MORE LIKE A BEACON LEADING YOU AWAY...:

Vintage Lighthouse Heads for Solid Ground (KATIE ZEZIMA, 10/03/07, NY Times)

Since 1850, the Sankaty Head Lighthouse has guided boaters and pilots home to the east shore of this island. This week, the lighthouse is being steered to a safe harbor of its own.

Much of the cliff where the working lighthouse sits has been eaten away by storms, threatening to send it plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.

The only original lighthouse left on Nantucket — two others were destroyed and rebuilt — the Sankaty tower with the red band painted around it is viewed by many as a symbol of the island. In keeping with its listing on the National Register of Historic Places, its supporters say, it needed to be preserved, and moving it 405 feet northwest to another site was the only way.

“It is an icon for this island,” said Bob Felch, president of the ’Sconset Trust, a land preservation group that uses the shorter, more familiar nickname for the village of Siasconset. “Everybody knows the red stripe.” [...]

Cris Farley, who owns a clothing store on the island, was selling T-shirts and sweatshirts that read “I’m a Keeper”; sales benefit the society. Mr. Farley said he first saw the light while working on the golf course as a teenager.

“To me it was the beacon home when I was a caddy,” Mr. Farley said. “You can call it a friend, and you don’t want to see something close to you perilously close to an eroding cliff.”

The 3rd hole at Sankaty Head played right to its foot (or seemingly so), but that's pretty much the farthest point from the clubhouse and definitely the farthest from the caddy camp. With the Atlantic stretching out beyond, it always did seem precariously perched.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 3, 2007 10:26 AM