The Path Less Traveled

We follow the path of lighthouse signs for most of the morning before we decide that no matter how much we tell ourselves “oh it’s probably just around this corner,” the lighthouse is nowhere to be found.

“Where is this damn thing?” asks David from the passenger seat.

In the rearview mirror I spot Ben looking out the window and chewing on sunflower seeds. He sits nestled in the mess of his slipshod packing, all sweaters and camping equipment and his obnoxiously large backpack, with its many straps and compartments, that we have dubbed “the octopus.”

“I hope you’re using a spit cup or something,” I say. Ben just smiles and keeps watching the New Brunswick countryside emerge from a rain shower. Large puddles dot the road, adding a green hue to the red, yellow, orange reflections of the wooly trees. Somewhere out in the tall grass, the marshes inhale and swell from deep breaths of newly crisp fall air.

“Relax,” he says, “it’s a rental.” Ben, the neurotic who, during the bed bug infestation of 2010 went around New York City with a cut-up black garbage bag to drape over public seating, is telling me to relax.

“I know,” I reply, considering the slightly obnoxious-looking burgundy hatchback that Hertz insisted was perfect for our road trip. “I’m just saying. You’re always leaving a mess in here.”

“Fuck. Dude.” David chimes in. “Pull over. This is ridiculous.”

David, a part-time yogi/part-time marketing exec, is a chill-out master, a diffuser of bad vibes, and I envy him for this. The way he describes the universe, as a conscious, calculating place that you just have to settle into and learn to appreciate, makes you want to kick back on a lawn chair and wait to be showered with blessings and good fortune. Although, ironically, David is as prone to sudden and intense agitation as the rest of us, maybe even more so. He’s the last person you’d expect to get worked up about anything, so when it happens its as if this universe he talks so dearly and dreamily about has short-circuited, sent sparks flying, and managed to start a brush fire under his ass.

I roll the car into the gravel parking lot of a little convenience store that I’m surprised to find in the middle of all of these fields. David jumps out, edges his way between two pick-up trucks, and disappears inside. When he comes out a moment later he’s shaking his head.

“Wild goose chase,” he says when he’s back in the car.

“What do you mean?”

“This road we’ve been following with all the signs, it’s just the ‘Lighthouse Path,’ as in ‘a road that keeps you close to the edge of the water so you pass all the spots where the lighthouses used to be.’ There’s no specific lighthouse.”

“Used to be? They’re not there anymore?”

“It’s the future dude! No lighthouses! This sucks!”

Suddenly the world, its absence of lighthouses, seems incredibly unjust. David is particularly distraught because somewhere back in Maine a few days earlier, during an accidental stop-off at a squat and otherwise underwhelming lighthouse near Acadia National Park, he had a premonition. As we stood with our hands in our pockets, watching the waves, a young woman emerged from the water and the rocks, all mysterious-like, hair wet and up in a bun. She walked in our direction.

“Excuse me, Miss,” said David, in his “I’m asking you a question but I’m really hitting on you” tone of voice.

She stopped and looked at us. I noticed she was a little older than she had appeared in the distance.

“Would you happen to know anything about this lighthouse?”

“I know a little,” she responded, “but you’re probably better off reading the placards they’ve put up everywhere. I’m sure they explain everything a lot better than I would.” Then as she was about to nod, turn away, and leave us to the description panels that dotted the perimeter of the property, she stopped. “Sad thing about lighthouses, you know? Most of them standing around just for show, not actually doing much of anything anymore, not with everyone having all that fancy equipment on the boats. The captains, they don’t need to be staring out at blinking lights like they used to. And so these houses, they’re just shells, they’re ghosts. They keep turning and flashing their lights like nothing has changed, like they’ve been doing all along. Someone should tell them things aren’t how they used to be.” She paused and now here was the nod, the actual farewell. “You boys have a good day.”

She walked away from us and we watched as she began to disappear down the road we had come on.

David, perhaps sensing some incomplete interaction, a message not fully relayed, suddenly ran after her. When he was alongside, he tapped her on the shoulder to get her attention and then said something. Ben and I watched as she leaned in towards David, as if she was about to give him a kiss on the cheek. She whispered something into his ear that made him blush, and then continued away from us.

“What did she say?” we asked.

But he ignored us, was bashful all of sudden, didn’t want to talk about it. He just looked back at the lighthouse, all wide-eyed and pensive, and said, “there are others.”

The trip, which up until that point had been centered on camping and nature walks, suddenly transformed into an active search for lighthouses, a survey of spinning beacons along the East Coast.

“Fine, so there’s no lighthouse,” says Ben from the backseat, between chews and spits. “Not the end of the world.” I sense he’s getting fed up with all of this lighthouse business. He was never really that enthusiastic about it to begin with.

“Just go,” David tells me.

Back on the road, the GPS system, or “Sandra” as we have named her, happily perks up and tells me I should continue in the direction I’m going for another few miles. Our goal for the day is to be deep within New Brunswick by evening time, to camp out in a spot we picked because of its entertaining name – “Fundy” – and because it was designated on the large 2005 road atlas I have left over from a trip to Chicago in college by a big graphic box of woodlands and a small tent icon.

I follow the straight green line of eastward motion and all I can hear is the crunching of seeds from the back and an occasional exasperated sigh that escapes from David. Then from the corner of my eye I catch Sandra beginning to recalibrate her calculations.

“Left turn in 300 meters,” Sandra tells me, in her soft hybrid American/British accent.

“Stupid metric system,” I say out loud, to no one in particular. “Sandra is being feisty. She keeps changing her mind.”

“Sounds about right,” says Ben, and chuckles to himself.

“Left turn,” she reminds me as I get closer.

I slow at the instruction and we find ourselves at the head of a small country road that leads into the farmland.

“Turn here?” I ask the others.

“Sandra doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” says Ben, as he sits up and looks out through the windshield, suddenly attentive to what’s going on because it doesn’t seem to correspond with our plans. “That’s not the right way. Obviously. I mean look at that thing.”

He has a point. The road seems a little too quaint, as if it is was built to accommodate carriages and horseback riding 150 years earlier.

“It’s the right way.” David is animated again, his eyes blazing. “That’s our road dude!”

“Seriously?” asks Ben. “Come on, that’s ridiculous. It. Sandra. Whatever. Made a mistake.”

“Where is your sense of adventure?” asks David. Look at that thing, it’s awesome! There’s a reason we’re being told to turn here. That’s our road! You gotta believe in the greaterness of things my man.”

David likes using that phrase – “the greaterness of things.” It’s his go-to proclamation of higher purpose, of following a course of action because the universe is telling you to do it, even when it might not totally make sense. The hunt for the lighthouses, our time on “Lighthouse Path,” its all part of the same plan, and this, at least to David, seems to be the next step.

I’m influenced by David’s enthusiasm, encouraged by his aura of certainty.

“This is such a bad idea.” Ben reiterates when he sees me twisting the wheel.

I laugh and pull us onto the country road. The car lurches and jumps in response to the potholes and sediment peaks that have dried and hardened after the rain. I try to keep us centered on the carved-out tire tracks of vehicles past, but at some points there’s the scraping of stone against metal, our underbelly traveling too close to the ground.

“Slow, slow,” Ben instructs.

“We’re off-roading!” I proclaim. The rental burrs unhappily.

The single-lane cuts between high stalks that rise on either side of us. Beyond is the open horizon with its choppy strips of clouds sandwiched between sections of purple and orange sky. After a few minutes we can’t see where we came from.

“How long are we going to stay on this thing?” asks Ben.

“Don’t worry, it’s taking us where we need to go,” David answers.

We cut sharply to the left and we’re led towards a narrow passage in the woods, framed by trees and thick roots and fallen branches. Our tires hit soft moss and mud as the ground under us melts away into a sea of loose, moving glaciers. The back of the car fishtails as it struggles to grip the loose soil.

But we’re still moving, and after half an hour even I begin to wonder if this road leads anywhere. Sandra doesn’t have anything to add, guiltily sitting in the corner with her tail between her legs. On the read-out we’re just a small blue arrow on a screen of black.

“You know,” I say after I realize no one has said a word for several miles, “this seems like the sort of road that ends at a big, locked gate.”

Ben chuckles bitterly. None of us consider turning back because we’ve just gone too far. At this point it would be a surrender that even Ben wouldn’t feel comfortable with.

Eventually we see a clearing, and as soon as we’re out of the woods, we find ourselves passing fenced-off properties.

“Are we in some massive backyard or something?”

What moments earlier had been us in the middle of nowhere, a blip on a screen traveling towards some unknown edge of existence, is now an embarrassing trip past porches and patios and lawn chairs. We pass a small, pale child sitting in a blow-up pool with arm floaties slipping down to his elbows. He slaps his hands against the water, watches it splash up, and then turns his attention towards us, to this rented burgundy hatchback passing behind his house. I half-expect to hear him yell “mommmmm” in that confused tone that kids reserve for situations where they’re unsure of the merits of something.

“This has to link back to a main road,” suggests David, returning to more practical considerations. He fiddles with Sandra and points to something on the screen.

David is right, and soon there’s the sound of traffic running alongside us, just behind the section of land with the row of houses.

“You hear that!?” he yells. “I told you! We probably just cut out like an hour from our driving time, went straight to the source.”

We head towards the sound, and follow the road to its conclusion.

“I hope that thing isn’t locked,” I say when we see the gate in front of us. It’s plastered with red Canadian maple leafs and blocks of text that start off with the words “Attention!” and “Attention!” and then taper off into two columns of very official-looking signage in both English and French.

David hops out and I watch him push at the gate only to find that it is, indeed, secured. He passes his hand down its length and walks to the pivot-point. There, shining in all of its metallic glory, I spot a massive steel lock, happily clanked into place. David inspects the sides of the gate, factors in the space on either side of it and then runs back to the driver-side window.

“Dude, pop this thing through that area on the left of it. I think there’s enough room to go around.”

I gauge his instructions, stare at the sharply banking ground that rises up on the side of the gate, and then turn back to him.

“You’re crazy. No way is that going to work.”

He looks annoyed. “Fine, then lets turn around and head back.”

“Fuck!” I yell. “This sucks.”

“I’ll drive.”

“You have an opinion about this?” I ask Ben whose body has slid halfway down the seat, into a frustrated position of repose.

“I don’t really care. You guys do what you like.”

I let David take over. I stand at a distance so I can direct him in his attempt to make a twenty-point U-turn in the tight space.

“You’re going to hit that tree,” I yell, but it’s too late, the bumper knocks into a small tree and I hear it crack and then tip over onto its side.

“Now someone is going to run out here with a shotgun and tell us we’re destroying state property.”

“All part of the plan,” adds David as he tensely maneuvers the car. He gets it so that it’s perfectly perpendicular to the road and I wonder how he’s going to manage to get it to face the other direction. I shout instructions but he’s ignoring me. Inside the car he leans against the steering wheel and keeps moving his arm to shift the transmission from forward into reverse and back again. His tongue hangs from the side of his mouth, and his face is fixed in a state of turgid concentration.

And then the car stops moving, and with every one of David’s presses on the accelerator I just watch as brown mud flies up from under the front wheels and gives the side of the hatchback a paint job.

“Are you stuck?” I ask.

But David doesn’t hear me and there he is shifting and reshifting the transmission, over and over, and the wheels spin in one direction and then the other. With every exertion the car seems to be dipping lower into the ground, sinking into a bed of quicksand.

“Stop! You’re making it worse!”

David pauses and looks straight ahead. “OK I think you guys are going to need to push.”

I shake my head at myself and Ben emerges from the car, unfolding his towering 6’2” body to glare on the whole scene.

“Are we stuck?” I ask him, this time sounding dumbfounded.

Ben glares at me, a vicious smile curls up on the sides of his mouth. “Yeah,” he says with sinister joy, “maybe we’re stuck.”

I feel the blood drain away from my face. It’s not that I’m scared or nervous but I feel incredibly foolish. I cringe when I recall the way I had, moments earlier, shouted “we’re off-roading it” out the window.

“We’re not stuck,” reassures David. “Just push.”

So we push. Ben and I put all our weight into the car and we rock it, we nudge it, we dig our feet into the mud and throw ourselves against it. And there are definitely a couple of moments when it looks like yes, maybe, we have it. But then just as quickly it becomes obvious that we don’t. After more attempts than we probably needed to assure ourselves of the inevitability of the situation, Ben steps away from the car and throws his hands above his head.

“I’m done with you morons.”

---

The old man in the house, the one who answers the door after we knock for a good five minutes, he’s really nice about it. When we tell him what happened and ask to use his phone to call a tow-truck, he informs us that this isn’t the first time people have come asking for help after getting stuck on the back country road, goes on a tirade about the unreliability of GPS systems.

“And just a few months ago – maybe you boys heard this story – a young woman, she followed her GPS and it led her to some queer spot up in the mountain. Got stuck in the snow there, dead of winter. Found her frozen like a Popsicle, sitting behind the wheel like she was listening to the radio.”

We nod politely and call a few tow companies. We have to ask the old man to speak to the only one who answers because the guy on the line has pretty terrible English and keeps shouting “merde” at us when we try to explain the situation to him.

“You’re lucky I speak French,” he says. “Most people in New Brunswick couldn’t care less about it.”

Sid, our tow truck drive, is a stocky dude whose jeans hang loosely around his hips. He moves around our vehicle, attaching hooks and grabbing at levers. He uses the oily rag dangling from his pocket to wipe his hands and then his face. Sid carries himself with a French-Canadian dignity that says he’s simultaneously proud of and better than the work he’s doing.

When we ask whether we can all ride in the truck with him, he just shakes his head and says, “deux, two,” then points to the hatchback dangling from the back. “Un.”

“Is that safe?” asks Ben.

“Un,” Sid repeats.

David volunteers for the hatchback and climbs into it. Ben and I get into the truck with Sid, sandwiched on a wide passenger seat. The whole thing smells of cigarettes and wood chips. Sid revs the engine and the old man, who happens to have keys to the gate, unlocks it for us so that we can drive out.

“That old guy has the key?” asks Ben, shaking his head. “David is so footing the bill for this.”

Sid insists on driving us to Saint John, where his shop is, so that he can check out the car, make sure that we didn’t damage the suspension or the transmission or whatever else we put at risk during our activities.

“Saint John,” he says. “Check the car.”

There’s mostly silence in the truck except for the light sound of French music coming from Sid’s radio. When it stops, Sid pops out an old-fashioned tape, flips it, and reinserts it into the player. The music comes back on. Somewhere from behind the hum of the trucks engine I hear a woman with a high-pitched voice singing thoughtfully.

“You live in Saint John?” asks Ben.

“Live, yes,” answers Sid.

“You were born there?”

“Born in Quebec.”

“When did you move? How old were you?”

“Many years in Saint John.”

“OK.” Ben pauses for a moment, seems to consider whether he should keep asking questions. “What kind of town is it?” he decides to continue. “Is it like a town-town or is it bigger? Like a city? I guess you guys gauge that sort of thing differently over here, right?” Ben nods. “I guess it’s all relative really. I mean, a ‘town’ for me might be a ‘city’ for you. Right?”

Sid doesn’t say anything.

“I really like it out here though, really nice country you guys have. So much nature, and it’s so quiet. It’s funny, you know? Like we’re from New York,” Ben motions to me and then points to the hatchback dragging behind us on the highway. “And meanwhile, all you have to do is drive for a few hours and you get all of ‘this’---” Ben gestures at the highway and the thick lines of trees on either side of it. “And it’s like we don’t even know it’s here. We fly down to Florida or out to California or Europe or, I don’t know, Australia or something. We don’t even take the time to drive up to New Brunswick, it just doesn’t cross our minds. I mean, where are we?! New Brunswick! It’s wacky.”

Sid glances at Ben when he’s done, then turns his attention back to the road, smiles wryly to himself, and just mutters, “New York.”

Sid says little else for the rest of the trip except for what sounds like the occasional mutter under his breath, in-sync with the music still trickling out of the speakers. The truck, the attached burgundy hatchback with David nestled somewhere in it, descends into the fog that hugs the coastline and rolls over Saint John in white plumes.

“Are we here?” I look out the window at the near-empty streets and shuttered storefronts. A sign on one building reads “Hayward and Harwick, 1855” and I wonder what sort of business Hayward and Harwick ran back in the day. Furniture? Hats? Were they blacksmiths? A grayed church spire rises up out of the thick air and casts a critical gaze over everything.

“This is weird.” Ben stares at a lone woman standing at a bus stop, occasionally glancing up in anticipation of something that doesn’t seem as if it will ever arrive.

Eventually we come to what looks like Sid’s garage.

“Out,” he says at us, and it sounds charmingly Canadian, more like “oot.”

We leave the truck and walk over to the hatchback. At first we can’t see David, but then we find him asleep across the back seats, a sleeping bag draped over his shoulders and a packed tent under his head.

“Wakey wakey,” I whisper when I open the door. “We’re in beautiful Saint John.”

David stirs, he has a moment of disorientation where he rubs his face and considers the nature of his hands, and then he’s up, standing alongside us.

Sid reverses the truck and pushes the hatchback into the garage. A small contingent of squat men flood around the sides and begin inspecting it curiously. There don’t seem to be any other cars being worked on. Sid walks into an office and emerges with a largish, ruddy-faced woman. He whispers to her, points at us, and furiously gesticulates with his hands. I can’t shake the impression that he’s over-dramatizing the events surrounding our needing to be towed.

“I’ll give you a receipt,” she says eventually, when Sid is done with his explanation.

“How long is this going to take?” I ask.

“Don’t know. Two, three hours? They need to check the car. There might be some damage.”

“Really? I mean we only got it stuck in the mud. It’s not like we wrecked it or anything.”

“Just to be safe.”

I rub my hands together nervously. “And cost?”

“Not so much. If they find something they need to fix, it will cost more.”

I look at the guys and they shrug their uncertainty. City boys who don’t know the first thing about cars or their transmissions or what a damaged axel might look like. Even the words themselves – “transmission,” “axel” – have an abstract glow to them.

“I changed a tire once,” offers Ben. “It was pretty messed up though. Drove over like a two inch nail sticking out of a piece of wood.” He shows us the size of the nail with his fingers and then pauses to think things over. “Maybe we should leave the car. You never know if something could have happened. We still have a long way to go and the last thing we want is breaking down in the middle of nowhere.”

“Right,” I say, pointing out our current location. “Unlike now?” I pass my gaze over to the fog suffused town square across from the garage and watch a dog emerge, pulling a leash that eventually reveals a man holding the other end of it. The dog, in imitation of the man, droops its head low, as if looking for something in the grass.

The woman writes us a receipt. I grab it in frustration and we turn to go.

“The Grand Old Search for Lighthouses,” I say while shaking my head. “What is there to do around here anyway?” I ask, completely irritated. “Is there some place where we can sit around, have coffee or something?”

She thinks for a moment, puts her pen to her chin. “You can always check by the water,” she offers and points us in the right direction. “There might still be a place that’s open down there.”

I look at my watch. “Things close that early?” I see that it’s only 5p.m.

She looks as if she’s morbidly offended. “Most things, yes,” she answers pointedly. Then she turns on her heels and hobbles back into her office. “You’ll have to see for yourself,” she calls back at us.

Sid shrugs, either as an apologetic gesture or as a way of showing that he has no idea what we’ve been talking about. For a moment I don’t mind the guy, even while I feel we might be getting screwed over with the car.

We leave and head in the direction she has indicated. A silence sets in between us and we amble along for a couple of blocks before David sighs.

“What?” I ask.

“Never mind,” he says smugly, acting as if he didn’t mean to be heard.

“Come on. What is it?”

“It’s just that, it’s all part of the plan my man.”

“Fancy rhyme scheme you got going there.” I roll my eyes. “It’s funny, you said that right before you got us stuck in the mud. What’s part of the plan?”

“All of it! That we got stuck, that we ended up here, that we’re walking down this street in this town. It had to happen this way.”

I look to Ben, the go-to naysayer when David gets into his fateful moods, but Ben is smiling, enjoying himself, not really paying attention to what we’re talking about.

“I’m really digging this place,” he says. “It’s just so…Canadian.”

“Canadian?” I ask, agitation swelling up on my face.

“Yeah, all foggy and quiet. I feel like we’re in a different world.” He laughs. “Like where the hell are we? There’s no one here! This is awesome!”

I can hear the water, I know it’s there, an invisible wall of sound, a rush of movement over rocks coming from somewhere behind the mist. There’s the distant chiming of a bell buoy, a high-pitched ship’s horn that makes us feel as if we’re in the middle of the ocean, stuck on old boats with flapping sails. As we get closer, I hear what seems to be a group of children shouting at each other, cackling and hawing in some eerie game of tag. But then I notice the seagulls circling overhead, diving towards the water with their shrill calls.

At the seawall there’s the wet air, waves hitting rock and tossing droplets that float momentarily and then settle on our faces. There’s no breeze, just the stillness, a melancholic stagnation mixed with the disparate noises. The sea speaks, but it doesn’t breathe.

We turn left, in a direction that feels like south because we have to descend a slope. Brownstones line the street, their darkened windows keeping sleepy watch over the empty piers.

It’s then that we see the promise of an open door and the waft of temperature-controlled air spiraling into the mist.

“Are you guys still open?” I ask when we walk in. All three waitresses look up at us.

“Yes!” the one behind the counter says. She leans forward excitedly. The two other waitresses scatter. One moves to clean tables while the other retreats to the back. “Except we close in 30 minutes,” she adds with a frown. “But you can stay until then if you like.”

The place seems to be some hybrid mix between a stationary store, tourist shop, and coffee establishment. One wall is lined with glass shelves piled with Saint John memorabilia, with mugs and t-shirts and pens and shot glasses and other general kitsch. I wonder whether Saint John is actually the sort of place that people come to on their own, looking for an experience and a keepsake to remember it by.

David laughs. “You see that!? Check that out!” He points at an image that’s repeated on most of the items. Right there, under the letters, is a little lighthouse logo.

We sit down at a table because the waitress refuses to take our orders at the counter. She comes by with a little notepad and hands us menus.

“The lighthouse…” says David, letting the words trail off as he ignores the menu placed in his hand.

“Excuse me?”

“The lighthouse,” he repeats. “Are there lighthouses in Saint John? I see they’re all over the shirts and the other stuff.”

“Well yes, we have one,” she answers. “It’s down by the water,” she adds for factual emphasis.

David’s eyes perk up. “Really? That’s awesome. How do we get to it?”

“Well, you want to keep walking down this street” The waitress scratches her head. “And then you follow the water until you get to it.”

David stretches a satisfied smile across his face. “Thank you,” he says and then turns to us. “You see that. A lighthouse. Conveniently placed exactly where we end up.”

“How’s the coffee here?” asks Ben, oblivious to anything David has said while completely absorbed in making a decision about his order.

“Good,” she answers.

“What about the espresso drinks? Like your lattes. How are your lattes?”

“Also good.”

“Really? OK…” Ben looks back at his menu.

“Everything here is good,” she notes.

“Just pick something,” I tell him.

“What’s the rush?”

“They close in half an hour.” I turn to the waitress. “Actually, why is that?”

“Why is what?”

“Things closing. It seems like things shut down here pretty early. The town looks practically abandoned.”

The waitress chuckles to herself. “Well yeah, you’re right. Not much to do around Saint John. Nothing like Halifax. Ever been to Halifax?”

“No.”

“You have to go there. It’s something else.”

“What’s so special about it?”

“Lots of people. Everything stays open real late. Halifax is great,” she tells us, her eyes looking off into some distant memory. “This place, maybe it used to be like that, but now it’s different. People left, moved on. The rest of them, they seem to stay in. Everything moves sort of slow.”

“How come?” continues David.

“I don’t know. Maybe when the fishing industry started dieing down? There weren’t as many jobs so people went looking for work somewhere else.” The waitresss pauses, and then she shakes her head. “I don’t really know.”

“So this used to be a fishing village?”

“Sure was. Still is in some ways, just a lot less of that than how it was before.”

“What do people around here do now?”

“Hard to say. Everyone has their own thing. Like me, I have this place.”

“You’re the owner?”

She balks at the suggestion but she blushes, visibly pleased with the thought. “Me? No not me. I just work here. But I was just saying, this is what I do. Work here that is.”

“What about the rest of them? What about all the fishermen who stayed.”

“Some of them still fish, there’s a little of that here and there. Some went into other types of jobs. But I guess a lot of them, they work for Irving. Big bad Irving.”

“Irving?” Ben looks up from the menu.

Irving. I imagine some evil overseer, a man who walks around all hunched over, jaundiced skin, jowls. I imagine Montgomery Burns.

“You guys don’t know Irving?” She’s suddenly skeptical and shifts her weight onto her left foot. “Where’re you from anyway?”

“New York,” answers Ben.

The answer disarms her. She smiles.

“That’s funny. Well,” she continues, “Irving owns this town. Irving owns Canada.”

“But what is it?”

“A company. An oil company. They got a bunch of their rigs out there in the water somewhere, drilling away. Like I said – big bad Irving. Last thing we need around these parts is one of those things that happened to you guys down in the Gulf of Mexico.” She looks down at her little notepad. “So sad.”

We eventually give her our orders, and after a few minutes we get our coffees. I stir some milk into my cup and stare down at the miniature whirlpool. David and Ben talk logistics, about estimates of when we’ll be back on the road and how long it’ll likely take us to reach the Fundy campground. Meanwhile I think about dark and gloomy Saint John, about the blank stares of the departed fishermen. I think about what the docks must have sounded like before, the waterfront filling with the sounds of men shouting nautical phrases, the slap-strain sound of sail and rope, chain links clanging against themselves as dropped anchors sink into the sea.

“Sorry guys,” our waitress says eventually. “Have to lock up now.”

“No problem,” says David. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re welcome. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay.”

“Thanks.”

“And enjoy the lighthouse!”

We walk out and behind us there’s the sound of a shutting door, a bolt from a lock extending its arm and settling into a latch.

“Are we really going to go see this lighthouse now?” I’m not happy about it.

“Of course. We still have time to kill. What else are we going to do?”

“I don’t mind,” adds Ben. “It could be interesting.”

Outnumbered, I follow them. The slope of the street rises for a moment and we ascend a short hill. At the high point, right before the angle sharpens and drops towards the rest of St. John, we have a view of the whole city. There’s the sea wall straight out ahead of us, resting quietly against the waves that roll in, paw at its door, and then settle back. The wall twists off to the left and meets the skeletal, wooden planks of a dock. The water, when it recedes, exposes the algaed and barnacled faces of the support beams that disappear into the dark swirl. Long masts rise up towards the sky and rock in tick-tock fashion as the boats sway. And right out on the edge of land by the dock, is the white-washed paneling and red trim of a lighthouse.

“Is that it?” asks Ben. From where we’re standing, it looks to be about two-stories tall. “Sort of small.”

“It just looks that way from over here,” suggests David, and leads us down the hill.

But as we approach it becomes apparent that our height estimate, even from far away, is correct.

“Are a lot of lighthouses this short?” Ben wonders. I think back to the squat lighthouse in Maine, the one where David had that interaction with the mysterious, wet-haired woman. What has she said to him? David still hadn’t told us. “And why isn’t the light on?” continues Ben.

It’s then that I notice that the tower is dark, uninvolved. I can see the lens at the top. It doesn’t spin or flash, it just stares out at the scene of the town and the fog, an unblinking eye with neither thought nor comment.

On the tract of land where the tower stands is a single park bench facing out towards the water, offering a 180 degree view of vastness that ignores all of Saint John. To the side of the bench there’s a cardboard cut-out of misshaped adults and children waving and “Welcome to Saint John”-ing all the passersby. Some of the figures smile, some laugh with open mouths that expose block teeth, others look around coyly, their lips pressed together tightly as they hold in some secret conclusions about the world. They all appear aimless, confused and out of place, the color bleached from their faces by the sun.

“Well that’s not very inviting,” notes Ben.

I walk to the side of the lighthouse and read the inscription on the plaque affixed to the wood.

“It isn’t real,” I announce.

“What isn’t real?”

“Any of this. This lighthouse. It’s a stand-in. They literally built it for people like us who come to Saint John and then go around wondering where the lighthouse is.”

David walks over to the plaque and reads it himself.

“A faux lighthouse!” I add, amusedly.

Ben laughs. “So that’s why we ended up here?” he asks David. “We were meant to find this? Well that’s sort of lame.” He laughs again. “What does it all mean?” he asks comically, waving his arms in the air for dramatic effect. He places himself down on the bench and faces away from us. “It’s so quiet,” he says as he glances out towards the sea.

“It’s weird,” I tell David. 

He looks pale, the valleys under his eyes appear darker, more pronounced.

“Yes,” David answers, but he’s not hearing me.

We sit down next to Ben and for a few moments none of us say anything. I imagine a bunch of Irving oil rigs out in the middle of the sea, chugging away, bull horns going off at random times, lost somewhere in the fog. I guess that Ben might be wondering about when we’re finally going to eat again, anticipating getting to the campsite, setting up the fire, tossing meat and corn onto it, and then staring in silence as everything sizzles. And David, he’s probably thinking about the lighthouse, about why we were fated to end up here. Maybe he’s thinking about the next one, the one that we’ll accidentally hear about or come across, the one that will propel us into a new direction we could not have anticipated. And we’ll go, because we’re open-minded, because even Ben and I, as much as we might roll our eyes at David, want to believe in the deeper meaning, to believe in the “greaterness” of things.

“What did she say to you?” I finally ask, realizing that I’ve remained curious all of this time. It seems necessary to understand that piece, to know what sent us after the lighthouses in the first place.

“Who?”

“That woman. The one who came out of the water near the lighthouse in Maine.”

“Yeah,” Ben chimes in. “What did she say?”

David smiles to himself.

“You’re really not going to tell us?”

He pauses, “it’s stupid.”

“Come on!” Ben presses.

“Fine,” David relents. “She said she was flattered.”

“Flattered?” I ask, unsure of what he means.

“Yeah. I told her how beautiful I thought she was and she said she was flattered but much too old for me. And married.” David laughs. “Everyone’s married! Married or dating someone or too old for me or whatever. So it goes!”

“Flattered?” I ask again.

“Women!” says David. It’s something I often hear him say, a word unattached, spoken on its own, but always tightly bound with a variety of sentiments.

Ben looks confused. “Wait. She didn’t say anything about lighthouses?”

“No,” David answers nonchalantly. “I didn’t ask her anything about lighthouses.”

“But what about your whole thing with the lighthouses,” I ask. “You wanted to go look for them, you made it seem important.” I feel a little frantic.

“It is important. It’s our history.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about! Look around. We’re a world of water. Even the clouds, the fog. All of it. We’re basically made of water. Most of the planet is covered by water. We grew our cities by ports. We traveled long distances by ship. And meanwhile, we’ve moved so far away from the sea.”

I roll my eyes during David’s exposition but he continues.

“We’ve become a society that lives in some strange virtual world where we can get from one place to another in milliseconds. When we need to travel, it’s easy, we don’t give it a second thought, we take it for granted. We fly when we need to get somewhere. We jump in a car. We hop on a train.”

“When’s the last time you took a train?” I ask.

“That’s not the point. The point is that we don’t get it anymore, we don’t understand what any of it means, to have to take a ship, to be on the ocean and to take months to get from one place to another, to navigate by the stars and, all the while, not really know where you are or when you’ll get somewhere, being exposed to the elements. I thought it would be cool for us to chase it down a little, look for pieces of the past.”

I’m not so much angry as disappointed. The intention has brought us here, but it has been a false intention, or at least an intention that wasn’t what it seemed to be. I had been thinking of fated run-ins, of mysterious mermaid women whispering shadowy and cryptic instructions, of following some pre-destined path. But it hasn’t been that at all. It was just David on some history kick.

So what does that make this? Why are we really here? What of the purpose and reason that was the driving force behind all of it? Are the moments as pure? In the end, does any of it even matter?

I let it go. I don’t say anything more about lighthouses, and the three of us just return our attention to the soft rumble of the sea. It hums an old tune, a melody which seems starkly outdated, forgotten, and yet, sits at the core of everything.

Ben shifts his weight on the bench and I hear the fabric of his nylon jacket scrape against the wood.

“You guys hungry at all?” he asks. “I really hope we get to eat soon. I’m starving.”

I glance at my watch. “Maybe we can start heading back for the car now.” Its 7:30 and I’m surprised that it’s not yet pitch-black outside.

“Yeah, I think we should,” says David.

“We’re not going to be at the campsite until really late at this point, right?”

“Probably not for a while,” I admit.

Ben sighs, disappointed. “Alright well let’s at least start moving.”

We stand up in unison and begin to amble back up the little hill alongside the water, until the lighthouse is just a dull silhouette in the distance. Tracing our way back through the avenues, we find the garage with its front door wide open and Sid standing outside smoking a cigarette.

When he sees us he flicks the cigarette aside. “New York!” he shouts, and his voice is loud, spilling out over the empty square across the street. He pops inside the shop and then we hear a motorized grinding as the garage door peels back and spills light onto the sidewalk. Sid stands alongside the burgundy hatchback, which is still as muddy as we left it. I can’t help but think that nothing has been done to the car.

Sid fishes into his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper. He unfolds it, smoothes it out, and hands it to David.

“Cheque,” he says.

David looks at the paper and scratches his head.

“How much is it?” I ask.

“300.”

“300!?” Ben is incredulous. “That’s ridiculous. For what?”

“Bring the car. Look at car. Car is good now.” Sid gives us a thumbs-up and then rubs his hands on the outside of his jeans. “Fix.”

“It’s fine,” says David. “I’ll cover it.”

At first, neither Ben nor I say anything in response. But then our lack of comment seems awkward.

“No. Come on.” Ben speaks up first, his voice much calmer than it was a few seconds earlier. “We’ll split it. Easiest thing.”

“Yeah, don’t worry about it dude, we’ll all chip in.”

David doesn’t argue with us.

We give Sid our credit cards which he swipes for our respective portions. As if to show that there are no hard feelings, he extends a handshake to each of us. His hand is massive, a thick wedge of bone and muscle that seems almost too large even for his already wide, sturdy frame. Along the contours of his palm, and at spaces between the sections of his fingers, I feel rough calluses, tight mounds of packed skin that give the impression of stone and rope and wood. He’s not so much a man as a moving statue.

He gives his hand to David last, and David looks down at it.

“You know the lighthouse by the water?” he asks Sid as his arm is flung up and down in short, pronounced movements. David can’t seem to let it go. I laugh to myself and shake my head.

“Not a real lighthouse.” He responds. “No real lighthouse for a long time.” He finally pulls his hand away from David’s. “Many things different now.”

“Did you used to work on the docks?” David asks, and it strikes me that Sid, he might not have always been a guy with a pick-up truck and a garage.

But Sid doesn’t understand what David is asking and, after taking a moment to decipher the words, shrugs his confusion.

“Did you used to be a fisherman? Before? Going out on the boats.”

Comprehension changes Sid’s disposition. His face brightens, his eyes widen, a smile stretches its way across his wrinkled face, revealing deep etchings on the edges of his mouth and at the corners of his eyes.

“Yes, fishing, before.” He nods. “Now,” he puts his hands on the hatchback and pats its hood, “fix cars.”

“Do you miss it? Do you miss fishing? The way things used to be?”

Sid takes a moment, and I think that maybe he isn’t understanding David again. But then he purses his lips.

“Is OK,” he answers matter-of-factly. “Still there is ocean, still there are boats, but no fishing. No good to think too much about past. Makes you sad maybe.”

“Does it make you sad?”

“Hear the water, smell the ocean.” He takes in a deep breath. “I am happy.”

I smile. I believe him.

We say our thanks and start getting into the car.

“Nice to meet you,” adds Ben.

Part of me still thinks we might have been scammed a little, but I don’t really care anymore. He did, after all, pull us out of the mud.

David starts the engine and its sound is the music of forward momentum. There’s a relief in knowing that, soon, we’ll be moving on.

Right before we drive off, Sid walks up to the car and speaks to us through the open window on the driver’s side door.

“You like the lighthouses?”

“Very much,” answers David.

“There is a beautiful one. Magnifique. 100 kilometers. You must see.”

“Tell us,” says David, his voice confident, focused, convinced, again, that everything has come down to this moment, that it is crucial in the same way that every other moment was. “That’s why we’re here.”