TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, part 3

the environmental engineer takes me for a run. and had she not been with me, i wouldn't have had any chance at going, not just for the fact that she was the one that took me, but because i probably would have been deterred by the private restricted access notification that had been stenciled onto a block of cement next to the gate where we enter, which, ironically, is the only visible point of ingress onto the nature reserve between the island and the airport. the sun is nearly set, but it's still possible to see the flamingos wading in one of the salt pools to our right after turn off the path we've been following since the gate. the pink ones (and there's only one) come from africa, she tells me. that's where they're eating the pink shrimp. the shrimp in the salt pools (i don't ask if there are shrimp in the salt pools) are apparently of a different color. i don't, however, know that they're salt pools yet, and it isn't until she directs my attention to one of the ones from which the water has almost completely evaporated that i understand that this part of the system of pools in this part of the ria formosa lagoon corridor isn't for irrigation. a "long legs" flies across the path with its feet flung back past its tail feathers, looking to stake its own claim somewhere amid the mines that glitter in the setting sun. gourmet salt is algarve gold.

then the road forks. there's a house in the middle of the nature reserve -- a big one -- and the environmental engineer tells me that it belongs to a former head of the administrative region of the algarve ("europe's most famous secret"). the television on inside isn't huge, but it's large enough for me to see someone waving the flag of greece on the screen as we run left at the fork.

after we pass through the cluster of trees that separate the salt pools from the golf course we see madonna's house. or, rather, we see the cluster of houses that includes the house that madonna owns and visits -- like most of her neighbors on the golf course -- once every ten years or so. to the aggravatingly calming sound of the golf course sprinklers, the environmental engineer tells me that if those people hadn't paid so much to never live in their houses here that the nature reserve probably wouldn't exist. the people on the golf course like it quiet and prefer to not to know what they're missing. most of them probably don't know about the island -- and they probably wouldn't know about the salt pools if the ruins of the pools that the romans built weren't on the golf course side of the trees.

there aren't many birds visible in the late twilight when we arrive at the lake, but the pictures on the wall in the raised viewing shelter indicate that dozens of varieties make their homes at the lake at some or another time during the year. (from the sound of things there are at least as many varieties of frogs.) it's best, she tells me, when they're coming up from africa. in the spring. they're not so tired as when they're flying down from the north. but our attention is drawn away from the thought of the birds by the moon, the slightest of slivers, just now waxing, and pendent as if suspended from the only star visible in the waning gradient of sunset light, stopped at the edge of a pendulum swing out over the ocean. because we prefer that the spell not be broken, maybe, the sprinklers seem strangely in harmony with the chorus of frogs. in the forest where you're taken when you go right at the fork forced by that former administrator's house is where they get together at night to practice magic.

the moon is at our backs as we head back to the gate. we're back on that first path, which stretches from the gate at the road to the airport, past where we turned through the salt pools and all the way to the lake. it's now that time of nascent nighttime during which the eyes struggle to make use of the last traces of lingering light, which makes the running almost more treacherous than if we had been trying to follow the path in complete darkness. luckily we have the light of the island to guide us back to the road, and after our final sprint we're lucky that we have so many mosquito kisses to scratch, because they force us to stop before getting into the car and take another look back at the sky. and when we turn around again it's there, shining through a fog that must have just rolled off the ocean as we were stretching and scratching: the lighthouse on the barrier island across from olhão. and had it not been for all of that beauty, what a sad though it would have been to imagine how lonely and deserted the staircase at el faro de triana.