Double Bonus Issue AND Lighthouses

It's not often I get the chance to read a current news item about lighthouses.  It's not often either that I get to talk about why I think lighthouses are great.  But they are.

My family is long connected with the sea.  My other's father and brother and uncle and their male ancestors were all Danish merchant mariners, in their telling back to the vikings.  My brother is an accomplished surfer, fisherman, diver, paddleboarder ... a waterman.  Me, well I need a daily dose of water as well.

When I lived further north, in a city very much wetter than this city of angels, I read an wrote about a lighthouse I could see on the rare clear day from the surf lineup south of the Columbia river.  It looks something like this:

I hear it's been taken out of service and that you can get your ashes placed there for eternity.  Nice.  But I'd rather just have it as a working lighthouse.  The death of the lighthouse service by the automation of the lamps is a story of early obsolescence.  I wish lighthouses were not obsolete - in the way I wish morse code, map reading and surveying with steel tape and marking pins wasn't.  Some day we regret not having mourn the skill it takes to do things.

Also, another lighthouse I am very familiar with is near my home town:

But for sheer beauty (in the sense that a feat of engineering can be beautiful), for its sturdiness and remoteness, for its winning locale, this one has to take the prize:

From the year end Economist:

"Lighthouse engineers may be painstakingly conservative, but lighthouse keepers are just as likely to be unusual.  On duty they have any number of tasks to fulfil, but off-duty there are many empty hours to fill.  These might have been spent watching storms build up, fishing reading, or making ships in bottles.  Dick O'Driscoll [one of his distant cousins still owes me money lent in high-school], a keeper who spent 14 years on the rock ... recalls morsemen in the lighthouse and on shore became so adept that they would flash messages - even chess moves - to each other in the coulds.  For exercise, he would string a rope from the seventh-floor balcony and climb down hand over hand with no safety harness.  "What did we do?  Sometimes we'd sit.  More times we'd sit and think"....

Lovely

"Kathleen Lynch, a young lady from Cape Clear whose talent for "hearing the weather" eventually made her invaluable to relief ships and helicopters servicing the lighthouse, also rowed out to it as a teenager  "Once there, the lads would leap out and set to operating the crane and its basket.  They'd lift the girls from the boat right onto the rock.  And then they'd dance Cape CLear sets, two opposite two, and do slides, a young man squeezing the box for all he was worth away out there in the middle of the sea."

Hearing the weather ... they leapt out.  I bet she did and I bet they did as well.   Could there be anything more grand than a young girl in a rowboat out to dance with the boys on the rock?