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.
No comments:
Post a Comment