Race Point Lighthouse

Author's Comments

Getting to Race Point is part of the photograph. A mile and a half through soft sand, your boots filling and emptying with every step, the lighthouse appearing and disappearing behind the dunes as you walk. By the time you arrive you have earned the place, and the place knows it. The tower itself is modest. Forty-one feet of cast iron painted white, set against a horizon that contains almost nothing else. That is the point. What Race Point offers is not architectural detail but isolation, and isolation photographs best when the sky is doing the work. I come in late September, when the summer crowds have thinned and the nights are getting long but the sand is still holding daytime warmth. Blue hour here is genuinely blue. The Atlantic to the north goes silver, then pewter, then ink, and the lighthouse beam begins its slow rotation against a sky that still has color in the west. Stay for the stars. This is one of the few places on the eastern seaboard where the Milky Way appears with any real clarity, and the lighthouse gives you a foreground that almost no other dark-sky location offers. A long exposure with the beam tracing its arc across a star field is the photograph people make the trip for. It takes patience and a tripod that will not sink, and it requires you to be comfortable walking back through the dunes in full dark. The keeper's house can be rented. I have not done it yet, but I think about it every time I leave.

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