Last stop. You've walked out onto the south pier, and there it is at the end — the lighthouse, that steel tower painted against the water, marking the mouth of the channel where the harbor meets the open lake. If you've timed this even a little bit right, the sun is heading down over Lake Michigan behind it, the whole horizon is going orange, and you are standing at possibly the best sunset spot in northern Michigan. Earn this. You walked a long way past a lot of weird houses to get here.
There's been a light guarding this channel since the eighteen eighties, back when they first dug the passage through. The original stood over on the north pier. Decades later they moved a wooden lighthouse over to this side, and the steel tower you're looking at went up at the end of the nineteen forties. The town loves it so much that when the federal government was giving old lighthouses away in the two thousands, Charlevoix raised its hand and took ownership, because this is their light and they w
eren't going to let anybody else have it.
Now, I have to tell you one last Earl Young story, and it's the perfect place to end, because it's about the one building in Charlevoix that isn't his.
They say that at some point Earl Young looked at this lighthouse — this plain, straight, sensible, government-issue steel tower — and he could not stand it. All those right angles. That boring vertical li
