The Sound of Light

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The Chesapeake Bay's Floating Treasures

The offshore working lighthouses along the Chesapeake Bay provide sights and sounds unique to the region.

» LAUNCH PHOTO GALLERY

Even though they are private owners, Jefferies and his partners are committed to restoring Baltimore light and sharing it with the public through guided tours, launched this summer, and future educational programs. In his off hours, Jefferies, who has a stocked workshop on the lowest level, plans on more puttering and major repairs, and as most lightkeepers know, he says, it's a great place to listen to music. Jefferies's pick? "There's only one logical choice," he says, "Jimmy Buffett."

With a little imagination, or money, we could be in Paris. That would make our boat a floating cafe, a barge winding along the Seine. "Then this would be the Eiffel Tower," says Rose Tate, super casual in her sneakers and baggy khakis. She's talking loudly over the engine, standing next to me as we head northeast toward Sharps Island Lighthouse. True, the lighthouse does have some graceful iron work, filigree, a rusted railing. Rose and her husband, Al, are economizing this year in their travels as they juggle the care of elderly parents and demanding jobs. Mike and Liberty Hayes nod when they hear this. They balked at fares to Europe this season, ditched plans to visit Paris and instead drove from Silver Spring to Tilghman Island. Says Liberty: "It's cheaper than Paris. And we can be closer to nature and help out our local state."

There's no "For Sale" sign, but the Sharps Island light is being auctioned online by the federal government. Richards slows his engine and circles the concrete caisson. It looms like something lost on the sea floor, rising up for a last gasp of air. The deck railings and ladders are drizzled with rust and blistered, peeling paint. There are veins of cracked concrete, and like all the offshore lighthouses we've circled on this half-day tour, shiny solar panels are stuck to the roof like Chiclets. It is abandoned, but there is at least one sign of life: a large twiggy nest, home to a family of ospreys.

Here, at the confluence of the Choptank River and the bay, as the sun slips behind a cloud, the water is cast slate gray. In the nearby shallows, rows of pilings are hung with fishing nets, and a strong current moves along the surface. There are no pleasure craft, no workboats. Even Sharps Island isn't here, having long been drowned underwater (since 1940). But the lighthouse remains.

The captain reads my mind. "I've heard it called the Leaning Tower of the Chesapeake," he says. There's a history of tilting here, where the Chesapeake winters can be severe. A troublesome mix of ice and tides has taken a toll. In 1881, ice floes twisted and severed a previous cottage-style lighthouse from the tie rods and carried it five miles, with the keepers inside. "When it finally ran aground," Richards says, "they managed to save the Fresnel lens and the books in the library, and walk away unharmed." It was replaced in 1881-82 by the concrete caisson before us. During the winter of 1976, the bay froze solid, and winds and tides shoved a 40-foot ice floe against this lighthouse until the caisson gave way, tilting 15 degrees. It hasn't budged since.

"Hey, it looks like a great place to spend the night," says a young fellow, crouched on the bow. "Give us a few drinks, and we could straighten it."

It's hard to live near a lighthouse and not be forever under its spell. After all these years, I climb the spiral wooden stairs to the second level of Thomas Point light, just beneath the lantern room, which houses the lens, powered by the solar panels installed in 1997. I am ready to see the bellowing horn I've always heard. I pass a tall keyhole-shaped opening with views of the bay's blue waters; a fog bell once hung here and was rung by hand well into the 1900s, until a submarine cable provided electricity to the lighthouse.

I nearly bang my nose on a clear Lucite wall. I peer through it for a huge horn, something uplifting and grand. Elbow to elbow, we gather like eager parents gazing through a window to an intensive-care nursery, trying to figure out where the baby is.

I see a few wires tracing inside from the solar panels on the roof to a large apparatus of delicate instrumentation that records the weather, replacing the weather reports that keepers radioed in almost hourly. Thomas Point light is a marine weather station for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and, being offshore from the Annapolis Coast Guard Station, is also a point of reference for Coast Guard search-and-rescue operations. I stare at the wires, still set on finding a rotund metal horn, but it doesn't exist. Instead, a large box that houses high-tech aid-to-navigation sensors also houses a mechanism that triggers the sound of the foghorn. The fog instrumentation was installed in the mid 1980s, replacing the lightkeepers and the foghorn that Brosius switched on and off, the one he said "was bigger than a boat horn, for sure." I feel like I've been duped by an old childhood friend.

The fog detector is a solar-powered model so sensitive to humidity that it triggers a bellowing horn blast even in summer haze or sunlight. "It detects moisture in the air even if there is sunlight," says our guide. It can also sound in fog, rain, snow or air pollution.

Before the era of solar-powered automation, a keeper simply relied on his eyes. "If I couldn't see land, the tip of Thomas Point itself, then I turned on the foghorn," I recall Brosius telling me.

Some 30 feet away, a glossy white whaler drifts. A bulky fellow in a loose T-shirt standing at the stern casts his line, takes a sip from his beer. His whole body is attuned to the rhythm of the waves; he stands and sips, rising and falling with his boat. I recall how keepers like Brosius were "always dropping a hook" here to fill long silent hours, and I hear his words: "You have to love being alone."

Our group climbs back in the boat. As we leave the rocky crevices and swift currents behind, the wind has quieted. Our craft picks up speed, heading west, and the silhouette of the lighthouse on the horizon evaporates. I take a last look over my shoulder, comforted at least by the fact that the familiar sound of Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse's foghorn will continue. A seasoned mariner who has piloted boats around the world once told me that he remembered, when sailing up the bay after a long trip on the ocean, the relief he felt once near Thomas Point light. "Even with sophisticated GPS onboard, it's a comfort. The sound of the horn, especially. I know I'm home."

Patricia E. Dempsey is a writer and editor living in Annapolis. She last wrote for the Magazine about Venice. She can be reached at dmpsey@aol.com.