Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/1373686
W H A T ' S N O T T O L I K E — S O M E W O U L D S A Y L O V E — A B O U T L I G H T H O U S E S ? 100 As human-made structures, their picturesque beauty is unmatched, they still serve a noble purpose, and they're steeped in a daring, fascinating past. George Bernard Shaw was spot-on when he wrote: "I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as lighthouses. ey were built only to serve." In 2014, New England filmmaker Rob Apse was working on a short documentary, e Stones of the Quarries, about the granite quarrying industry in Cape Ann. He wondered "where all that stone went," he told me in a telephone interview. Intrigued by the meaning behind the stone as symbols of strength and security, he let the idea simmer until it bub- bled up into a new project, lighthouses, that are as much signatures of New England as maples, cod, and white-steepled churches. Eventually, he took a deep dive into the facts in between his duties at his business, Wandergroove, "a creative marketing studio curating the history and culture of brands through filmmaking and storytelling," as his website explains. Apse battled with the narrative arc for five years while he researched and shot film footage. Often he sailed in a boat to cap- ture his subjects—human as well as struc- tures—as dawn unfolded, erupting beautiful oranges, blues, and purples, while record- ing sounds of seagulls and other birds. "It's almost like you're going to the edge of the world to get out to it." Finally, he settled on his through line. "I looked at the historic past of the stories surrounding lighthouses and their keepers and paralleled those stories and events with