Split Rock Lighthouse

photo by Ron Winch

What good is a lighthouse in broad daylight?
Who needs such enlightenment in an age of modern communications?
The lighthouse is just an icon to admire--a quaint beacon of a bygone era.
_________________
I bought that print many years ago on eBay, perhaps from the photographer. I'd like to contact him to get his permission to use here, but I can't seem to find an address on the Web.

The photo reminds me of my father and the times we spent together along the Minnesota North Shore which I blogged about in a series called Revisiting Highway 61.

The photo juxtaposes many opposite compositional elements.  Here are a few that I see:

Black vs. white
Vertical cliff vs. plane of water
Wet vs. dry
Deep unknown vs. known clarity
Living trees vs. inorganic rock
Chaos (rubble) vs. order (monolithic cliff)
Near vs. far.
Darkness vs. lightness
Soft vs. hard
Edge/boundary vs. continuity

[As a comment, MamaM added: Two different cloud types. High cirrus in foreground and low cumulus close to horizon. Changing weather perhaps?

Two opposite diagonals. Tree trunks slanting one direction, cloud lines another.]

Fabled Sable Island

Wrecks of Sable Island. Click to enlarge.

I recalled Sable Island while reading of the Titanic saga. Sable Island is a crescent-shaped sandbar located way off the coast of Nova Scotia. The island got there as a terminal moraine from ancient glaciation and took its name from the French word for sand.

Long considered a navigational hazard to North Atlantic trade, Sable Island is littered with the buried remains of hundreds of shipwrecks. Already by 1912, Sable Island had two lighthouses and a Marconi wireless station. The first wireless distress calls from the Titanic were heard and relayed by the Sable Island station. I'd love to visit there.

Pigments of My Imagination

I got sidetracked by vacation and few other things and lost my way regarding the chemical elements. The following inorganic pigments are mostly familiar.

Red is for red and white lead in striped lighthouses and also miniature manuscripts. The red color comes from lead tetroxide and the stark white comes from lead carbonate. Both pigments are impervious to the elements which is precisely why Michael Faraday chose them to coat Britain's lighthouses.
Red is also for Barn Red. Farmers in Europe started this tradition by adding ground up rust to the linseed oil they used to protect their barns and sheds (the iron inhibits mold).

Orange is for terracotta roof tiles: The color comes mainly from iron oxides.

Yellow is for yellow school buses.  Originally the pigment came from lead chromate (the color comes from the chromate, not the lead). It too was impervious to the elements. Lead chromate is no longer used to paint buses, but the traditional color stuck with us.

Green is for emeralds. Beryl and emerald are essentially the same material, viz., Be₃Al₂Si₆O₁₈. The only difference is that emerald also contains about 2% chromium, the source of its green color. Chromium also makes rubies red, and sapphires blue.  How does the same element do that?

Blue is for the Prussian Blue. I wrote about this back here. Gun bluing, a form of metal passivation, is another iron coating in disguise. Blue is also for cobalt blue.  As the saying goes: if it's blue, it's cobalt (II).

Indigo is for itself. Its color is challenged by some as a separate distinct color: link The most vivid indigo colors I ever saw were solvated electrons trapped as either sodium electride or as sodium benzophenone. What do electrons really look like? link

Violet is for purple permanganate, KMnO₄ which is actually pinkish purple but I couldn't think of a better example. Can you?

Split Rock Lighthouse

Years before my dad took me and my brother diving up North, he took friends and diving students, and once or twice he took my mother.  She was determined not to be a SCUBA widow and she had an "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" attitude about the whole thing.

He took her to the Madeira wreck that I described back here. That is Gold Rock and the rocky beach in the upper right corner of the photo above. The wreck was only accessible then from the roadside shoulder of Highway 61 but access has improved since those days.  Back then there was no proper place to change clothes at the dive site. My uninhibited dad had no problem stripping down nude in semi-public places, but my mother was a different story.
"Nobody will see you" he reassured her after they had carried all their gear down to the beach.
She nervously glanced up at the lighthouse. She saw that the lighthouse had an unobstructed view of her (you can see her point of view here--the lighthouse is in the upper right background).  Throwing caution to the wind, she undressed and changed into her bathing suit and wet suit.
 
Later that evening after the dive, they met some friends for dinner in Two Harbors. After dinner, they drove back up Highway 61 and stopped at the lighthouse, which had only recently opened to the public. To my mother's shock and horror, the lighthouse had one of those telescopic, coin-operated viewfinders, and it clearly looked down on the beach where she had undressed earlier that afternoon.

Added: this photo: