time to time. There was rarely a reason to venture out in that weather, save to restock the bottles that fortified him with enough liquid courage to see through to the dawn.

Inside the lighthouse in the middle of the frozen bay that was the gateway to the shipping lanes, he knew the cargo ships didn’t have the same luxury to avoid the oppressive weather. Even with the best equipment on board, he could see how easy it was to become disoriented while steering off into the frozen gray shroud that enveloped the massive cargo ships.

Jake was encouraged to bring a dog. Having another life form to interact with would help pass the long stretches. Jake thought long and hard about it, but in the end, passed. He had zero interest in climbing the dozens of flights of stairs every time the dog needed to go out. Not that he couldn’t use the exercise himself. He could have let the dog shit wherever he wanted and just cleaned it up and thrown the bags outside to defrost in the spring. Jake had lived in shit long enough. A dog was just one more thing in his life he would have to worry about failing to properly care for.

The lighthouse gave him time to think. The job was as menial as it was extraordinary. He was the last line of defense should any of the light systems fail. Despite centuries of technological advancement, a human still needed to man the lighthouse. The magnitude of this never really crossed his mind.

Instead, Jake chose to think about everything else in his life. The poor choices he made. Was this another poor choice? Was he running away again? He convinced himself otherwise. His father was the one who ran from things at the first sign of conflict and resurfaced when it served him well. Eventually, he returned the conquering hero, flush with cash from some shady scam. The family lived high on the hog until the money disappeared. When the arguing started, his father disappeared into the night.

Jake wasn’t running. For once he was thinking; formulating a plan to move his life forward. The frozen bay was the perfect place to do so. No distractions, no internet, no television. Just one ship to shore radio and link to the Coast Guard. That was all that kept him from disappearing into the frozen mist.

The breaks in the grey were few and far between, but it was those moments he treasured the most. They afforded him an opportunity to use the telescope to survey the mainland.

She had to come out of the supply store at some point. Maybe a lunch break. Or a cigarette break. She seemed like a smoker. He didn’t care what the reason. Jake hadn’t figured out her schedule yet so he sat and stared waiting for serendipity to intervene.

He hoped to catch her looking towards the lighthouse. Did she think of him as well? Had he made an impression on some biological level that created a sense of longing in her, the same he felt?

Perhaps when the winds raged and the sky was blanketed in snow she thought of him doing God’s work. Surely he was a hero making sure that the ships didn’t drift close to the shoals outside of the bay. As the winter raged on and the water outside the shoals froze, the ships had a natural barrier to keep them in the deeper water, which rendered his job more or less irrelevant. She didn’t have to know that. He was a stoic, brave soul; an angel of Poseidon.

He never got her name when she sold him all of his supplies for the 5 months he would be locked in the lighthouse. She blushed when she rang up his copies of Hustler, but he was still a man with needs. If the needs grew desperate enough or if he was confronted with a real emergency, he could have taken a snowmobile across the frozen expanse of black water back to shore. Jake knew he would be swallowed up in the grey, another casualty to the elements if he attempted it.

Jake would bide his time. When the ice broke and he could take the skiff back to the mainland, he would take her out for a nice dinner and tell her how she sustained him in the quiet moments in the depths of the grey. He would promise her he would never run again and that his mind was at last, right.

He probably should have gotten a dog. The company would have been nice.

He had been in the lighthouse for two weeks.

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