On the River

Romantic notions of the job aside, lighthouse keeper Allen Emersonn knows that running a lighthouse makes for a full and challenging life, whether the lighthouse is a guiding beacon or - as in the case of the 19th-century Saugerties Lighthouse - a historic museum and bed and breakfast.  With a barge and a half-mile nature trail his only connections to the so-called real world, Emersonn admits that living "entirely surrounded by water" sometimes makes him feel "not grounded," yet keeps him ever "astounded."

And who wouldn't be?  Emersonn's anecdotes alone convey the sense of wonder that life on the water inspires.  Like that "spooky" night last fall when he and several overnight guests outside the front door suddenly noticed "an enormous shooting star that burned up within a half mile of us, shootin' sparks, giving off smoke, hissin' and poppin' kind of slow, like a flare in your face, like a big sparkler.  Shooting stars are exciting in themselves, but over the water?  Never seen anything like it, and never will again."  Like when the Hudson freezes over completely and the trail gets thick and slippery with ice, "and you're the keeper, and you just can't afford to slip and fall."  Then when the ice starts thinning at the end of winter, all day and all night "you can hear it crack and zing, and you can hear the crack run all up and down the river."  Or it's another cold night like any other and, heading back from doing errands "on the mainland," Emersonn realizes, yet again, how it's "always, always windy on the water" and how he practically lives in long johns, Yak Trax boots, and his "best friend, the windbreaker."  He rises early each morning to make breakfast for his four guests and maybe a child or two - cooking up country ham, buttermilk pancakes from scratch, scrambled eggs, and putting out plenty of toast, juice, fresh fruit, and pots of good, hot coffee and tea.  And then sometimes, he glances up at the guest room windows and gets the distinct sense that "upstairs, there's some nice, romantic coitus goin' on."

Emersonn swears he wouldn't want any other job, but the former farmer confesses that during his first year at Saugerties Lighthouse, he "felt so ungrounded" by the constant sight, sound, and smell of the Hudson River that by spring he became desperate to "spend the occasional night inland, not being surrounded by water."  But what a difference a year makes.  This spring, he found himself so happily "acclimatized" to lighthouse life that those longings for the mainland had ceased.

Emersonn takes to his guests and visitors as easily as they do him, whether they are lighthouse buffs or just curious.

"Hey, I'll leave a light on for you tonight," Emersonn tells two guests from Pennsylvania.  They're headed out to dinner but it's 30 more minutes before they finally leave, having stopped in to swap stories with Emersonn about smoking and how the husband beat cancer.  Meanwhile, a man and his teenage son, up for the day from New York City, appear in the sunlit doorway asking if they can look around.  They were at the lighthouse's reopening back in 1990, the man tells Emersonn, and his son was so struck by the place that for years afterwards he only wanted stories about lighthouses at bedtime.

As a member of the Hudson River Lighthouse Coalition, Saugerties Lighthouse is one of seven surviving lighthouses dotting the river (along with Little Red, Sleepy Hollow, Stony Point, Esopus, Rondout, and Hudson-Athens), but it is not the original building.  The original was funded by Congress in 1834 and built in 1838 at the mouth of the Esopus Creek.  Lit using five whale oil lamps with parabolic reflectors, it guided ships past the shallows and into Esopus Creek to the then-thriving commercial port of Saugerties; however, because its pier foundation was eroded by ice floes and currents, it had to be abandoned.