Marshall Point Lighthouse

Author's Comments

The walkway is the photograph. I know this is the cliché of Marshall Point, the shot every photographer who drives through Port Clyde comes home with, and I am telling you to make it anyway. The wooden planks lead the eye with such insistence toward that small white tower at the end of the granite that it would be perverse to fight the composition. Make peace with it. Then start looking for the other photograph. I have found that other photograph most often in late September, an hour before sunset, when the light comes in low across Muscongus Bay and the granite of the pier turns warm against water that has gone the color of slate. The lighthouse is small. It is not a dramatic tower. Its quietness is the point, and the surrounding landscape does most of the work - the dark spruce on the far shore, the lobster boats moving at the edge of the frame, the particular Maine sky that goes pink and grey at the same time in a way I have never quite seen anywhere else. Come at golden hour and stay through blue hour. The lighthouse lights up and the walkway empties of the casual visitors who came for the Forrest Gump reference, and you have maybe twenty minutes of something closer to solitude. Bring a longer lens for the keeper's house from down on the rocks, and a wider one for the walkway itself. Spring works. Summer is busiest. Fall is what I would choose if I had only one trip.

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