Everyone has one.  They feel their life has become a metaphor that, though they are nothing alike it reality, in the most basic of ways they are the same.  Grief for example has been given metaphors based in climbing a mountain or drowning at sea, or going around and around on a ride that seems to be going in a straight line but somehow manages to show you some of the same scenery over and over.

No matter what joys or tragedies have been brought to my life, I have associated it with and felt drawn to lighthouses.  I’ve always felt a little on the outside of things looking back toward the more elaborately lived lives onshore.  I'm not a loud person.  I am a quiet observer, getting involved in times of trouble rather than being the first person invited to a party, and most definitely not the life of the party.  I'm the rock that most people cling to.  Even now while I am grieving.  I'm told it is because I have deep thoughts that open up doors others have missed.  I received an email from a woman who said reading of my grief gave her new eyes to her own husband.  She stopped taking him for granted and has worked to renew her attraction for him.

I cry and grieve, but who doesn't at times?  I search.  I look for meaning and the words to bring light to my small life and the larger, more important to me, life of my husband.  Don't misconstrue.  I’m not complaining that I have a small life.  Like the lighthouse keeper who kept vigil so far away from the masses of humanity, yet whose job was so very important, I feel like I'm doing some good.  I'm the maker of the Memory Quilts.  To do that, I need to be alone with my thoughts and with the stories of the ones who grieve.  I’d rather be on an island offshore than in the maelstrom of stress and fast paced lives that seem so chaotic that sitting and thinking might be considered a waste of time.  I’d rather be in my lighthouse.

Lighthouses catch some of the most awe-inspiring aspects of the ocean.  There can be immense loneliness but there can also be intensely spiritual connections made.  From the isolation of a lighthouse one can see the insignificance of our existence as a means of keeping the ego under control.  But one can also see the importance of our existence by way of doing one small thing that matters to so many, like the lighthouse keeper making sure the lamp stayed lit.

I know lighthouses are mostly automated now and only a handful are inhabited by members of the United States Coast Guard and their equivalent in a few lighthouses along the coastlines of other countries.  There is no need for that solitary figure rushing up the spiral stairs during a violent storm valiantly trying to keep the lamp burning, saving mariners fighting the wild gales during the long hours of the night.  Such a romantic and melancholy concept.  Yet that is what once was everyday life on these islands for the men and any family they took with them during the length of their assignments.  Ghost stories aside, just the everyday existence of life offshore is a worthy read.

I think I would like living in a lighthouse.  I would enjoy the hours spent in the middle of some of nature's calmest and also wilder moments.  The serenity of a quiet ocean can be thought of as the visual definition of peace in the soul.  The violence of a storm, the rogue waves that can slam into the rocks and rising lighthouses can rectify any illusions of a boring life having no meaning.

I was caught out in a harsh March snowstorm once, heavy rollers cutting me off from the safety of the mainland.  Stuck out on my precarious perch taking photographs without the good sense to keep checking the storm forced early rising high tide put me in a dangerous situation.  Slipping on wet granite, sliding into crevices, getting soaked by near freezing salt water, and not having the luxury of time to be scared, I kept up the mantra of Eddie Akiau, "Eddie Would Go."  I wanted to go home.  I wanted to be back in my husband's arms.  I took off my windbreaker from under my winter coat and wrapped my camera in it.  Hands high, I slid off the rocks and into the rising water that was now waist high, and so cold.  My feet were slipping on the smaller rocks hidden by the churning water.  I kept my eyes on the rocks rising out of the water just 15 feet or so in front of me and on the rollars that were streaking to the shoreline of my cove.  If they hit hard against the rocks to my right, I would be nailed since that was the curve of the cove and the physics of water.

Then an arm was around my waist and a loud voice trying to rise above the turmoil of the crashing waves, trying to be heard.

"I can't let you go anywhere can I?" He was laughing.  How he could laugh was always a mystery to me and what made him my husband.  "For a such a quiet soul, you can get into more trouble.  Gotta call in the Marines." 

He was strong and steady and he easily got me up and onto the rocks, and back up on the heavy earth that made up the shoreline of our cove.  I laid there exhausted and he knelt beside me letting me rest.  The waves were deafening while the snowflakes fell like bits of silent, wet cotton.  He let me rest, then got me up and moving back up the rise and to home.

He wasn't mad then nor later.  He never got mad at me.  I would ask and he would look at me and say, "Honey, you just live in your own world sometimes and I love you for it.  I should have gone with you.  But I can never be mad at you for who you are.  Now that you're warm enough, come upload your pictures.  Show me what you saw."

I have my favorite locations of remote lighthouses.  I would love to travel to each one, to see them with my own eyes.  For now, I travel on the Internet and through books.  Maybe one of you who read this hub have been to one of these places, seen these solitary sentinels for yourselves.  I envy you if you have.  But these favorites of mine are the ones that I see, for my life now, as the perfect places to pass the long drawn out moments of time already spent alone to paint, read, photograph the ocean’s waves, and to write.  I'll just have to be careful and remember that my Marine can't reach out a hand to save me if I get into trouble.  Some of these places are very wonderfully remote and dangerous places to put a wrong foot.

The Ar Men lighthouse was built under horrendous conditions on rocks that were submerged at high tide.  The height of the rock it is built on is not quite 5 feet out of the water at low tide.  Work was started in 1870 and took 14 years to complete.  During the year 1873, the men could only work 6 hours a day.  It is located at the far end of a chain of small islands off Brittany, France.  It has been batter by waves in excess of 100 feet and a great many photographers gravitate here to capture some of nature's wildest waves.

La Corviere light is out on a bit of rock in the extreme southwest part of Jersey, St. Brelade, the Channel Islands.  The name loosely means "a place where crows gather."  This stretch of water has extreme tidal variations that have plague mariners for centuries.  The lighthouse is one of the most photographed and a congregating point for sunset lovers.  It was lit for the first time in April, 1874.  It is 62 feet tall and stands 119 feet above the spring high tides.  The beam of light reaches out 18 nautical miles.  Automated in 1976, it only has the maintenance visitors climbing up to its door but I would personally love to spend a year here.

Phare de la Vieille is the lighthouse in the same chain of islands off the coast of Brittany, France with the Ar Men.  It is the light nearest the coast.  What makes this light so interesting to me was the fact that there was a delay in its automation due to the protest by it's lighthouse keepers on site refusing to carry out the task.

This lighthouse was difficult to build because this part of the sea has violent currents that range from 6 to 15 knots that surround the rock it is built on, Gorlebella.  There are also very few sheltered locations and they are only accessible for a short period of time.  The engineer in charge of La Vieille's construction figured on work taking place for only 5 months out of each year.

Though it is not as far out from shore as Ar Men, this lighthouse for me has wonderful stories of the struggles to build it, and the men who lived in it before automation.

A lightouse just outside of Boston Harbor on Cohasset Rocks, Scituate, Massachusetts.  It was first lit on January 1, 1850 and it's first keeper was Isaac Dunham.  The legend goes that Isaac's assistant, his son, had a pet cat and that the cat was so agitated by life lived in the unsteady tower that it jumped to its death.  The feeling of insecurity was felt by the light's keepers as well and the Dunham's quit the light after only 10 months.

The second keeper, John Bennet's, feelings of the light fared no better.  He threw a message in a bottle into the waves in October of 1850 that declared "Our situation is perilous.  If anything happens.....,we have no hope of escape.  But I shall, if it e God's will, die in performance of my duty."

In April 1852, an enormous storm struck with the light of the Minot lasta being seen on a Wednesday night.  The keeper was on shore at the time of the storm having left his two assistants with the light.  They were killed when the light rolled into the sea.  Only a few bent pilings were found on the rocks and a note in a bottle by a Gloucester fisherman.  The note simply read:  The lighthouse won't stand over to night.  She shakes 2 feet each way now."

The present light was built and lit on November 15, 1860 and was the United States most expensive lighthouse in history at a cost of $300,000.

Today Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands offers cruises out to Minot's Ledge Light.  It is a lonely and beautiful location.  I prefer looking east out to the Atlantic but many people love to sail out there to watch the sun set over Boston and the surrounding communities to the south.

Saddleback Ledge Lighthouse in near Vinalhaven, Maine in Isle au Haut Bay.  It sits on rock that sticks up 25 to 30 feet out of the water with the sea raging against it on all sides.  The light keepers first lived inside the tower itself until a wooden building was built attached to the tower.  They also lived there with their families and made $450 a year.  They had to bring their fresh water across 7 miles of salt water to the island and there was no ventilator for the kitchen smoke pipe.  The keeper could not keep his own little sail boat due to the islands conditions.  There were two bedrooms and a living room inside the tower for the keeper and his family along with a small cellar.  The first keeper, Watson Hopkins lived there in 1842 with his pregnant wife, Abigail, and seven children.  Abigail gave birth out on Saddleback to a baby girl.  It is written in Isle au Haut history that a boat came for the mother and new baby to take them to the mainland.  During the transfer to the boat, the infant was dropped into the icy waves and quickly grabbed before serious harm was done.  Her name was Margaret Hopkins who latter married a Civil War veteran, William Kitteridge.  She lived to the age of 86.

Nothing stays well on Saddleback.  Iron rusts.  Wooden buildings rot.  There is no soil to plant anything and though soil was brought in for the purpose of gardening fresh vegetables for the keepers, the winter storms would always wash it away.

Saddleback is extremely difficult ot land on but as there is nothing to do on the island only the storms, I guess, provide entertainment.  But I like storms.  And the light still stands though everything else built on this rock has been washed away.

Skerryvore is a magnificent lighthouse that was built on a dangerous reef of rocks off the Hebrides, Scotland.  It's light can been seen from some 23 miles away and was established in 1844.  There is a helipad built now on the island for maintenance with 151 steps to take these caretakers to the top of the light which at 156 feet is the tallest lighthouse in the United Kingdom.

With the hazards of the reefs that surround the lighthouse, landings are near impossible.  One access point is at a small place called Riston's Gully which intersects the rock near the tower.  A system of ropes were installed as unaided landings had been described as "like climbing up the side of a bottle."

Skerryvore is located in one of the stormiest parts of Scotland.  Statistics were kept from 1881 until 1890 and showed 542 storms lasting 14,211 hours with one keeper losing his hearing for several weeks after a lightening strike threw him through the entrance door.

Such adverse conditions warranted the keepers receiving additional payments but the remoteness and the storms proved time and time again that Skerryvore was suited for veterans keepers only. John Muir, the Scottish born - American naturalist served as a keeper for 39 years and had a posting to Skerryvore from 1902 until 1914.  He baked his own bread and scones and made an inlaid table while there.

My island, as I came to think of it, is Straitsmouth Island a stone's throw off Gap Head in Rockport, Massacusetts.  I did a year long photographic study of Straitsmouth and grew to love the loneliness of it.  It is owned by the Audubon Society who do not allow anyone to walk on the island,  Teenagers sometimes do but only along one or two places that a boat can be pulled up to.  The better vessel to use is a kayak.  It has long been bashed by storm waves and the keeper's house is abandoned.  By in the late 1990's, a couple of brothers tried to renovate the keeper's house but the rats and birds refused to allow it.  Also vandalism from passing boats using rifles to shoot out the newly installed window were a depressing deterrent to the two men trying to reclaim the island.

To me, standing on all the points along Rockport to photograph the island, I fell in love with it.  I've written a book about it that I am trying to peddle, fiction that includes the ghost stories of the place.

In my heart I always called the island Isla womanNshadows.  My husband had looked into the harbormaster taking us out there, permission, not wanting to get into trouble with anyone, and no one would take us, or give permission.  If anyone is seen out there, we were told the Coast Guard is called and legal action is taken.  Yet with all this protection nothing is done on the island.  The keeper's house is falling down.  All the money spent for upkeep goes to Thatcher Island.  Straitsmouth has been abandoned  unless something goes wrong with the fog horn or the light.

It's a perfect metaphor for many things in people's lives.  It's the perfect metaphor for my life.  I would love to go back, buy the island, the whole thing, and live out there.  I would see all the storms first, coming up from the southeast and the treacherous nor'easters that bear down.  The stars would be uncountable and the full moon, the moon that marks each month since my husband died would be very visible.  It would be the perfect place for me to retire to.  I could still make the Memory Quilts but I could also let my dogs run free, confined by the rocks and water.  I would be freer out there.  And I would be close to the light that reaches out through the night, an afterthought now with all the technology beeping out from the beacon buoys that mark the selvages.  But it's still a light in the dark and I have always liked that metaphor.