ONE BRIGHT, COOL

day in the spring of 2010, Richard Skidmore walked up a small dirt path that runs along the bluffs in front of the Gay Head Lighthouse on Martha’s Vineyard. The lighthouse had stood on the promontory since 1856. Skidmore, the lighthouse keeper, with his wife, Joanie, could walk this path blindfolded, its soft rise from the street towards the cliffs, a north-northwest approach. Each step added to the view of Vineyard Sound, the Elizabeth Islands beyond and Buzzards Bay in the distance. Richard didn’t live at the lighthouse, the way keepers did in the old days, but he tended it and maintained it and visited every few days. In fact, he had been up at the light just two days before and everything was as it should be. But now, something was different. There was a split-rail wood fence that ran along the bluffs, a fence Richard had known for the twenty years he had been the keeper of Gay Head Light – the fence was part of his life. As he rose to the top of the path, he stopped abruptly and stared at the fence, or the place where the fence should be. A large part of it was gone. He walked over to the bluffs, looked down. The fence was strung like a necklace on the face of the cliffs, dangling beneath the proud lighthouse towards the waves crashing silently into the rocks far below. PZYK

FIVE YEARS LATER on 28 May 2015, the promontory on which the Gay Head Lighthouse sat vibrated with activity. People from all over the island – some tourists, a few journalists, but mostly hardened locals who’d been following the story and had heard that the old lighthouse that was falling into the ocean was actually going to be picked up and moved today – leaned on the barrier that kept them away from the construction.

The moving of the light was major news in Aquinnah, the town that includes Gay Head. After he found the dangling fence, Richard had enlisted engineers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to examine the structure. He fielded proposals for solutions and read up on a company called the International Chimney Corporation, which had moved numerous lighthouses, including the famous one at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. In 2012, two years after finding the fence, Richard stood before the town’s board of selectmen and told them that the lighthouse had to be moved in 2015 to stay ahead of the erosion, that International Chimney was the outfit to do it, and that it was going to cost $3 million (about R43 million).

Erosion is one of nature’s slowest phenomena and its slow pace makes it hard to comprehend even when its effects are obvious, because it is only obvious if you didn’t see it happening. Even if you sat watching a beach for thirty years, during which 20 metres of it eroded into the sea, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Erosion takes forever and yet we humans are constantly scrambling to combat its effects, the same way we don’t believe our own bodies will age until after the wrinkles and aches set in.

Workers prowled the upper edges of a large trough that now surrounded the lighthouse like a moat of air. They examined the steel skids on which the lighthouse would travel the nearly 40 metres to its new home, adding shims and checking levels. Jerry Matyiko, whose family owns Expert House Movers – a structural relocation company brought in by International Chimney – climbed into a Case 1155E bulldozer, its front end modified for hoisting. Jerry is a former Navy man, near 70 now. He’s grown into a paunch and full beard, but still has Popeye forearms. He wears a bandanna and clenches a cigar in his teeth. Jerry is the boss.

Two months before, crews had dug the trough around the lighthouse in a matter of weeks. They had peeled off the top layer of dirt and vegetation like a sticker, and re-stuck it several hundred metres away for safekeeping. Then they scraped off the next layer of earth, carefully sifted through it and found bits of previous lives – a former lighthouse keeper’s clay pipe, ceramic dishes that could have dated to the 1600s, when the native Wampanoag people lived there. After that, they dug past the two granite rings that formed the light’s foundation, which over time had settled below ground level. They dug another two metres below that. As the space opened up around the lighthouse and its pedestal of red clay, it came to be a lone turret protruding from the deep. The trough looked as if it had been cut by water – 60 metres long, the width of a four-car garage, with a wall at the cliff-side end like the scarp cut into shore by the farthest reaches of high tide.

By the second week of May, steel beams had arrived in Aquinnah. Jerry’s team from Expert House Movers began tunnelling through the clay pedestal and threading beams through it. The clay supporting the lighthouse was slowly exchanged for a lattice of steel, 12 metre-long beams running across the width of the trough, supported on 10 metre-long bright-yellow beams in the direction of its length. Box cribs – like little log cabins made of one metre railroad ties – were erected under the beams. Soon, the lighthouse seemed to float above the ground, the giant granite blocks of its foundation high enough for a man to walk underneath, head high.

At the same time, a new concrete foundation was poured at the inland end of the trough. Its top was precisely level with the light’s old foundation. A railway was constructed between them: a pair of 20-metre beams were laid under the lighthouse, directly below the yellow main carrying beams, pointing towards the new foundation. Another pair was bolted to their ends, creating 40 metres of track. Hilman rollers – tank-like sets of rolling steel cylinders – would be fixed to the underside of the yellow beams, providing wheels for what, it was becoming clear, was a kind of flatbed rail wagon.

By the end of the month, the small, historic lighthouse seemed a hulking monolith, brick on granite foundation on a railroad of steel beams on top of hard earth. Its structure had been fortified: doorways and open windows bricked up with concrete masonry units. A compression collar wrapped its upper reaches like a weight lifter’s belt. Two massive beams through the bottom supported the center column that hangs the light’s spiral staircase.

The tourists and the reporters and the locals watched as Jerry finished up in the dozer. When he came over to talk, they shouted out questions. “When will it start rolling?” “Shortly,” said Jerry. In the background, off to the side of the lighthouse, was a bright-yellow truck crawling with tendrils of black hose. Its back was a grid of gauges, valve handles and levers.

“Is there any chance you guys are going to press those levers today?” someone asked. “It’ll be soon,” said Jerry. “Like while we’re standing here?” Jerry looked up and said, “How long are you gonna stand there?”

“A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW, MAYBE MOVING A LIGHTHOUSE IS NO BIG DEAL. PUT IT THROUGH A MATRIX, VROOP! WE TRANSPORT IT.”

characteristic white-red, white-red, white-red.

“See where you can see the mainland, between those islands? That’s New Bedford. At one time the richest city in the country.”

“You know, back before they built the Cape Cod Canal, 90 000 ships a year passed through the Vineyard Sound.”

“That’s up 10 000 from the last time I heard you talk about it.”

“You know they used to call this the women’s light? Can you guess why?” “Why?” “Well, the light pattern used to be white-white-whitered. Think about the calendar.” “Ah.” “Weeks of the month.” “Heh heh.” “Sailors weren’t so politically correct.” Adam Wilson, Aquinnah town administrator, and George Sourati, a civil engineer on the island who helped plan the move, seem the likely authorities. But they mostly sit back and listen as Richard Skidmore and Len Butler steer the conversation. It’s hard not to. Richard is the veteran keeper, and Len is the guy who took charge of Aquinnah’s Relocation Committee. As a general contractor, he had the expertise and interest to shepherd the move. They look like a comedy team at sunset, Richard and Len. Both in their sixties, Richard is tall and angular, Len short and weathered like the islander he has come to be. They’re both Martha’s Vineyard polymaths, guys who have mastered the various skills required to live on an island full time (an island with a year-round population of 17 000 and six towns and where the Obamas and the Clintons vacation, but an island nonetheless). Not the physical skills – though they have those, too – but skills of a more valuable kind: reading the weather, knowing the neighbours, memorising the best ways on and off the island at any given time of year. They’ve ingested the Vineyard’s history and geology and can spit it out as if they’ve lived there their entire lives. Listen to them long enough and they tack hard into a long-running conversation about it. A routine.

Len: “I moved here when I was 21, and I’m 66 now.” Richard: “Shit.” Len: “I’ve lived with that light 45 years. I’ve gone to bed every night seeing it sweep through my bedroom window.”

Richard: “If it’s a cloudy night, it just lights up the sky in a cylindrical 15-second thing.”

Len: “The arc of it washes the whole town.”

Aquinnah, at the western extreme of the Vineyard, is what the locals call up-island. Historically, it’s been rural and undeveloped; a previous lighthouse keeper lost five kids in 11 years, in part because the lighthouse was a day’s ride from the nearest doctor. But Gay Head was the site of the first lighthouse on the island because of an underwater rock formation called Devil’s Bridge, just offshore, that scuttled ships traversing Vineyard Sound, between the island and the curling bicep of Cape Cod. It was a key shipping route at a time when towns from that part of Massachusetts accounted for nearly half the world’s whaling and more than half the value of the American catch.

The first lighthouse at Gay Head, a squat wooden octagon, sprouted in 1799, built with funds procured by Alexander Hamilton himself. It was 15 metres tall and glowed with sperm whale oil. A contractor moved it 30 metres in 1844, to the present lighthouse location. (The current one was completed in 1856.) Today the light is still an active navigational beacon. So though it will move, it has to stay near the edge. It must sit at the same height. Mariners will update their charts and it will be 8,4 seconds east and 0,4 seconds south of its previous location.

Richard: “Even for landlubbers, Len, when he comes, and if I come home at night, at some point, I’m going to see the flash of that light and think, yeah –”

Len: “I’m home.”