ALTHOUGH CRISES OCCUR 1 T HE MECHANICS OF T HE MOVE 2 3 4 5 5

STRUCTURAL PREPARATION SUPPORT MOVING EQUIPMENT MOVING PROCESS NEW FOUNDATION

only when we have built something that can be threatened, the problem of erosion dates back to before the creation of the island itself: 144 000 years ago the Illinoian glaciation pushed ice down North America. And 120 000 years later, the Wisconsinan glaciation did the same. The weight and motion of ice from the glaciers ploughed up an edge of land called a moraine and topped it with till. That is Martha’s Vineyard: the island is a pile of rocks. Gay Head is so named because of the unending sculpting of the loose and colourful alliance of white Cretaceous and green Miocene sands, light-brown Quaternary sediments, and red Cret-aceous clay that make up the bluffs. The string of landmarks from Martha’s Vineyard down to Montauk, on Long Island, is pocked with proud maritime villages but also severe coastal erosion, because the moraine, essentially, is the crusty lip of snow, dirt and garbage raised at the edge of a road by a snow-plough. And the Atlantic won’t stop. “When you’re dealing with the sea – the sea wins,” says Joe Jakubik, head of International Chimney’s historic preservation division. “Doesn’t matter what the situation is. Water wins.”

Byron Stone is a geologist for the US Geological Survey and his job is to know the Massachusetts coast blind. He’s well aware of lighthouse moves in his backyard. The two companies that moved Highland Light – International Chimney and Expert House Movers – moved the Southeast Lighthouse on Block Island in 1993. And the Nauset Lighthouse in Eastham, also on the Outer Cape, in 1996. And the Sankaty Head Lighthouse in Nantucket in 2007. “There’s no cement between the grains,” says Stone of the land beneath most of these places. “It’s loose sand. You could stick your finger in. You could stick your little finger in. You could stick your tongue in it.”

Stone helped choose the new location for the Gay Head Light. The goal was to deposit it someplace where it would be safe for at least a hundred years, when perhaps other men will stand in its shadow and try to figure out how to move it. Sea levels rise, climates change, erosion, accretion – these forces move so slowly as to seem unmoving to time-bound humans, until the moment that one is engulfed in a hurricane or drought, or one finds a lighthouse on the edge of a cliff.

Looking at the bluffs from offshore, the most extensive point of land is a red-clay promontory, with white sandy receding faces on both sides. A geotechnical consultant took core samples of the soil all over Gay Head. Stone helped review them. The vein of clay, which continues inland, proved to be steadfast against water. In a hundred years, perhaps it will be a red buttress between brick, candle and sea. “That’s three mortgages,” said Stone. “A hundred years gets it safely out of our purview,” said Richard.

“A hundred years from now, maybe moving a lighthouse is no big deal,” said Len. “You just put it through a matrix, vroop! We transport it.”

ON THE morning the lighthouse was scheduled to move, Richard and Len entertained a group of secondand third-graders from Chilmark, the next town. They came armed with questions. “How tall is the lighthouse?” “Twenty metres” “How much does it weigh?” “Four hundred tons.” “How far is it moving?” “Fifty metres.” Then a little squirt in Red Sox gear asked, “In the future, do you think you’ll, like, have to move the lighthouse again?” Len smiled. “Very good question. Very good question.” “You know, when you say ‘the future’, that’s a very big word,” Richard said.

A few hours later, Jerry had everything perfect, beams in place, rails level, lighthouse secure. He climbed into the cab of the yellow truck. He looked like every driver of every

box truck ever. But when he turned the key, something different happened. Fuel. Air. Spark. The percussion of internal combustion. Hydraulic fluid began coursing through the tendrils of hose, and somebody yelled, “It’s moving!”

Jerry had 16 jacks rigged up under the light, in a triangle: groups of five on the left and right and a group of six in the front. When the lighthouse was being lifted on to jack support, all 16 were linked in a system called unified jacking, forcing them to rise together, at the same rate – slowly. During the move, Jerry would decouple the three zones. They defined the plane the lighthouse sat on. Any point of the triangle could be adjusted to keep it level. “It’s like a Greek vase sitting on a plate,” said Richard. “It’s like sex,” said Jerry. “If it doesn’t stay up, you’re in trouble.”

Behind the lighthouse were a pair of push jacks, long extending arms, one cylinder that slides out of the other like the actuator on a storm door. Hydraulic pistons pushed the bright-yellow beams the lighthouse rested on, and it slid along the rails, which had been greased with nothing more than Ivory soap.

This push moved so slowly that Len decided to try to give the spectators a visual reference. He grabbed an orange cone and put it on the rail. The lighthouse moved forward, pushing it – and the cone slid, barely, still too slow to see. Len had another idea. He wedged the cone against the lighthouse platform. He found a scrap of wood and balanced it against the tip of the cone. The rail, the cone, and the wood made a delicate triangle. As the lighthouse moved forward, it pushed on one corner, the cone pushed the wood – and the wood fell, with a minor clack. Len set it again. A hundred and sixty years of history had led to this: clack. Len gave up.

The jacks pushed, telescoping until they’d extended 165 centimetres, as far as they go. When they got there, Jerry turned off the truck, and his team reset: tucked the extending cylinders back inside the push jacks. Moved them up the rails. Bolted them into new positions.

The unified jacking machine was restarted and the pushing continued. It was slow going, mundane, even – and entirely necessary.

Suddenly, Len came back. He had surveying equipment with him, and he worked with the movers to shoot each rail. What happened? “As the weight was coming over the beam, it was dropping on one side, so we were starting to notice a list to the structure.” How’d he notice? “I have kind of a trained eye for when things are out of plumb, and even though it’s tapered, I mean, it’s a little bit of an optical illusion – but I could sense it. Actually, as I was driving down the road, I looked back and I said, ‘Wait a second. That doesn’t look right.’ ”

In his rearview mirror? And he was right?

“We were about a half-inch low on one side.”

Len sounded like he was talking about changing a tyre on the side of the road. But then someone came over to hand him something. He looked down. “Oh! Hey! All right!” A flat shiny oval.

“Penny on the rail!”

TWO DAYS later the lighthouse reached the end of its railway. The work wasn’t over, but the sexy part was done. With the light suspended over the concrete pad, International Chimney built up masonry supports, flush against its granite underside. The jacks were released, and the lighthouse’s weight shifted on to this new foundation. From there, the move process would be reversed: steel removed. Foundation reconstructed. Trough refilled.

When the kids from Chilmark were visiting, Len told them about the beginning and the ending of the move process. “The first thing we did is we took all the grass and all the little shrubs, all the trees and everything, and we plucked them out of the ground,” he said. “And we put them across the street to save them, so that after we move them we can put everything back, so that when you come back up here after it’s all moved, it’ll look just like it always did.”

So it will. On 30 May this year – one Memorial Day late, thanks to that rough winter – the lighthouse will open to the public for the summer season. The vegetation will be pristine but familiar, as Len promised. And there will be grace notes: a ring of granite from the old keeper’s house will mark the lighthouse’s old foundation. But one day those markers will fall into the sea. The island will age. The schoolchildren from Chilmark will get older, take Len and Richard’s place. The people who moved the light will be long gone, and those who remember seeing it happen – their memories will fade. It will be hard to discern that the lighthouse moved at all. The structure will be what it has always been: a red-brick, candle-topped chimney in a field of green, sentinel over cliffs, white-red beacon washing over the people of this island, who never really see their home getting smaller every year. PM