Places I am considering moving to for the rest of 2020 and forever. ◽️ Most folks don’t know that the #topography of the land UNDER #BostonHarbor is a wild labyrinth of jagged rocks and chasms. This means depths get suddenly shallow rapidly, with sharp peaks all over the place. #Shipwreck hazard city. Meanwhile, there are very few contiguous natural channels from the outer harbor inward to the land that a big ship can travel through. This is why the European colonizers fetishized the harbor so much. Its hidden dangers made it naturally defensible. If you didn’t know those few paths in, you’d end up crashing, without a single round of ammo fired as warning. This is why the Harbor lighthouses were so vital for so many centuries. While Europe decimated the land and its Natives for profit and supremacy, the lighthouses guided the way through the precarious harbor for their #seafaring trade. Arguably the natural topography of the harbor was among facilitating factors, accelerating the domination which the Europeans sought over the Americas through ports like #Bostontown. Graves Light is the furthest out from the land, on an island with the macabre moniker “The Graves.” NOT “Graves Island” in common parlance; just “The Graves.” The most lonely and solitary, it’s still in operation, with one caretaker at a time, who I am totally jealous of. Graves is the “starter beacon” to guide ships through the zigzag hidden under the water’s surface. A little further in and south Minot’s Light seems to sit impossibly out in the middle of open water. In truth, at that point in the harbor rises one of those sudden ledges — just 20 feet below the water’s surface! Shooting up so sudden and steep off the coast of Scituate that it required a lighthouse to prevent so many shipwrecks. In 1894, #Minot’sLight started flashing a 1-4-3 sequence signal, which supposedly is said to count off the letters in the phrase “I LOVE YOU” (one letter, four letters, three letters). I will consider that a love letter, calling me to the solitary, mythologized romance I have for these stoic, charming structures from a bygone era of European dominance. ◽️ #bostonhistory #akaXN #TheRealXN (at Boston Harbor) https://www.instagram.com/p/CCbvGERpDMZ/?igshid=r6qikgw2ttt6