When I was a senior in college two rather important things happened: my health fell apart and I took an outstanding class on cultural geography. These seem unrelated.
My health actually started to fall apart earlier than that. I caught a bad flu, had a fever for a week, and then realized a few weeks later that my stomach was still constantly upset. A few more weeks passed and I went home for Christmas and my family commented that I was looking thin. I came back in January and proceeded to go to class and dance and ski. But I still couldn’t eat. Despite the occasional joke about how this made it cheap to go to the bar, I was starting to get scared. I was no stranger to long-lasting bouts of obscure illness.
By the time spring term started I was a mess. I’d tested a medical prescription that ended up backfiring, and instead of being “mostly functional but not hungry”, I was dizzy, shaking, and throwing up on a daily basis. And, being both stubborn and scared, I had neither lightened my course load nor would admit I felt ill to most of my professors or friends. Several unlucky friends only found out I was struggling when I would suddenly sit down on the grass until I felt well enough to stand again. The magic of multiple dining halls is that no one questions it when you come in and drink tea and don’t eat dinner.
Eventually, I dropped one course, and among the remaining three was cultural geography. Cultural geography was a class that I adored. The readings were wide-ranging and fascinating. The class small and full of students with diverse academic backgrounds. The assignments relatively few and thought provoking. This class alone was enough to make my struggles that semester worth it. And unexpectedly this class provided me an opportunity to delve into and acknowledge the grief I was dealing with as I came to terms with the reality of chronic illness. Our first assignment was to “write about a place”. Any place. Anywhere, anytime, with anyone. A place that mattered to us.
I wrote about a lighthouse.
Stained Glass
The shores of Lake Superior are a two dimensional world. There is a narrow ribbon of land between the hills and the water, and every town lies along this line, constricted on one side by Highway 61, which runs north from Duluth to Grand Portage at the Canadian border, and on the other side by the shoreline. This scenic drive parallels the Superior Hiking trail. From both, travelers get consistently beautiful views east across Lake Superior. Further inland, it is a different world. Immediately west of Highway 61, roads wither and die as they hit the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This is a seemingly endless expanse of lakes and woods with muddy portage paths connecting the two.
Growing up, I was no stranger to the North Shore. My family went canoeing in the Boundary Waters every few years, and I’d come to love the shoreline on these brief summer visits. The endless view from Palisade Head, looking down the cliffs at the rock-climbers, then gazing to infinity, where the lake meets the sky. Eating dinner at the top of the Radisson tower in Duluth. Splashing in the spray of Gooseberry Falls in the sunshine. Climbing over deadfall in the woods on the Superior Hiking Trail. Sitting for hours on the rocks on the edge of the water. My memories hold sunrises, sunsets, thunderstorms, and starlit campfires. It is a narrow ribbon of land, but there are lifetimes of history and adventure contained in it nonetheless.
The most intriguing part of the landscape is Lake Superior itself. The largest of the Great Lakes, it is a perilous body of water, cold, with big waves and rocky shores that have claimed countless lives. Most people living on the lake shores interact little with the lake. It is a dramatic backdrop, but not functional in their everyday lives. Lighthouses span the gap by guiding ships to shore. They bring people home.
It was March 2008 and I was having a rough time. I had been ill for several months, and I could count the number of days I had attended school on one hand. My soul shattered audibly when I quit the ski team in December. Although I had stubbornly refused to lighten my course load, I was breaking down from the constant dizziness, the inability to do my favorite things, and the bleak outlook on treating my mysterious symptoms. To break the stress, my parents took me to the North Shore to spend a weekend in Two Harbors lighthouse. Most people would consider this an odd choice; March is the off-season for North Shore tourism. It’s the time of year when the temperature rarely rises above zero degrees fahrenheit, and shipping stops because the ports are frozen over. While this allowed us to get discount rates in the lighthouse, it also meant that nearly all the restaurants in town were closed when we arrived. To the chagrin of the bartender, who was already late to a party, we ended up sitting at the bar waiting for the oven to reheat enough to cook our pizza. From the town we could see our lighthouse, throwing its beam across the harbor and out into the lake. There’s something quietly beautiful about a tourist town in the offseason. Serenity in the locked stores and houses with lit fireplaces.
The lighthouse itself is small, just a tower rising from a two-story house. Downstairs there is a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room. Upstairs there are two bedrooms and above that, up a narrow staircase, is the light itself. Outside there is a boathouse, which has been turned in a cabin for guests. The boathouse is long and skinny, with each room running into the next and a window stretching across an entire wall facing the harbor. Every morning breakfast is served in the dining room and begins promptly with hot fruit stew in honor of the proprietor’s Norwegian heritage. The living room is bright and open with windows facing out towards Lake Superior. There is a green, high-backed armchair by the fireplace waiting for a young lady with a book to sit down and dream her way into another world.
From the lighthouse, narrow, winding paths extend in three directions. One heads back down the peninsula towards town, the others run each direction along the shoreline. Rocky stretches provide beautiful views in the summer, but served only to deliver icy blasts of wind during our visit. It was a stark view during March. I stood wrapped in a sweater, a coat, a scarf, a hat, and two layers of mittens, huddling next to my mother to block the wind, squinting and shivering in my effort to admire the frozen lake. Ice as far as the eye could see. Once again, I was struck by the boundary on the world. During the winter, all human activity ended at the shoreline. Only the beam from our lighthouse extended out across the ice.
Just below the lighthouse there is a breakwater extending into the lake. From the end, you look to your right to watch the ships being loaded in the harbor, and to your left to watch the waves crash at your feet. This is the only unobstructed view around, and as I learned quickly in the below-zero temperatures, this comes at the price of no protection from the wind. In short, sporadic trips, we explored other places in the cold weather. We visited the waterfalls that I had played in during the summer, but were now frozen solid in braided pillars of slippery white and blue ice. The cold weather had kept away ice-climbers, leaving only us to imagine the rainbows hidden in the twists of the icy spires. At last, we broke out of the two dimensional world and wandered onto the ice of Lake Superior itself.
Unlike most smaller lakes, Lake Superior does not freeze solid. It freezes from the outside towards the center, but there is open water in the center that can move the ice around the lake. This builds up stacks of ice where ice from further out crashes into the blocks nearer to the shore. When the ice breaks, it cracks with booms that can be heard miles away. We spent one night at dinner listening to ice cracking in the distance and watching with binoculars to find the rifts and faults that were moving and building up on top of each other. The final effect is that there is a smooth patch of ice extending from shore out for a few hundred feet. There it hits the first set of faults. These are piles of broken ice stacked haphazardly. They look like the remnants of a stained glass window. Rough, misshapen, multicolored pieces of frozen glass. Beyond this first set of breaks there is another much larger smooth patch, but this one has cracks running through it, and far out you can see the giant piles where the ice flows meet the open water. These are the places where loose blocks of ice can shift and build up atop the frozen sheets, triggering other breaks extending closer to shore. Only close to shore is the ice stable enough to walk on. I wandered in this frozen wonderland. It was a new world for me: a harsh, jagged range of frozen mountains in varying shades of white and blue. The stacks of ice rose higher than my head so I saw only pieces of glass, the remnants of a window out of the two dimensional shoreline world that had fallen and shattered around me, and every so often I could hear the sounds of another cracking to join my personal mountain range.
I was sorry to leave Two Harbors lighthouse. It was a short visit, just a momentary break from the stress of being at home. Since that weekend, I have returned several times to the North Shore of Lake Superior, and each time I watch the sweep of the lighthouse across the harbor as it breaks the barrier between the water and the shore and remember the stillness of my first visit in the offseason. There are no locked doors in the summer months. The lighthouse exists to bring sailors safely home; its beam guides ships through treacherous waters. Maybe the rest of the world disagrees with me, but a trip to northern Minnesota in the frigid winter was exactly what I wanted: a sharp reminder that there is beauty in even the most extreme circumstances. I stood on the ice and saw myself reflected back just as I felt: broken into pieces. I cried as I despaired of ever feeling whole again. Then the ice cracked, and I jumped, and as the moment ended I remembered that nothing lasts forever. Every year the lake freezes, and every year the ice melts. Beautiful windows can be made from the smallest shards of glass. For the first time in months, I became hopeful. Despite the frozen harbor, the lighthouse in Two Harbors served its purpose and returned me safely to my home. I relaxed. I finished my classes. Two years later I was accepted at college. And four years after that, when I found myself fearfully breaking apart again, I took solace in the memory of a lighthouse beam shining across a frozen harbor of pieces of stained glass and began building a new window.
In high school, when I finally got better I believed it was done. Forever. As hard as it had been to get through that year, it was over. Despite the anxiety whenever I caught a cold, I kept getting better quickly. Until that time I didn’t. The realization that it was happening again was almost harder than the actual illness. But eventually, I got better. I rejoiced in three meals a day.
But the third time, I finally understood. I don’t get a free pass at being healthy. And sometimes that makes me more appreciative. Able to glory in simple moments: eating my first ice cream cone in months, hiking the peak above town and realizing how nice it is to be that strong again. Moments that can be rare in a town as obsessed with exercise as Boulder.
But sometimes I just want to be healthy without having to monitor what I eat and how much I sleep. And in those moments, when everything feels like its shattering and breaking and falling apart, I look for a lighthouse.
I remember that stained glass windows are made up of little pieces.
In high school it was a lighthouse on Lake Superior. In college, Lake Champlain. Last year, Ireland. Although that was more of a castle than a lighthouse. But it’s hard to find a lighthouse in Colorado.
Maybe this time it will have to be a fire tower.
