The Keepers of the Light: St. Marks Lighthouse in the NYT & Reader Response

This past weekend, in addition to a great review of my novel Acceptance and a mention of my next novel in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Times op-ed section ran a piece of mine on lighthouses--including our local lighthouse at the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge. (In other exciting news, Acceptance, which features a lighthouse prominently, appears on the NYT bestseller list next week.)There was a fair amount of material I couldn’t fit into the article, all of it due to the wonderful writer Kati Schardl, who earlier this year had written up a feature on me and the Southern Reach trilogy for the Tallahassee Democrat. It was because of that feature that I got to go inside of the St. Marks lighthouse in the first place. I’ve reproduced some further words from Schardl below, which gives further context about the lighthouse and the lighthouse restoration fund.The reaction to the lighthouse piece was very positive, including a thumbs up from the Lighthouse Directory on twitter. I also received a fair number of emails from lighthouse enthusiasts. In addition to Schardl’s comments I’ve reproduced some of those emails, with permission, below. I think you’ll find them of interest. I should note that the opinions expressed are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect my own. - JeffKatie Schardl on plans for the St. Marks lighthouse and its Fresnel lensThe Fresnel lens will be professionally preserved in its current condition and put on display in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center while the building itself is restored. The ultimate goal is to relight the beacon, but the lens will first need to be restored to optical quality, which will be costly--there aren't a whole lot of artisans out there who have the knowledge and expertise to work on Fresnel lenses.[As for] restoration bringing in too much tourism. It's a very delicate balance, isn't it? The paramount concern is to restore the lighthouse and keeper's quarters in a way that has the least impact on the surrounding environment, and also work within federal guidelines and requirements, since the refuge is a federal entity. There's currently a moratorium on expanding structural square footage in federal wildlife refuges, so there is no plan to expand the footprint of the lighthouse/keeper's house with reconstructed historic out-buildings, etc.However, there will be site enhancements such as new walkways, refreshing the current historic marker, and an ADA-compliant ramp. There will probably be an extra fee charged to tour the lighthouse, once it's restored, which will help support expanded staffing and maintenance, etc. The staff at the refuge, and the volunteers as well, are very canny and vigilant stewards and, if it came down to it, I think terroir would trump tourism in the long run.In the end, yes, we hope more people will want to come learn about the lighthouse and will experience the happy side-effect of falling under the spell of the refuge's primeval landscapes!It's my personal belief, as someone who's been exploring and loving the refuge for 20-plus years, that the more people make contact with those landscapes—breathe the air, walk the trails, watch the birds and wildlife doing their thing, feel the peace of it all—the more people will want to protect a place where that wild magic seeps into the soul. As a refuge ambassador and volunteer ranger, I've seen that magic do its work time after time.From Mel Kelly, former mayor of Carrabelle, FloridaIf you had gone a bit further west from St Mark’s to Carrabelle [you would have seen] ‘our’ beautifully restored lighthouse, wonderful museum, keepers’ house replica, original wash house, and take the historic tour of the setting!In addition, you could have safely climbed our 120-years-old lighthouse for a wonderful bay view, and watched the beam guide boaters in at night. Our original Fresnel lens is in the Coast Guard building in New Orleans (where they won’t part with it despite our restoration and security) but we have an exact replica.The Lighthouse and grounds are a wonderful example of what can be done with public support and interest – please come back and check it out when you return to the area(Mel Kelly was the Carrabelle Mayor when the light was being restored and the park was created, complete with very popular ship replica, the Lady Carrabella. The navigational beacon was re-lit in December, 2007.)Dr. Ryan K. Smith, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityI liked your take on entropy/survival of the lighthouses "as is." My own take is that in the successful lighthouse restorations, we see a too-rare example of local, concerned citizens working with government to actually create solutions to modern problems. (As well as seeing the mysteriously deep-rooted attraction to these iconic structures.)My father has been in practice for over 40 years, developing a specialty in historic preservation. Early on, in the 1980s, I think, he got some commissions to do work at the St. Augustine Lighthouse and the St. John's River light, and it just kind of snowballed from there. He is near retirement, and not digitally-savvy, so his firm does not have a website, but luckily he has won lots of awards and gets lots of commissions through the preservation community. He was at St. Marks about a month ago to meet with the Refuge Association and the Fish/Wildlife Service, and to present them with his structural assessment survey of the property and his design work for the proposed restoration.I have not been to St. Mark's myself, but the route in sounds appropriately atmospheric. He says, as you likely know, that the group could not do much to raise money or move forward until the property was officially transferred from the Coast Guard to the Fish/Wildlife Service. His firm has also been recognized for its work on the Crooked River Lighthouse, the Anclote Key Lighthouse, the Cape St. George Light, and others. He is currently at work on the Pensacola light. A brief article on him here.(Dr. Smith teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently studying the twentieth-century restoration of historic lighthouses in the southeast. He hopes, in book form, to tell the full story of the structures' decline and then their subsequent adoption by various local groups. His most recent book came out from Yale University Press.) From a geologist who lives in CaliforniaThank you for writing on this topic. [I once] took a ferry across Pamlico Sound [in North Carolina] and drove north from Ocracoke Island along the barrier island chain. When we arrived at the mother of all U.S. lighthouses, the light at Hatteras, it was closed by the National Park Service because NPS was preparing to move the light inland. I was very disappointed. Given the ephemeral nature of barrier islands I told NPS staff that the lighthouse should have been left to the energies of the Atlantic Ocean, and following collapse the bricks should have been sold for $1 to the all comers of we the people.I have believed for many years that we Americans are conflicted about out past and the future—we want to preserve some element of the infrastructure past as a durable physical testament and reminder of, the now former, industrial might of our nation. Yet we are quick to demolish our history, as infrastructure, in the mad belief that progress exists and the immediate new is somehow [better] than the durable past.[The geologist also notes that…] Beginning in 1964, I drove by the Pigeon Point Lighthouse on coastal San Mateo County for decades. In the beginning the light was a Fresnel lens , made in France, and tremendous booming fog horn. In the not too distant past the crew quarters were handed over to an organization as a hostel, the light was replaced with "modern" technology and the horns were turned off. Then the State of California Department of Parks got its greasy incompetent hands on the light and the adjoining property was purchased by the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which installed ugly glitzy terracotta tiles and a big semi-circular bench telling all the reading world the names of the individuals that funded the purchase of the property.Yet another ugly "thing" grown on a coast that for over a century was an expansive agriculture district—think artichokes, brussle sprouts, pumpkins and cut-flowers, into another novel sensory stimulus for the bored ill-focused majority of Americans that can think of nothing better to do on their time-off work than to drive California 1 all the while emitting climate change gases, incrementally consuming the finite petroleum resource, and trying to connect to a past, or future, that is and was not tenable and hastening the encroachment of eustatic change on the lights they pine to visit. My two cents is keep the lights burning, exclude the public, and roll it back to a point where GPS and sonar are not the only tools used for coastal navigation.