Charlee Remitz and the Search for America’s Lighthouses: An Introduction

Charlee Remitz is an accomplished artist who also goes by the moniker Blue Monkey, with praise from such coveted publications as LA Weekly, American Songwriter, and Alternative Press, to name a few. Someone who thrives in and champions creative freedom, Remitz is also on another creative journey, one that has her travelling her home country in search of lighthouses.

With her latest musical release, Ageless, out as of June 6th, 2025, Remitz begins a new chapter in which she details her incredible voyage on the pages of V13 Media. Stay tuned for stories, images, and more. Fans can also find additional content and updates on Instagram here.

The first lighthouse I consciously collected (I say conscious, because of course I wasn’t doing anything on purpose when I saw the Statue of Liberty aboard the ferry to Staten Island) was a mere 20 miles from the Oregon border, in Crescent City, California. It was early February, and I was the last of the few guests to arrive at my hotel. As such, they greeted me by name. This would become thematic over the next four years. I was never terribly good with time. I often lingered in a sleepy coastal town too long or slept in too late. And it wasn’t uncommon for me to receive a phone call from a motel in an obscure place wondering if I was coming to stay with them at all.

I was never that certain about anything beyond the lighthouses. I got stars in my eyes. I was overexcited and impulsive. In the beginning, I didn’t plan, which left a lot of room for spontaneity. And there was something to that, even if I overshot and rarely returned home having achieved my goal.

Now, I struggle to limit myself. To be there for the journey instead of racing from one lighthouse to the next. I have back problems and hip problems from sitting for hours on end in a car. I know I should set aside time to walk around, to get to know a place beyond the blurs through my windshield, but it was hard for me to war with the perfectionist-completionist within who just wanted to get it done. And that was part of the whole thing. Trying to see every lighthouse in America takes determination, but is it worth it if I did it so fast, I can’t remember a thing?

The following day, after a fitful night of rest, I saw no less than three murals of the lighthouse I’d come to see as I drove through town looking for coffee. This, too, would become thematic. I’ve never met a city that didn’t dote on its lighthouse(s). That didn’t lobby for big restoration projects, so it could be opened to the public and preserved forever. As I walked along the little half-moon of low-tide beach, coffee in hand, towards Battery Point, I understood the attachment. I felt the hugest things when I stood beneath that lighthouse. I plopped down on a picnic table next to a buoy tree and looked out over the Pacific, and I was so hopeful.

Battery Point is extraordinary. Unique, as far as lighthouses go. The small hill it sat atop made a tall tower unnecessary. And so, it looked like a typical American house. White brick, with a red roof, dual chimneys, and a lantern room. It was active and open to the public, and perhaps if another of my many enduring themes wasn’t showing up out of business hours, out of season, or out of time, I may have been able to go in.

I could have started my journey with a more emblematic lighthouse. Pigeon Point or Yaquina Head, to name two. But I was often the only soul around at these lesser-known stations. I preferred it that way. And, aside from the boats motoring in and out of the marina and the sea lions flopping onto floating docks, mariners had set out specifically so they’d stop terrorizing the main docks. I had the whole place to myself. That solitude was deeply moving.

Even with the wind, which howled around me, I felt a stillness. A settling. Like I had become one with the air, and I was lying flat over everything. For the first time, freedom consumed me. Way out there on that patch of land, which tended to be an island if you timed it wrong, I was scared and emboldened in the same breath.

It was exhilarating.

Battery Point in February 2021, photo by Charlee Remitz

It wasn’t long into my lighthouse journey that I started to pick up on the status quo. For instance, each time I showed up to a new lighthouse, I had the keen sensation that I was breaking up a land dispute between the lighthouse and the native birds. After an attack by a gull during hatching season on Anacapa Island, I started to side with the lighthouse.

Birds are greedy for space. There, I said it. They build their nests in every conceivable nook and cranny a lighthouse has left bare as though the lighthouse is being punished for popping up like an unwelcome colonizer, hogging the coastline and driving them out. The entire thing felt distinctly unresolved and petty, but I knew I could always vent my frustrations to the fishermen I hired to boat me out to remote lighthouses. No bond would ever appear as strong as that which forms between people with a common enemy. Their hatred, however, was much more specific. Cormorants, known for their uncanny ability to dive up to 150 feet in the water for prey, offered a unique competition for the day’s catch.

There are lighthouses, like Middle Bay in Mobile, Alabama, whose roofs are permanently white because of bird poop. And when you step out of the cabin for a breath of fresh air after a long couple of hours trying to reach the Farallon Islands in tempestuous waters, you will be assaulted with the smell of guano, and a surfeit of resulting flies.

A self-important gull atop Anacapa Island’s flagpole in August 2021, photo by Charlee Remitz

So, I came to expect birds. But also shipwrecks and state parks. In British Columbia, there were blackberries. On the western coast of Florida, I collected shells as big as my hand. There are buoy trees and sculpture gardens and geriatric volunteers who’ve lived down the street from a certain lighthouse their entire lives and have fond memories of engaging with it in a way that’s long been outlawed by whatever committee’s come along to take over its conservancy. There are sheepshead and dolphins, and sometimes, there are whales. There is fog and rain and ample amounts of wind. There are stories of ghosts. There are mangroves and oil rigs. There are dive bars. There are Coast Guard stations and checkpoints that require special security clearance to get through. There are artist co-ops and beaches and painters with their easels.

But most of all, there is hope.

It stands to be said that a lighthouse has always been the foremost symbol of preservation. Its light is the first thing seamen see after suffering the psychological torment of getting caught in a storm and wondering if they’ll ever step foot on land again. A lighthouse was designed to run all through the night, no matter the detriment to its keeper, its apparatus so smart, so tactical, its lens a kaleidoscope of glass to extend its range. It was built to be there, in whatever shape, for a long time. To keep. And most of them, against all the odds, have.

The New Canal Lighthouse in New Orleans, LA, rebuilt on pilings after Hurricane Katrina left the original lighthouse in ruins, photo by Charlee Remitz

I thought my search for America’s lighthouses was just about the adventure of it all. And it has been—the adventure of a lifetime. But what I was really looking for when I set out in 2021, one year into an unprecedented world event, was hope. Freedom. Whimsy.

At first, it was just California. It was an unorganized, chaotic enterprise of planning little and expecting a lot. I’d drive up the coast in my tiny Mini Cooper, intending on seeing 24 lighthouses and return home to LA having seen eight. I’d pull up to signs blockading one-way roads and gates protecting private property. I’d discover one lighthouse could only be visited on a tour on Wednesdays and Fridays, and another in a kayak or along a six-mile hike at low tide.

I saw nearly all of them in this manner, ending my days exhausted in hotel rooms feeling like I’d gone to Mars and back. And it wasn’t until I moved to Nashville and spent enough time away from this project that I realized how in love I was with seeing the world in this way. No matter the toll it sometimes took on my body.

It’s not about the lighthouses, really. It’s about where they take me. I used to have an idea about who I am and what I have access to. And now, I’ve come to realize how fluid it all is. Like I said before, this freedom feels so enormous, it gives me anxiety. I understand now why we volunteer to stay put, living as one enduring suggestion, rather than evolving over and over again. Of course, we should long for stability. The world is unstable and it’s getting worse by the day. Having something you can depend on, living in a snow globe where little happens, devoting yourself to only what affects you—this is where comfort and longevity fight to the death.

And I understand the compulsion to give up. I can only speak to so many hopeless climate scientists in places like Sapelo Island, Georgia, as they whisper “things are far worse than they seem” into my ear before I start to lose my edge. But I’ve acknowledged a certain responsibility in this journey. To be beholden to the truth.

In the 359 U.S. and nearly 150 international lighthouses I’ve seen, I’ve found a world worth fighting for.

So, I guess, this is my battle cry.

Ccharlee Remitz, photo by Hollon Beasley