“The Last Lighthouse Keeper in America” (The New Yorker, September 30, in print on November 6)

Наконец-то, захватывающее чтение в Нью-Йоркере (я по привычке ворчу на их колонки, но все же каждый раз радуюсь прекрасным находкам) — длинная статья-травелог о последнем маяке неподалеку от Бостона, который до сих пор управляется вручную, и оператор его — замечательная женщина Салли Сноумен. Тут тебе и исторический экскурс, и поэтическое эссе, и набросок к героической биографии, который читается на одном дыхании. Взгляд выхватывает знакомые названия — Наррагансетт, Ньюпорт (Массачусетс-Род-Айленд, лавкрафтовские места), и сердце начинает учащенно биться.

Snowman didn’t mind the confinement, or the occasional bomb cyclone. In February, 2013, she and her assistant keeper Audrey Tessier got a call from the Coast Guard: a vicious blizzard was approaching, and they could be evacuated in twenty minutes. Snowman wouldn’t think of leaving. In sixty-mile-an-hour winds, she and Tessier headed to the boathouse to check provisions, clutching each other in a crablike crouch. Back at the keeper’s house, they used a six-by-six post to brace the cellar door against flooding. Through the night, as the house rattled and shook, Snowman felt as if she were in a vibrating bed. “She was like a kid in a candy store,” Tessier told me. “I wasn’t quite as thrilled.” In the morning, Snowman ran from window to window, exclaiming at the seals playing in the surf and the twenty-foot waves crashing ashore. She was unfazed by the possibility that the wind might whip the house off the island: “What a way to go!” ©