Road trip--Montauk Point

Saturday was grey, cool, blustery and just the right day for a little tourism. No tourists and no traffic jams. Intending to go to Sag Harbor, I started driving... and ended up at Montauk Point, the far end of Long Island. the eastern-most tip, or "the end of the world" as my daughters call it. This is where the lighthouse is.

I paid my eight dollars, visited the museum, and climbed the 130-or-so steps to the top. You can go into the room just below the lantern, and then half-way up a ladder so you can peek at the view from the lantern room. A door opens from the room-below onto a tiny balcony where you can watch the ocean, a long way below.

A family climbed the stairs while I was there; mother, father, and two little girls. The mother said she was afraid of heights... I admired her for doing this and showing her children that fear doesn't have to get in the way.

I am afraid of heights, too, if my little children are looking at a huge drop. On my own, it doesn't worry.

Lighthouses tend to disappoint me. I'm always expecting to find circular rooms, stacked one-upon-the-other, like those plastic cups children play with: secret staircases leading to the next floor and eventually to the lantern. A windswept balcony all the way round the top. But somehow they are all just houses with towers stuck on the side.

This one has a metal spiral staircase to the top, with a couple of small wedge-shaped platforms by tiny windows, and a rope bannister on the outside for a feeling of security. Like climbing a church tower, but with the treads unworn by time.

In the house-museum stand the older lamps and lenses. Before electricity arrived, the lighthouse keeper would hoist a small kerosene (paraffin?) lamp into the shell of huge lenses. The lenses would magnify the small flame many thousands of times, allowing it to be seen for at least twenty miles.

The lighthouses along the south shore of Long Island are about forty miles apart: Montauk, Shinnecock, Fire Island and further. The height of the lighthouse allows the ships to see the light of the next before losing the previous one behind the curvature of the earth.

Now I have to see the others...