Lighthouses Are Not Romantic

Somebody is going to buy a calendar this year with a lighthouse on it. A white tower, a red roof, a tidy little keeper’s house, a sky doing something forgivable. It will hang in a kitchen and mean peace, or simplicity, or the good clean life by the sea that we would all be living if things had gone differently, and every month of it will be a small lie, because a lighthouse is not a symbol of peace. A lighthouse is a scream, made permanent, at exactly the place where the most people drowned.

I say this as someone who loves the coast, not as someone who is above it. But I have grown tired of the postcard, and the postcard is doing real damage, because it has convinced people that the edge of the Atlantic is a soothing place, and the edge of the Atlantic is a machine for killing sailors, and the lighthouse is the coast’s own honest confession of that fact, if you know how to read it.

Where the light goes

Here is the thing to understand, the thing the calendar leaves out: you do not build a lighthouse where the view is nice. You build it where the ships die.

A light on a headland is a grave marker in advance. It is placed, at enormous expense and often at the cost of the lives of the people who built and kept it, at the specific rocks, the specific shoals, the specific fog-blind approach where enough vessels had already been torn open that somebody in an office decided the drowning had to be made to stop. Every one of those pretty towers is standing on a body count. The prettiness is not the point of it. The prettiness is what we did to it afterward, once the danger had been outsourced to satellites and we no longer had to think about what it was for.

And nowhere is the danger more total than off this coast, because we happen to live beside the foggiest place on earth. That is not a figure of speech. Out on the Grand Banks, where the cold Labrador current slides down from the north and meets the warm wet air riding up on the Gulf Stream, the moisture condenses the instant the two touch, and the fog comes down like a dropped sheet — something on the order of two hundred days a year of a sea you cannot see across. A lighthouse is a light, and a light is a thing you see, and for two hundred days a year, out where it matters most, you can’t see anything at all.

Which is why the coast had to learn to make a sound.

The scream

The foghorn is the part of the story nobody puts on a calendar, and it is the truest part.

When the fog takes the light, the light is useless, and a useless warning is worse than none, so the coast reached for the one sense the fog cannot smother, and it built machines to shout. The first automatic steam foghorn was invented — and I take a certain grim national pride in this — by a Scotsman in Saint John, New Brunswick, named Robert Foulis, who is said to have worked it out one foggy night when he heard his daughter playing the piano at a distance and noticed that the low notes carried and the high ones didn’t. So he designed a low, mournful, deliberately sorrowful note, pitched to travel through exactly the blindness that was killing people, and it was built on an island in 1859, and then, in the way these stories always seem to go, another man took the credit, and Foulis was eventually vindicated and never made a penny and died poor. The man who invented the sound that saved sailors died broke and uncredited in Saint John. Put that on a calendar.

Stand near a working foghorn sometime, if you can still find one, and you will understand that it was never charming. It is enormous, and it is grief-coloured, and it goes through you. It is a sound that means, precisely: I am here, and I cannot see you either, and I am telling you where the rocks are because it is the only thing I can do for you from this distance. It is the coast’s voice for its own danger, and it is not soothing, and it was never meant to be.

The coast is losing its voice

And now the foghorns are going silent, which is the last thing the calendar will never tell you.

Radar happened. Then GPS happened. A ship can now find the rocks in perfect fog without any help from a light or a horn, and so the international bodies that oversee these things have declared, in the flat language such bodies use, that fog signals are “no longer necessary for the needs of navigation,” and one by one the horns have been switched off. The keepers went first, decades ago, when the lights were automated and there was no longer a human being living at the edge to tend the danger. Now the horns follow. The coast is being quietly relieved of its voice, because we have built better ways of not dying, which is genuinely good, and which is also a kind of loss that people did not expect to feel until the sound was gone and they found they missed it more than they could explain.

That, in the end, is why I can’t stand the romantic version. Not because it’s pretty. Because it’s a lie of omission, and the truth is so much better. The truth is that people who lived by a sea that killed them built towers and machines to warn each other, at terrible cost, out of nothing but the refusal to let the next ship go down without at least a light and a sound to say not here, turn, we lost people on these rocks and we will not lose you too. That is not peace. That is love, of the hard coastal kind that doesn’t say the word. Keep the calendar if you like. But know that the little white tower is standing on the drowned, and that the sound it used to make was the most honest thing this coast ever said out loud.