The Lighthouse

It is no wonder that our maritime ancestors personified the Sea.  “The Sea gives but the Sea will have what the Sea must have”, it was said.  Certainly the Sea must have been the Creator’s Crucible in the Creation of life on this glorious biosphere. 

My first encounter with the Sea was one of trepidation.  A leviathan confronted me, grey as chain mail and gloomy as a winter fog and bellicose. The roar of the waves was almost deafening.  The wild wind-tossed salt spray was biting and bitter.  Looming larger than any land lubber ‘s wild imagining, crashing over rocky embankments and curling in great arabesques against the sea wall, the incredible power and immensity of the waves were evident to insignificant little me.  All the romance and beauty envisioned in the mind’s eye fades in an instant when confronted by an “angry sea”.

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“This road is closed” said the officer dressed in a sou’wester.

Though our retreat was made in haste I did not fail to take particular notice of the lofty pillar precariously perched on the edge of the earth.   Its lonely horn sounding out above the roar of the towering waves, its beacon flickering in candle power, a symbol of the ages to mariners the world over.

 Though presently automated, for the greater part of history the lonely outpost on a precipice or ledge or tiny isle or atoll would have be occupied and operated by a keeper.

An individual made of stalwart stuff, willing to embrace the solitude and ruggedness of the location was the ideal candidate for the job.  The keeper would have been required to maintain the lamps, haul the fuel for the lamps, (the spiraling climb alone, exhausting) clean the lenses, remain awake for the entire night to tend the lamps and cover the lantern windows at day break.  The remarkably powerful Fresnel lenses could easily magnify the sun’s rays and set the light house ablaze during day light hours and thus it was imperative to block out the sunlight.  The keeper could not permit himself to nod out at the break of dawn after a long night’s watch.  If there was a storm, if a ship was in peril, the keeper would risk his life and brave the onslaught to help survivors of the wreck.  Of heroes, the stories abound.  

Somehow the job appeals to the fanciful side of me.  As one of the characters in Dicken’s Pickwick papers put it “Anythin for a quiet life...when he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.”

The storm subsided and the following day brought beach combers and swimmers back to the sea side.  How altogether different was the sea from my first encounter, the azure expanse meeting a cerulean sky, the lapping of the waves, the mysterious little creatures of the tidal pools,  the gulls wheeling and on the distant point, the lighthouse touched by a rainbow.  

Evening descended, the beach revelers had gone home, the tide had come in and on the quiet surf was phosphorescence.  Droplets of pure light, more numerous than the stars in the sky.   Swept in on the surf, each wave was dappled with the luminous star dust only to fade upon the shore in the twinkling of an eye. 

 I witnessed a summer wonder and somehow I fell in love with the sea.  The keeper’s situation seemed more appealing than ever.  The stark solitude, the beauty, the setting, the romance, the lore, they call out from times past and “...and the sea will have what the sea must have”.

Looking for a lighthouse posting.