You've just passed that white tower down on the sand. Don't roll away from it too fast — because somebody had to live in it, and I don't think most folks stop to reckon what that meant.
Picture the job. You are the keeper at Point Betsie. Your work is one thing: that light does not go out. Not for weather, not for sickness, not for anything. Out in the passage there are vessels running this shore in the dark, and the difference between a captain finding sea room and a captain finding a sand bar is whether your lamp is burning. So you wind the clockwork that turns the lens. You trim the wick. You haul the oil up those stairs. You do it again at two in the morning. Every night, all season, for years.
Now put November on it. The gales on this lake come out of the northwest across four hundred miles of open water, and there is nothing between them and your front door but sand. Spray comes over the whole building and freezes where it lands, so by December the tower is glazed in ice like a cake. The waves get into the outbuildings. Your family is in there with you — keepers had wives and children out on these points, and the children walked to school along a beach that in a bad blow was simply gone.
And the worst of it wasn't the storms. It was the nights when you'd hear a vessel out there in the dark, in trouble, close enough to hear — and there was not one thing you could do but keep your light burning and listen. Some of those nights ended with the surfmen dragging people up onto the sand in a breeches buoy. Some of them ended quiet, and in the morning there'd be wreckage on the beach and you'd know.
They kept a keeper out here into living memory — this light wasn't left to run itself until the nineteen eighties. So when you look at that pretty white tower in your mirror, and the water looks like a postcard: somebody's whole life was spent in that building, in the dark, so that strangers he would never meet could get past this point and go home. That's the job. There's no statue for it. There's just the light.