Particularly after a visit to a lighthouse. When the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, rising 158 feet, opened in 1875, it was the final beacon in the Barrier Island chain. Until its operation was mechanized in 1939, the lighthouse required a crew comprised from three families. These lighthouse keepers performed the manual labor of cleaning lenses, fueling lamps, trimming wicks and rotating lenses to guide ships anywhere within 18 nautical miles away from danger. They and their families made their lives inside a neat, grassy compound where a solidly attractive Victorian duplex rose across from the lighthouse. In 1900, a one-room schoolhouse opened nearby, its structure built from the timbers of wrecked ships. An additional, smaller lighthouse keeper's house was moved to the site in 1920. In their starched Victorian collars, the lighthouse families' black-and-white portraits offer a thought-provoking contrast to the knots of comfort-clad tourists who now pose on the same site for their own digital posterity. We were here, both sets of pictures prove; but to what avail?
There is a world of difference between a clockwork routine devised to save lives at a distance, and a holiday schedule that seeks diversion up close, but the intervening decades have brought these family portraits into unexpected juxtaposition. We tourists are amazed by evidence of the lighthouse families' lives in isolation; they, surely, would be shocked to find so many of us tromping through their front yard (not to mention buying made-in-China lighthouse knickknacks in the gift shop). The lighthouse itself rises in splendid obsolescence, a reminder of what no longer needs to be done. But does that mean it's time to relax? From point to pointlessness; from isolation to congestion; from natural wonder to developer's paradise; from urgent utility to frenzied leisure. It's enough to make you want to get back to work.