image by K. S. Brooks
Guiding Light
“I’ve been the keeper here for thirty years… How can they just dump me? I’m too old to retrain… too young to retire! ‘Technology’, they say. ‘Have to move with the times’, they say… Decommissioned!... Bah!... Ridicules! I’ve given this job my life… what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? There’s nowhere to go… Well, I’m not going anywhere!”
Five years after decommissioning old Sam Grogan’s lighthouse, when the 150 mph hurricane hit the east coast, quite a few people died, but it should have been a lot worse. The commercial fishing vessels, charter boats and even a cruise liner that was caught up in that flash storm and swept towards the rocky peninsular, for all their GPS, satellites, computers and fancy equipment, that storm was such that none of it was of any use.
The captains and crews of the nine surviving vessels swore under oath that they would all have perished had it not been for the constant, flashing, warning beacon of old Grogan’s lighthouse.
The following week, when the coast guard went to the lighthouse to investigate, only a broken shell remained; a dilapidated, wreck of a building that might once have been a lighthouse but now there was certainly nothing there that could have generated any kind of beacon.
Standing on the broken turret, once the lighthouse, the young coast guard officer looked down at the jagged rocks below where, five years previously, they’d found old Sam Grogan’s broken body.
“I’ve been the keeper here for thirty years… How can they just dump me? I’m too old to retrain… too young to retire! ‘Technology’, they say. ‘Have to move with the times’, they say… Decommissioned!... Bah!... Ridicules! I’ve given this job my life… what am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go? There’s nowhere to go… Well, I’m not going anywhere!”
Five years after decommissioning old Sam Grogan’s lighthouse, when the 150 mph hurricane hit the east coast, quite a few people died, but it should have been a lot worse. The commercial fishing vessels, charter boats and even a cruise liner that was caught up in that flash storm and swept towards the rocky peninsular, for all their GPS, satellites, computers and fancy equipment, that storm was such that none of it was of any use.
The captains and crews of the nine surviving vessels swore under oath that they would all have perished had it not been for the constant, flashing, warning beacon of old Grogan’s lighthouse.
The following week, when the coast guard went to the lighthouse to investigate, only a broken shell remained; a dilapidated, wreck of a building that might once have been a lighthouse but now there was certainly nothing there that could have generated any kind of beacon.
Standing on the broken turret, once the lighthouse, the young coast guard officer looked down at the jagged rocks below where, five years previously, they’d found old Sam Grogan’s broken body.
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