OMG

It’s a gray day in Grand Haven, MI, spitting, wishing it could rain. I’m in my office this morning, looking out my corner window at people walking briskly with steaming coffee and wind breakers, up and down Washington Street. ’Coffee Grounds’ is my part-time, some-time, spiritual retreat. Coffee is the best. Toast your own bagel and chase it with a big, chocolate chunk cookie. I’ve got my smart phone charging and life is pretty good. I went to the beach yesterday, thinking the wind might be blowing up some whitecaps but it was placid and overcast. Still, you take photographs. It’s like signing in at the desk; you were there and who knows, maybe you get lucky. 

I looked out the channel to the lighthouse and something didn’t jell. Not much going on but something was amiss even at that. Shades of gray and OMG: the catwalk was gone. For ever; as long as I’ve been coming to Grand Haven the red lighthouse and black, elevated catwalk have been the town’s fingerprint. As you walked out the pier, almost a quarter mile, it was under and around the heavy, black iron work that bridged up the old walkway, from shore to the lighthouse itself. In the old days when the light keeper had to negotiate heavy weather, to and from shore, the catwalk was the only way. With a life line attached, one could work from hand hold to hand hold, 15 ft. above the pier and the waves crashing over it. Of course it’s all automated now. GPS and radar have rendered the light unnecessary, except for its scenic value. But you love it, absolutely love it when you trip the shutter in the same split second the light glows red and a big wave explodes up and over the breakwater. 
The catwalk isn’t there; just gone. Its old pier mountings are still jutting up a foot or so in two straight lines, running out to the lonely looking, little red lighthouse. I don’t know why they did it. I’m sure it was a good reason. That piece of work would have been very expensive and something surely must be safer or improved but I’ve that yet to find out. As I stood at the breech, the route out to the end looked more precarious, more dangerous without the catwalk. If you were crazy enough to be on the pier during heavy weather, you could get behind and hold onto the iron work. Now it looks more like I remember, kids walking the railroad track; nothing to lean on, nothing to hold onto. Falling off the track might skin you up but falling in that water, any weather, would put even a strong swimmer at risk. People drown in this water every year and now the catwalk is gone. But things change, even the things you love and you can go along or you can live in the past. Someday soon this will be the new normal.