In his 2014 essay for The Guardian, the writer Joe Moran admits that during his childhood he “wanted to be a lighthouse keeper.”

He wasn’t bothered, he wrote, by the travails of the characters in a book by the Finnish novelist Tove Jansson. Instead, he was heartened by the words of another writer, Virginia Woolf, author of the 1927 novel “To the Lighthouse.”

"I meant nothing by the lighthouse," Woolf wrote of the interpretations that readers made of the book’s title, "but I trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions."

It certainly did for Moran, who admits that “lighthouses appeal especially to introverts like me,” by which he means people “who need to make strategic withdrawals from the social world but also want to retain some basic link with humanity.”

I can relate, being much like the character of Randal Graves in Kevin Smith’s 1994 movie “Clerks.” Randal, you’ll recall, agrees with his friend Dante that he may not like too many people. But, he adds, he does “love gatherings.” As Randal admits, “Isn’t that ironic?”

Whatever the reason, I’ve made it a point to visit more than a few lighthouses on my travels over the years. In fact, I own hoodies that mark my treks to lighthouses at, among other places, Oregon’s Cape Meares, Whidbey Island’s Admiralty Head and San Diego’s Cabrillo Point. And I own a t-shirt honoring my stop at Portugal’s Farol do Cabo de São Vicente.

Most recently, though, I checked out lighthouses located in Montauk, New York, and Marblehead, Ohio. And while I did purchase a souvenir hoody in Montauk, I couldn’t find anything worth buying in Ohio (outside a t-shirt I liked at Cleveland’s Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame).

Let’s begin with one of Lake Erie’s “most-photographed landmarks.” That, at least, is how the Marblehead Village website describes the Marblehead Lighthouse. It’s a credible claim, considering the facility dates back to 1821 (or 1822, depending on your source), which leads to an even more impressive boast – that it is “the oldest lighthouse in continuous operation on the Great Lakes.”

Standing some 50 feet, with 5-feet-thick walls that are 25 feet wide at the base narrowing to 12 feet at the top, the limestone tower was built by the contractor William Kelly. Its durability is said to be due to the Columbus Limestone, quarried nearby, that is native to the Marblehead peninsula and that protects the lighthouse and its attendant buildings from the lake’s pounding waves.

As the website proudly proclaims, “Marblehead's beloved beacon continues to shine and protect boaters from peril in Lake Erie's unpredictable waters along her rocky shores.”

As for the Montauk Point Lighthouse, it sits at the very tip of Long Island, the New York City borough that harbors more than a few exclusive Jay Gatsby-type neighborhoods. The borough’s North Shore, in fact, houses some of the area’s most exclusive mansions, having once belonged to the likes of the Vanderbilt, Guggenheim, J.P. Morgan and Colgate families.

The town of Montauk itself was originally the home of the indigenous Montaukett tribe, which over the centuries – in a storyline that would become a familiar American tale – declined due to disease, fights with other tribes and gradual encroachment on their native lands by various groups of settlers.

The lighthouse was commissioned in 1792 by none other than then-President George Washington. As the first lighthouse to be built in New York, and the fourth-oldest working lighthouse in America, it was honored in 2012 as a National Historic Landmark.

Not only does the attendant Lighthouse Museum boast a display outlining the history of the facility, but it’s possible to climb up to the top of the tower itself where a new LED-enhanced lens was installed in 2023.

(Note: The climb, though, ends up being a bit disappointing. After waiting in live, then navigating a series of winding steps to the top of the 110-foot tower, you emerge in a small room. Instead of being able to step on onto a landing as is possible at other lighthouses, though, you can only peek out the windows to get a view of the surrounding area.)

“The lens is a huge, upright glass dish that spins on its edge and focuses the rays from an LED into a single intense beam,” reported the New York Times. “It turns six times a minute. It flashes every five seconds.”

The Times also points out that the lighthouse itself is, in this age of GPS, something of a “throwback.”

Maybe, though, that’s part of the charm of all lighthouses. Nostalgia can be every bit as powerful a draw as is the need for solitude.

At least that’s true for some of us introverts.