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Bringing the Lantern Home: Avery Point Tower Once Again Looks Like a Lighthouse
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Jones, Stephen G. |
| Copyright Year | 2006 |
| Abstract | It is truth universally accepted that a lighthouse works best when it does not move. This was a belief that I myself adhered to when I was hanging onto the inside of an off-shore light station during the shakes and shivers of a three-day storm of March 1961, a gale now known as the Mid-Atlantic Storm of the Century. In the many years since, I’ve often felt a disconnect between events of that time and the subsequent lighthouse craze with its tchotchkes, sweatshirts and even my own literary attempts to render the experience. It was a welcome surprise then one day in mid-October when I was involved in moving a lighthouse some eleven miles over water from Willow Point, West Mystic to Avery Point. The sun shone. The sea was calm. Only the day before, Long Island Sound had been scruffed up by a head sea which would have converted the low bow of our 1950’s oyster boat into a battering ram that would have sent spray and maybe solid water over the lantern. This day our only challenge was from the enthusiastic wakes of our well-meaning escort boats. At ten knots, the Chief bore the lantern from the workshop to her ultimate home in a little under two hours. The duration of the journey seemed much shorter. The squat steel tugboat had been conceived in pure utility in the 1960’s at Blue Point, Long Island as a shellfish dredge. More recently Chief had seen service employed to push loaded barges from Boston’s Big Dig out to the harbor spoils islands. On this day, however, though her mission was equally utilitarian, the old steel tub seemed to glide across the mirror of the sea within an aesthetic nimbus. My shipmate, lighthouse constructor Jim Wesolowski, characterized our deck load as “a great Fabergé Easter egg.” To be more precise this was not the entire lighthouse, but merely its raison d’être, the lantern. To some, lantern suggests the light itself, that is the bulb, or in the old days the wick. The lantern, however, is actually the house around the light, the pumpkin around the candle in the jack o’ lantern. Originally designed to harmonize with the garden gazebo of Avery Point’s seignior, Morton Plant, the lantern was indeed a jewel. The elegant octagon of mahogany and curved glass set in arched, triple moldings was topped by a copper roof sweeping up like a great candy kiss to the gold-leafed finial vent ball itself surmounted by the spike of its lightning rod. Bringing the Lantern Home |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://opencommons.uconn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=wracklines&httpsredir=1&referer= |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://media.ctseagrant.uconn.edu/publications/magazines/wracklines/fallwinter05/lantern.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
