The Commission

The maritime museum paid me a modest sum to transcribe the surviving logbook of the Carrick Head light, kept by one Ezra Doune across the year 1911. I expected weather and lamp oil. That is what lighthouse logs are, mostly: a man's neat record of fuel burned and ships sighted and the wind backing round to the north. Ezra Doune kept a tidy hand and a tidy log. January through September is forty pages of a careful man doing careful work alone on a rock two miles off the coast. I transcribed it in a week and found nothing in it but the weather. Then I reached October, and the handwriting was the same, and the careful man was the same, but the things he was writing down had stopped being the weather, and I made myself a pot of strong tea before I went on.