Station in the Dunes by Cathy Ulrich
Symbol of times past,
You stand silent
on shifting dunes.
Those who shared your walls
patrolled these beaches
looking for wrecks.
Hurricane’s victims
run aground.
Ships foundered
on unseen bars of
dreaded sand
while surf pounded
their sides, and sailors
clung to rigging,
hoping that someone saw.
Brave men,
Life Savers came.
Lauching boats in
boiling waters,
rowing furiously
through rocky shoals,
reclaiming lives otherwise
lost.
Formally organized in 1878 as an agency of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Life-Saving Service comprised a series of stations and crews positioned along major shipping routes along the East Coast, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico and then later the West Coast. Their job was to patrol the beaches and harbors and to rescue crews and salvage cargo from the numerous shipwrecks of the day – the many thousands of them. In 1915, Woodrow Wilson signed “The Act to Create the Coast Guard” which served to merge the Life-Saving Service with the Revenue Cutter Service.
I always wondered why the U.S. Coast Guard was organized as an agency of the Department of Treasury (I think now, it has been moved to Homeland Security), but it makes sense that the Coast Guard started as an agency involved in the rescue and salvaging of cargo ships.
Peter and I encountered this one remaining Life-Saving Station on Cape Cod during our visit to Provincetown this week. It was originally positioned at Old Harbor further south on the Cape, and was moved to Race Point in the Cape Cod National Seashore near Provincetown. Now a museum dedicated to the crews who manned and staged often dramatic rescues (not unlike modern Coast Guard rescues), this lovely old building captures the imagination of the days when sailing ships were vulnerable to any kind of weather and the shifting sands of commercial waterways.
For more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Life-Saving_Service
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_James_(lifesaver)
http://www.mychatham.com/capecodlifesavers.html
Old Harbor Life Saving Station by Cathy Ulrich
Have you ever encountered a museum or historic site that captured your imagination and made you wonder what it would have been like to have lived or worked in that time?
Love,
Cathy
