Advent and Lighthouses

With scheduling conflicts and years when I was a simple attendee, it was 2012 before I decorated my second table for an Advent Tea. My theme was lighthouses, and that is my table in the photo at the head of this post.

The centerpiece was topped with a ceramic Big Red, the lighthouse at Holland, Michigan, which is displayed year-round in my living room. It has a light inside it, but I had no way to plug it in. For the tea, I surrounded Big Red with photos of other Lake Michigan lighthouses that I had taken on a sailing vacation the year before. I used my best dishes, and I suppose the set-up came close to being elegant, although that wasn’t my intent.

It was easy to tie the theme in with Advent since Jesus came as the Light of the World. To emphasize it, my favor that year was a laminated copy of my poem “The Lighthouse,” which I wrote in 2011. The poem follows:

The Lighthouse
 

A light has come to save the world,
            A lowly baby born,
It shines its beam on rocky shoals
            From evening until morn.
 
When storms of life beat on my boat,
            And winds begin to blow,
The beacon shines across the waves
            With its resplendent glow.
 
Mist and haze may hide the reefs,
            Clouding up my sight,
But though they blind my eyes at times,
            They cannot veil the light.
           
As lighthouse keeper I must go
            And rescue those in danger,
For one in peril on the sea
            Can never be a stranger.
 
The harbor light beams steady on
            Wherever I may roam,
A welcome blaze when life is done
            To guide me safely home.

 May His light shine on you this week

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.

What Do Lighthouses Have to Do With Christmas?

In John 8:12, Jesus says, "I am the light of the world." So when we commemorate Jesus' birth, we celebrate the Light.

The following poem is my take on the subject.






               The Lighthouse
                           by Kathryn Page Camp

A light has come to save the world,
     A lowly baby born,
It shines its beam on rocky shoals
     From evening until morn.

When storms of life beat on my boat
     And winds begin to blow,
The beacon shines across the waves
     With its resplendent glow.

Mist and haze may hide the reefs,
     Clouding up my sight,
But though they blind my eyes at times,
     They cannot veil the light.

As lighthouse keeper I must go
     And rescue those in danger,
For one in peril on the sea
     Can never be a stranger.

The harbor light beams steady on
     Wherever I may roam,
A welcome blaze when life is done
     To guide me safely home.

Lighting the Way

For centuries, lighthouses have warned sailors that they are close to land or a reef, keeping boats from running aground and joining the shipwreck statistics. Lighthouses are not only vital to the safety of water traffic but are also scenic. And they were one of the highlights of our sail up the eastern shores of Lake Michigan last month.

The original lights were called lighthouses because they provided lodging for the lighthouse keeper and his family. Back in those days, the keeper needed to be on the premises to trim the wicks, replenish the fuel that kept the light burning, and do other maintenance work. Now that the lights are automated, they no longer require a resident lighthouse keeper. The newer ones don't include a house but do make attractive additions to the landscape.

Lighthouses are more than that, though. Even with today's reliance on GPS and other modern inventions, these lights still shine through the dark and the fog to guide ships away from rocks and shoals and mark the entrances to rivers and harbors. And that's a good thing. Otherwise, I shudder to think were we would be if our GPS failed in low visibility.

During our trip, I noticed that each light has its own character. The picture at the top shows the Holland Harbor Lighthouse, affectionately nicknamed "Big Red."* None of the other lights we saw on our vacation had the same look as Big Red. Or the same look as any other light or group of lights. Even the three lights that were similar in shape and color were placed in different contexts.

The difference in character is part of their charm. At least that's my opinion. See if you agree.

St. Joseph North Pier Inner and Outer Lights

South Haven Pierhead Light (at the end of the pier)

Grand Haven South Pier and Pierhead Inner Lights

Coast Guard Station with Muskegon South Pier and Breakwater Light

White River Light Station--the only one no longer in operation

Little Sable Point Lighthouse

Ludington North Breakwater Light

Big Sable Point Lighthouse

Although South Haven, Grand Haven, and Muskegon all have round red silos on the south pier, those lights still have individual characters. The South Haven light stands a solitary vigil at the end of the pier, the Grand Haven light yields pride of place to the imposing building that houses a fog signal (as well as a light), and the Muskegon light stands sentinel between the Coast Guard Station and the breakwater light.

Unfortunately, the White River Light Station was the only place we went into. Although Big Sable and Little Sable are open to the public, they are only accessible by land, and they were both too far away to hike or bike. So we had to be satisfied with seeing them from the lake.

The way they were meant to be seen.

__________

* All pictures in this post are copyright 2011 by Kathryn Page Camp.