Foghorns and lighthouses on the Racine waterfront

I had a good half-day free on the US trip and was looking at the map for something nearby rather than inventing a reason for another long drive. Racine was the nearest useful concentration of civilization, and I had already picked out two things that looked worth investigating: the harbour breakwater and Wind Point Lighthouse a little farther north.

The city sits where the Root River reaches Lake Michigan. Its name is unusually literal: racine is French for “root”, a reference to the river. That was enough history for the moment. My first encounter with Racine was more practical: an enormous parking area beside an equally substantial sandy beach.

The beach looked perfectly decent. I am still trying to understand why humans are so enthusiastic about sand, but perhaps that preference survived from some distant reptilian stage of development.

Along the breakwater

From the beach I walked out towards the harbour entrance. There was almost nobody around. The sun was hot, but wind and waves gave the walk a distinctly maritime feel; Lake Michigan was doing a respectable imitation of a sea. On the sheltered side, sailboat masts rose behind the breakwater rocks. Farther out, the harbour entrance was marked by navigation lights on both sides.

At the end I finally met another person, apparently using the breakwater for yoga. That made two of us occupying a considerable amount of concrete.

Beyond the easy concrete, I considered continuing across the large armour stones to reach the outermost point. A short experiment was enough. The rocks were big, the gaps between them were bigger, several surfaces were slippery, and my city shoes were an exceptionally poor contribution to the project. The possible reward was also not especially impressive.

I therefore applied a simple free-market calculation of value against cost and returned to the sensible part of the breakwater before the market demanded payment in skin.

From out there, the beach and shoreline looked considerably more attractive than the rocks immediately under my feet.

Wind Point and industrial-grade warning

After the harbour I drove a few kilometres north to Wind Point Lighthouse. The grounds were neatly maintained, so I walked along the shore and read the interpretation panels around the station. This was the part of the afternoon where a casual stop turned into something genuinely interesting.

Wind Point Lighthouse was built in 1880 and first lit on 15 November that year. Its designer, Orlando Metcalfe Poe, had been a brigadier general during the American Civil War before working on Great Lakes lighthouse engineering. The station was not built merely as a scenic landmark: repeated requests in the 1870s cited frequent shipwrecks on this stretch of coast and the need for a directional light. The 33-metre (108-foot) tower contains 144 cast-iron steps, which makes the old keeper’s routine more tangible: fuel for the lamp had to be carried up those stairs, and the lighthouse history records about 270 gallons used in 1881.

The fog-signal system was the detail I liked most. The lighthouse's historical timeline credits the steam-powered fog signal introduced around 1900 with a reach of 40 miles across Lake Michigan. Whether one needs that much acoustic authority is another question. I would happily take ten per cent of it for my car; I know situations where it would have been persuasive.

The light itself kept evolving. Wind Point became the second Great Lakes lighthouse to be electrified in 1924, and the Coast Guard automated the station in 1964. That progression from kerosene, weights and daily lens cleaning to automation is easy to summarize on a sign, but standing beside the tower and the oversized foghorns made the scale of the old equipment much easier to appreciate.

Racine had been exactly right for the time I had available: a beach I could remain philosophically unconvinced by, an almost empty breakwater, one rejected scramble and a lighthouse with machinery excessive enough to justify the detour.