Lighthouse Travel Research--The Inadequacies of Written Description

 

I fell in love during my research trip. Not with Roland, which was already a given. No, I fell in love with the Fresnel lenses still in use in some lighthouses today.¹

Fresnel lenses are not lights themselves but are made up of hundreds of pieces of specially cut glass surrounding a lamp. Their role is to reflect and magnify the light shining inside, making it visible for miles. And they are beautiful.

The closest I can come to showing you their beauty is to provide some photographs, but even those are woefully inadequate. The photo at the top of this page is a 4^th Order lens in the museum at Beavertail Light in Rhode Island.

Fresnel lenses are graded by size, with 1^st Order lenses beging the largest and 6^th Order lenses the smallest, as you can see in the second photo. I have never seen a 1^st Order lens, which is big enough for a man to walk inside, but we did see a 2^nd Order lens at the Maine Lighthouse Museum in Rockland. That’s the third photo.

The remaining two lenses are shown in their natural habitats. The fourth photo is the Sixth Order lens at Rose Island Light in Rhode Island, where we got to climb to the lantern room. The final is another 4^th Order lens, this time seen from below at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in Maine.

But the question I’m posing in this post, and the one I’m struggling with right now, is how to describe the indescribable. Even the photos don’t do Fresnel lenses justice, so words never will. Still, there are times when a writer has to try. Here is my poor attempt to show my protagonist’s reaction the first time she climbs the tower and sees the lens.

Jessie couldn’t stop staring at the shimmering glass object in the center of the room. Beehive-shaped and almost as tall as Dad, it was prettier than any jewel she had ever seen.

“Is that the light?” she asked.

“No. The light comes from a lamp inside. This is a third order Fresnel lens that reflects and magnifies the light.”

Jessie could have looked at it forever.

This is just the first draft, so maybe I’ll be able to come up with a better description before I finish the book.

But it still won’t come close to describing the indescribable.

__________

¹ So where did Fresnel lenses come from? In the early 1800s, a French committee was formed to study improvements in lighthouse illumination. One of the committee members was Augustin Fresnel, whose design was adopted all over the world. For more information on the history and operation of Fresnel lenses, see the National Park Service article at www.nps.gov/articles/fresnel-lens.htm.

Lighthouse Travel Research--Mapping the Station

 

As mentioned in my last post, my recent lighthouse research trip provided insight into the isolation and loneliness my protagonist would feel at a remote location. But it also helped me map my fictional setting and put the buildings in likely spots. After all, I don’t want the buildings to move to different locations in the middle of the book.

Besides the tower and the keepers’ house, each lighthouse station had several outbuildings. In the days before automated lighthouses, all stations had a fuel building that was located away from the other structures because of the volatile nature of its contents. Most stations had either a fog bell or a foghorn, also separate from the light and the keepers’ dwelling, possibly in the futile hope that it wouldn’t disturb the keepers’ families during the night.

Then there was the outhouse, which was a necessity well into the twentieth century for some of the more isolated lighthouse stations. The outhouse was often built of brick, and a typical one had two holes for adults and a smaller one for children.

It was also common for a lighthouse station to have a barn and a boathouse. Some also had a tramway, which wasn’t a building as much as an elevator designed to haul supplies up a cliff from the dock below.

Before we went on our trip, I tried to draw a preliminary map of my fictional Lonely Rock Lighthouse station, but I knew it was incomplete. After returning, I drew the one at the head of this post. As I write the story, I may discover the need to add additional topographical features, but at least I know where the buildings are.

A map keeps buildings from moving around unexpectedly or characters from walking in the wrong direction to reach them, and location research can help develop that map even for a fictional setting.

And that’s especially important when the setting is a character in the story.

Lighthouse Travel Research--How Lonely is Lonely?

 

I recently returned from a trip to New England to research lighthouses for my next book. My protagonist will be living in an isolated lighthouse in 1924, and I’ll have to create the atmosphere. Although my lighthouse is fictional, it will be a composite of several historical lighthouses located offshore in very lonely settings. So it was helpful to know exactly how isolated some of these lighthouses are.

We didn’t have time to see each of the hundreds of lighthouses along the New England coast, or even to sample some from each New England state, so we selected a few in Rhode Island and Maine. Unfortunately, things are much different now than they were in 1924, and many lighthouses that used to be almost inaccessible are now easy to reach by car or ferry. That also meant there were lots of tourists to interfere with the isolated feeling. Even more problematic for doing research, the loneliest ones are not open to the public and can be viewed only from the water.

The Portland Head Light in Maine isn’t really as isolated as it looks in the photo at the head of this post. It was lonely in the sense that it probably had no near neighbors, but it’s on the mainland and not too far from a village—at least close enough to go into town whenever supplies ran low. The same is true of the nearby Cape Elizabeth Lights (two twin lights, only one of which can be seen in the second photo), Pemaquid Point Light (Photo 3), and West Quoddy Head Light (Photo 4), all in Maine.

The Southeast Block Island Light in Rhode Island (Photo 5) was probably the remotest one we saw in terms of distance from the mainland. It took us thirty minutes to get there by high-speed ferry and would have taken three hours by the slower car ferry. Even so, the Southeast light was only a few miles from a tourist town that was probably thriving during most of the years the lighthouse was inhabited.

There was a more isolated lighthouse on the island, but it turned out to be too isolated for us. It would have cost too much to take the car on the ferry, so we planned on renting bikes. Unfortunately, I hadn’t ridden in years, and even Roland, who rides almost every day, was having trouble controlling his rental bike. So we gave up and walked to the closer lighthouse with the idea of taking a taxi to the more isolated North Block Island Light. But we discovered—in time, fortunately—that the road ended short of the lighthouse and we would still have had a twenty minute walk over sand to reach it. Aside from the fact that our legs were already tired from walking to the other lighthouse, we would never have made it back in time to catch the return ferry.

The sixth photo shows the North Block Island Light taken from the ferry. It was quite a distance away and I was fortunate to get even this poor-quality shot.

Beavertail Lighthouse in Rhode Island (Photo 7) and Bass Harbor Head Light in Maine are both located on populated islands. Bass Harbor Light is in Arcadia National Park and actually felt the most isolated because we had to wait thirty minutes in a traffic backlog to get a spot in the small parking lot. The lighthouse itself was a disappointment, though, because the area around it was too tight to get the entire complex in a single picture. As you can see from Photo 8, which was taken from the rocks below the lighthouse, the fog was also a problem at Bass Harbor.

We saw one other lighthouse on an island, also in Rhode Island. The final picture shows the Rose Island Light, which is on a small island close to the mainland. It shared Rose Island with a military installation in the days when families lived there. Actually, it doesn’t seem to have been a regular military base, but some officers were lodged on the island with their families. So that wasn’t as isolated as I wanted, either.

Still, I did get a peak at the loneliness the keepers and their families might have felt.

And it’s always good to feel the atmosphere before writing it.

A Tribute to Beverly Cleary

 

Beverly Cleary died in March, just short of her 105^th birthday. She was a classic children’s author who made it her mission to write about ordinary children with ordinary lives—and make everyone want to read those stories. That’s a real talent.

A professional children’s librarian, Beverly’s fiction was shaped by comments she heard from reluctant patrons. The boys, who were brought in by their teacher during school hours, weren’t interested in what the library had to offer. Instead, they asked where the books were “for kids like us.”  So when Beverly wrote her first book, Henry Huggins, she remembered incidents that had happened to boys she knew and changed them to fit the book.

Beverly’s second book was Ellen Tebbits. Today it is one of her lesser-known works, but not to me. Ellen Tebbits was one of the first books I owned as a child, purchasing it through the Scholastic Book Club at school. I loved it then, and I love it now.

Ellen Tebbits is a good example of how well Beverly fulfilled her mission. Ellen and I shared a similar experience, although mine occurred several years after I first read the book. In the first chapter, Ellen is desperate to keep her friends from finding out that her mother makes her wear woolen underwear. When I was in junior high, somebody noticed there were three straps under my blouse. The bra and slip straps were okay (many girls wore slips back then), but the third strap was an undershirt and the girls in my class laughed over it.

I just finished reading Beverly Cleary’s two memoirs, A Girl from Yamhill (through high school) and On My Own Two Feet (from college through marriage and the publication of her first book). Like with her fiction, she takes what was a relatively ordinary life and makes it interesting.

One amusing fact is her attitude towards reading at home. Her mother frequently read aloud to her, but Beverly refused to read to herself outside school. Because of a sub-par first-grade teacher and days missed due to illness, she could barely read when she started second grade. Her second-grade teacher quickly changed that, but Beverly still didn’t read at home.

Thanks to Miss Marius, I could read, but I refused to read outside of school.

“Everyone in our family has always loved to read,” said my puzzled mother. “I can’t understand why you won’t.”

Neither could I, but I felt reading should be confined to school and only when required.

Fortunately, she got bored one rainy Sunday afternoon during third grade, so she picked up a book and was hooked.

But I’m going to concentrate on several of the lessons that I and other writers can learn from her experience.

First was her determination to always try. In fourth grade, a store across from her school announced an essay contest, and many of her classmates said they were going to enter. I’m guessing Beverly’s essay was good, but that wasn’t the reason she won. Nobody else had even tried.

Similarly, she entered a Camp Fire Girls contest for a bulletin cover, and she “produced a cover of sorts. Once again I won a prize, not because my cover had any artistic merit, but because no one else entered the contest.”

As Beverly wrote after telling about the essay contest, “This incident was one of the most valuable lessons in writing I ever learned. Try! Others will talk about writing but may never get around to trying.”

During the writing process, Beverly tried to follow her mother’s advice to make it funny and keep it simple. And after her first book was published, she resolved to ignore all trends and not be influenced by money.

Anyone who is interested in writing for children, or simply wants to learn about children’s authors, should read A Girl from Yamhill and On My Own Two Feet. The last chapter of On My Own Two Feet, which talks about the process she used when writing Henry Huggins, is especially helpful for aspiring children’s authors.

So get out and read before you write.