The lighthearted lighthouse

As Labor Day approaches, we, the survivors of the June flood, are just beginning to enjoy the fruits of summer. To the standard question, “How are you?” we are now able to answer, “Better, thanks,” instead of “Ugghhh!” An evening of fun, now, is made more so by its contrast to the two full months of clean-up and restoration. Even a trip to the city for a tooth extraction was welcome respite from the chores at our riverside idyll. In the next few weeks, paint and fresh blacktop will render the worst of our flood damage history.

Now that we can breathe freely, we are tempted to pack two months of summer into a few weekends. This week, we managed to attend a DIGit event on the Roebling Bridge, an NACL performance in Highland Lake and a vocal recital at Campo D’Oro in Beach Lake. And there were still things we missed! We failed to make even one performance at Bethel, and I can’t bear to think of all the tag sales I missed. Still, I like to think I have kept my sense of humor and perspective through it all. (My husband may take issue with this claim.)

So, it was with that humor that I greeted Art Peck’s intention to install a lighthouse on the newly-sculpted spit of rock and soil in the Big Eddy.

Art has always been an odd duck in this pond. In Manhattan, he might not be noticed. I can imagine him in a loft downtown, making public art in the fanciful style of Peter Reginato or Frosty Myers. But Art lives here, in Narrowsburg, and uses his apparently infinite spare time restoring and crafting small gems like vintage sailboats and automobiles.

Residents of the “flats” set their watches by the tall clock that stands in Art’s yard on Second Avenue. No one, as far as I know, considers it a nuisance. His barn in the flats serves as his workshop. His “victory garden” is a marvel of wit and industry, with its neat rows of chard and kale. He once fastened store-bought tomatoes on his tomato plants, in early June, prompting outcries from his competing gardener friends, whose plants had not yet flowered.

Art likes a good joke, as much as he loves the river he has lived by most of his life. This summer, sensing his neighbors’ distress, he lit on the idea of building a lighthouse to stand sentinel on the newest island in the Delaware. The island is an extension of one we own, and on which we pay taxes. Rather than surprise us, he asked our permission. Knowing his skill, we gave our quick assent. “But, Art,” we cautioned, “it won’t survive the river.” The twinkle in his eyes acknowledged as much.

The artist went to work. In a few days, a nine-foot-tall lighthouse with a small solar beacon made the rocky spit a virtual Cape Cod on the Delaware. People stopped to look at it and smile, and river guides took pictures of their clients standing next to it. Everybody, it seemed, was entranced by this apparition of hope. We knew it would not be long before another surge of rough water would take the lighthouse downstream. But, until then, we could count the days it stood as a kind of victory over the flood. Daily, the lighthouse announced art and nature living in concert, neither intruding on the other.

On the Roebling Bridge last week, art and nature came together as DIGit festivalgoers used the historic structure as a kind of theater to hear and see digital art projected through speakers and on screens on both sides of the river. It was a thrilling use of the setting, and of the new media of digital artists. Even nature suspended her disbelief, by holding off a threatened rainstorm for the duration of the evening.

But nature, it seems, does not run the National Park Service. It only took one grumpy spoil-sport’s complaint to get the park service to insist on the removal of the lighthouse. Art’s humor, it seems, was lost on them. As he told me, after dismantling his beacon of light, “the only difference between God and the National Park Service is that God has a sense of humor.”

Amen.

(For more on the removal of the lighthouse, click here.)