Sketching Uruguay: When life gives our journeys shape

“Every new beginning prompts a return.”

― Jeanette Winterson, Lighthousekeeping

Just before I left the U.S. for Uruguay in September, my parents flew out to San Francisco for a week-long visit, to see the place I’d called home earlier this year.

And although I’m speaking for them here, I think my parents would agree that our favorite day of the trip was the one we spent wending our way down the Slow Coast. We loved the stunning ocean landscapes, quirky small towns, and Slow Coast-state of mind, but most of all, we loved stopping by the lighthouse at Pigeon Point.

My family has always had a thing for lighthouses. Although I grew up in the state of Virginia, we were but an hour’s drive from the North Carolina border, which we crossed often on our way to the Outer Banks region—a series of beach towns set along a 200-mile-long strand of narrow barrier islands, the beaches growing ever more undeveloped the farther south you drive.

And as you follow the road that connects the islands, the quiet landscape of dunes, sand, sea grass, and shoreline is occasionally punctuated by a tall, tapered shape on the horizon—by one of the Outer Bank’s five historic lighthouses. There’s the red-brick lighthouse on Currituck Beach; the black-and-white striped one on Bodie Island; and—my family’s favorite—the Cape Hatteras lighthouse, whose own black-and-white stripes spiral up the structure like those on a barber’s pole.

I knew my parents would enjoy seeing the Pigeon Point lighthouse while in San Francisco, but I could have never predicted what we learned there—that not only was the original Fresnel lens at Pigeon Point first used by the Hatteras lighthouse in the 1800s, but that the Pigeon Point lighthouse is also remarkably similar in shape to those on Currituck Beach and Bodie Island.

“No wonder it felt so familiar the first time I was here,” I said to my parents that day, with a hint of wonder in my voice.

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Given that unexpected connection, I suppose it isn’t too surprising that my first sketch in Uruguay was not of a ubiquitous cup of yerba mate tea, nor of a delicious, dulce de leche-filled alfajor, but of a lighthouse.

About two hours after you leave Uruguay’s capital of Montevideo, you reach the resort town of Punta del Este, whose long, sandy beaches are lined with high-rise hotels and whose vibe is often compared to that of Miami. Punta del Este didn’t especially move me the first time I saw it—but the more rustic beach towns you reach soon after it did.

Almost immediately the vibe grows calmer, the buildings smaller, and the landscape quieter; the whole world becomes a little bit more like the world I grew up in—just dunes, sand, sea grass, and shoreline. Again, the landscape opens the more you keep driving…only instead of driving south, like my family always did in the Outer Banks, I’m learning that in Uruguay, you go east.

On my second day trip east from Montevideo, my dear friend José and I went even farther past Punta del Este to a beachside village called José Ignacio. And it was there that I found a seat along a wooden pathway, opened my sketchbook, and looked up at a familiar, tapered shape—at the 140-year-old lighthouse that stands sentinel over the coastline of José Ignacio. No matter the distance between the Outer Banks and Uruguay, I’d never felt more at home in the country.

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After nearly two months in Uruguay, I set out for Montevideo’s airport earlier this week and began retracing my journey back to the U.S.—which even included another seven-hour layover in San Salvador like the one I had in September.

And though I’ll be returning to South America at the end of the month—after my beloved younger brother’s wedding this weekend, in fact!—I can’t help thinking of my first stint in Uruguay as a singular story of its own, as new beginnings often are. And it seems rather fitting that it’s a story with two lighthouses for bookends—the same tall, tapered structure now standing sentinel over the start and end of my first journey there.

The same symbols, the same landscapes and forms—it all keeps returning, doesn’t it? Our only job, then, is to take note, live with intention, and keep searching for the ways that life gives our journeys shape.

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