The Sound of Light
Throughout her childhood, she could hear the foghorn of the lighthouse through her bedroom window. Now she had a chance to finally see it.

By Patricia E. Dempsey
Sunday, September 14, 2008

Sailing on a clear evening near Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse in 1980, you might have heard "The Gong Show" wafting out from the lightkeeper's quarters. The show was a favorite of lightkeeper Joe Brosius, a young Coast Guard recruit who was stationed at Thomas Point with a singular mission: "to keep the light on." This was in the waning days of the Coast Guard's manning of the bay's lighthouses; by 1986, all of the Chesapeake's lighthouses were automated, with Thomas Point being the last to make the switch. Today, this lighthouse, much admired for its design -- a red-roofed, white-clapboard cottage perched near the mouth of the South River -- has opened its door so that curious travelers like me can go inside.

I hoist myself up through the hatch. Standing on the lighthouse deck, it's hard to imagine that Brosius could hear the sound of his own voice, much less a television. A 15-knot wind whips around me. Waves smash from all directions against the rocks stacked high to buttress the "spider legs" of the lighthouse's screw-pile design -- cast-iron tie rods crisscross to support the 100-year-old cottage, anchored on pilings that have been driven deep into the soft bottom. The deck creaks; whitecaps slap, sending plumes of water into the air. I can barely hear the humming chug of a tug nosing a barge up the bay.

Some 30 yards beyond the rocks, waves slop across a large cast-iron wedge shaped like a harpoon head. This icebreaker points like a spear in the direction of tidal ice floes. In 1877, ice plowed into the Thomas Point lighthouse, shaking the structure, tipping over the lantern, spilling 200 gallons of oil. The keeper, a Civil War veteran, managed to escape in a rowboat. The lighthouse was repaired, and the icebreaker added, but freezing temperatures put even a modern keeper on edge. Brosius, now 50, who spoke to me from his home in North Carolina, remembers it well: "I could only go outside to check the ice for a little while. I had a small heater inside, but in a 100-year-old building, how warm could it get? So I was cold, hearing ice piling up on the rocks because of the tides pushing it. When the tide was going out, the ice was piling up from the north; when the tide came in, it piled up from the south. Yeah, there was an icebreaker, but still you worried."

Before 1939, when the Coast Guard began managing the nation's lighthouses, nearly half of a keeper's time was spent cleaning, polishing, scraping and painting. He or she wiped soot and grime off the lanterns, a residue of the whale and porpoise oil, and in later years kerosene, that lit them. The keeper also waged battle against the salt spray that corroded brass and paint and the gull guano that threatened the only source of potable water -- rain from the roof collected in a cistern. By the time Brosius was stationed at Thomas Point, the workload had softened considerably. The Coast Guard delivered fresh water in tanks, so Brosius had to scrub gull guano from the roof only when the clean water supply ran low. Also, the electric lanterns burned clean. Brosius, who shared his station with another keeper ("He was a biker and hated it; he missed riding the open roads"), says he spent about four hours during his solitary 12-hour watch cleaning -- mostly dusting the light and wiping the salt spray off the windows in the lantern room.

"I'd start my watch at midnight and by morning be in the lantern tower, watching the sunrise and reading, later listening to music on my eight-track. Jimmy Buffett's 'Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes' was the soundtrack of my life."

The wind gusts and flips off my visor as I stand on the deck watching the last two in our group climb up. We climbed from the boat to the dock to the supply platform beneath the lighthouse, then up the ladder onto this wooden deck that circles the hexagonal cottage.

"Does this lighthouse have a foghorn?" a huffing middle-aged woman asks, her bright-red hooded head rising up through the deck's hatch. "Will we get to hear it?" Our docent is out of earshot, but I'm eager for his answer -- after all, the foghorn is why I am here. As I grew up on a beach about a mile north of Thomas Point, the foghorn bellowed year-round. It still does.

MMuuu-o-o-o. That sound. I close my eyes and imagine the foghorn blasting through the cottage, causing it to rattle and shimmy like Jell-O or a vase teetering in an earthquake. Brosius told me he learned to sleep through it. "Loud. Loud. It was loud. I could feel it -- the sound. Being so old, the whole structure would shake and vibrate. But I learned to sleep through the foghorn when I was off my watch. You get used to it."

I never got used to it. Never slept through it, even almost a mile away. Its low hooting traveled to my bedroom window, letting me know the fog had drifted in thick as cream. The foghorn sounded a warning to mariners. Stay away. Danger. But to me it beckoned.

I've wanted to perch on the top floor of this lighthouse since I was a kid. I imagined that the foghorn was manned by a troll-like keeper with sinewy, tattooed arms and unsavory sea stories, but by the time I'd grown up, I discovered that the keepers were long gone, replaced by automated lights and foghorns. Yet the mystique of this lighthouse lingered.

As a kid, I visited lighthouses on land. We drove to lighthouses near Chincoteague, Va., and St. Michaels, but Thomas Point light, a mile and a half offshore amid strong currents, was unlike the lights on land: It had a foghorn. And by the time I was a young teen in the early 70s, I could try to travel there on my own, without parents at the helm. I taped nautical charts on the walls, filled my room with the clove scent of permanent markers circling lighthouses that line the bay's shipping channels, tracing a route to Thomas Point light. My head was full of tales from books and teachers who told me about Chesapeake lighthouses -- an alleged murder at Holland Island Bar Lighthouse in the 1930s linked to rumrunners; paranormal sounds and sights at Point Lookout light, which is on the grounds of a Civil War prison; another, Turkey Point light, manned by a woman; another wracked by fuel tank explosions. Fog and heavy weather sometimes sent stranded boaters banging on our back door for help; as rain dripped from their neon yellow slickers, they'd tell of a craft they saw scuttled -- "near Thomas Point." I wanted to join the rescue.

I was determined to cross the water to get there. I made many attempts: A homemade raft I launched early one spring made it several yards beyond a red channel marker, then sank. The following summer, my brother got his boater's license and skiff, and we circled a "spider buoy," the remains of a lighthouse that once marked Greenbury Point Shoal, but we never ventured into the deep shipping channels, wary of the rolling wakes of cruise ships, tankers and barges. We never went that extra mile south into the whipping wind to Thomas Point light, where, in our inexperienced hands, we were sure the skiff's hull would bob in the breaking waves and smack against the rocks. I just couldn't get close enough.

Until now. Crammed on the narrow deck, amid smells of seaweed, suntan lotion and salt spray, we're a rumpled collage of baseball caps, hooded sweat shirts, windbreakers and sunglasses. One rotund fellow wears a khaki vest dotted with some 50 patches from lighthouses he has visited; another, a tall elderly gentleman, is ready for the elements in head-to-toe L.L. Bean. He nods my way. Thomas "Buck" Worthington is something of a world traveler who, it seems, has come home.

"The last time I was here, I was a boy," he shouts over the wind. "I used to ride on the keeper's launch, tucked in with the supplies and food. The launch left from the closest tip of land" -- he extends his arm south to the shoreline that is more than a mile away, where a mix of sagging bungalows and post-Hurricane Isabel renovations hug the water's edge. "They'd go out twice a day. Things were casual back then," he says. Worthington is a 10th-generation Annapolitan, who has long ties to the Arundel on the Bay neighborhood near Thomas Point. The lighthouse, he says, hasn't changed much, but the temperatures have. "My father and grandfather walked from Arundel on the Bay on the ice to Thomas Point light." He shrugs wistfully. "You're not going to see that again."

Ed Blanco and his wife, Omara, left their home in Miami in a hurry when they heard that visitors could now go inside an offshore working lighthouse. "We jumped on it," says Ed. "We got leave from work to come north. Came up Wednesday night, and go home Monday." In addition to Thomas Point, they will visit at least four other Chesapeake Bay lighthouses. This kind of obsession makes them "wickies."

A century ago, "wickie" referred to a lightkeeper who trimmed the wick to keep the oil lamps lit. Today it means hard-core lighthouse enthusiasts. Wickies are trivia buffs, taking note of every fact and figure in a lighthouse's history; some travel the world to as many lighthouses as possible and share their findings at local and national lighthouse events. As the woman in the bright red hoodie puts it, "They bring notepads and pens."

I confide to the group a dull truth about my life: I have never been inside an offshore working lighthouse. Ed Blanco flashes a look of charitable concern and says, "I guess that makes you a wickie wannabe."

Today, many offshore working Chesapeake lighthouses are like orphans hoping for adoption. The Coast Guard maintains the horns and lights as navigational aids, but not the actual structures. The Thomas Point Shoal Lighthouse (the only screw-pile lighthouse in the United States still in its original location) got lucky, and in 2004, via the National Historic Lighthouse Preservation Act, was transferred to the city of Annapolis; it is now part of a complex partnership that includes the Annapolis Maritime Museum, which launched the interior tours in July 2007, and the U.S. Lighthouse Society and its Chesapeake chapter. Other offshore lighthouses are private retreats, benefiting from the passionate generosity of the individuals who purchase them from the federal government, agreeing to restore and maintain the historic structures, while the Coast Guard has access to the navigational aids. Sandy Point Lighthouse is privately owned, and a Falls Church resident owns Craighill Channel Lower Range Front Beacon, both on the north side of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. An attorney from Nevada bought the Bloody Point Bar Lighthouse near Kent Island for $100,000, and according to Mike Richards, who pilots tours to off-shore Chesapeake lighthouses, he plans to restore it.

"Let's face it," Richards says. "There are more efficient ways to provide a navigational light on the bay. You drive a piling down into the ground and put a light on it with a solar reflector, and you never have to touch it -- heck, except maybe every two years. And you get the same function as the lighthouse. This is where the role of the private citizen comes in, recognizing these as historic structures. This is what will preserve the lighthouses."

A former real estate developer now living in his Tilghman Island bed-and-breakfast, Richards is a history buff who collects maritime oils and watercolors, a pragmaticmariner, the kind who calls the restroom in his home "the head." He captains his tours in a wide-bodied, retired Navy work-boat, M/V Sharps Island. These are not hasty drive-by, roll-down-the-window, point-and-click journeys. "We see the lights as a mariner would," he says, by which he means as part of a system of lighted buoys and beacons that form a fixed constellation that a mariner on the bay welcomes in the inky darkness. "The fix with the GPS is very accurate, but from my standpoint, I respect the lighthouses and use them," says Richards. "Young mariners don't pay any attention to them at all; they pass by them, say, 'Hey, it's a good place to fish.' "

We circle several lights in an afternoon, embarking from Tilghman Island's harbor. As we chug closer to Baltimore Harbor Lighthouse, I see a silhouette in the portal -- is someone there? About a mile and a half north of Sandy Point, Baltimore light is something of an uptown neighbor to Thomas Point light; it's privately owned. Four couples bought the lighthouse in 2006 in an online auction and occupy this four-story townhouse that just happens to be an octagon and is part of a 120-foot concrete caisson driven 57 feet into the mud.

It's a steep 20 feet from the water to the front door. On a clear evening, after work or on the weekend you might see the owners hoist a yellow Lab, legs splayed, dangling happily in a search-and-rescue harness. Up he goes from a rubber launch to the first-floor deck. The rope dangles back down. Next in the air, a large plastic tub brimming with supplies. The waterfront retreat has neither property taxes nor services, and the owners haul everything on board -- drinking water, inflatable mattresses, lumber, tripods, utensils, coolers, grills, gallon bottles of rum, limes, power tools, rain slickers and boots. Then they climb onto a cockeyed metal ladder, up to a second ladder, through the hatch to the first-floor deck -- and a spectacular 360-degree view of every boat heading to the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal or Baltimore.

Baltimore light is near the neck where Mark Jefferies, an avid sailor and one of Baltimore light's owners, grew up. "In Cape St. Claire, it was a regular occurrence to go out in a boat around this light, out on the Magothy River. I grew up passing by this light almost every day. It never occurred to me I'd be sleeping here."

Unlike Brosius, who slept through the foghorn at Thomas Point, Jefferies is a light sleeper. "I've been at Thomas Point when that thing blows. I could never sleep through that," the 36-year-old says. "I'm up every two hours all night long at the light. There are the strangest noises: Every ship going to the port of Baltimore takes a turn at this light. Freighters, car carriers, one after another, they roll by. I wake up at night to a regular procession of tugs, the low rumble of ships going by." Some evenings when it's especially calm, Jefferies says, he can hear a dog barking on land 1 miles away and the rumble of traffic on the Bay Bridge. "I can even hear the crunching of bait fish chomping, feeding on the barnacles along the water line."

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.