It's a New Dawn

Earlier last year I went to Maine with my mom. She wanted to see lighthouses and sailboats. This lighthouse is on the Rockland breakwater. It's over a mile of large, rough-hewn slabs of stone loosely thrown together. My mom had broken her hip a year before, so the trek was quite perilous for us.
These giant stones are so roughly paired together to make a "road" out to the lighthouse. The Breakwater's job is actually to tame the wild northeastern seas and protect Rockland harbor and her ships from the storms that naturally occur.

It's not a pretty structure, and you can see the lighthouse itself is pretty, but is absolutely weathered from all the storms, is consistently dripping in ice cold salt water, and the rocks are crawling with strange mixtures of algae and mildew. It's ugly.

But it's only ugly because it's been constantly immersed in ceaseless poundings of nor'eastern winds, rains, waves, and snow (although I imagine the breakwater enjoys the snow, in light of all the wind and waves). And it's only rough because it was necessary to throw the biggest stones Rockland had to best the biggest the cold Atlantic could throw. The breakwater isn't Whitby Abbey, or the palace of Versailles, or the Taj Mahal. And it's no Starbucks coffee shop where couples can take a moment out of the world to just breathe and smell the kahuna. Rockland locals probably don't think twice about the breakwater. But the breakwater is necessary for Rockland's harbor to exist like she does. The breakwater tames the seas so we can go on living. It's ugly, it's rough, it's tough. And when the storms aren't there, it looks out of place. And maybe it is.

But... it's kind of beautiful.