This winter I went to Lake Park, at the edge of the East side Milwaukee
neighborhood where I grew up, and saw the lighthouse beautiful in the
falling snow. As I photographed it I saw people going in and out the
front door. I read the sign. The lighthouse was open that day. I had
never been inside it. It had never been open in the past. So I went in.
And I climbed the narrow staircase to the top, in a snowstorm.
I
looked around at the park, at the blue grey lake and at the houses in
the neighborhood off into the distance and as the snow swirled around, I
thought of when I was a child. When the fog rolled in off the lake, the
thick Lake Michigan fog, so thick you would walk down the street,
enclosed in that fog, a cocoon around you, the only illumination would
be the halos of streetlamps. And the only sound you could hear, in the
fog womb, was the sound of the foghorn that warned ships of the danger
of foundering; Lake Michigan is a grave of shipwrecks. The lighthouse is
decommissioned, the foghorn gone, but, I can still hear that sound.
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