Waltons Lighthouse

Derek Walton never made it home from World War II. Fifty-six years later, his brother built him a lighthouse. Charles Walton donated $60,000 to replace the unsightly harbor light with something more fitting: a proper beacon named for the merchant seaman he lost to the war. Walton Lighthouse was dedicated in 2002, a brand-new structure in an era when most lighthouses are 19th-century relics.

The 350,000-pound structure was engineered to withstand a quarter-million pounds of wave energy – necessary given the breakwater’s brutal exposure to Pacific swells. Unlike the historic lighthouses that dot California’s coastline, this one’s a 21st-century memorial with an old job: guiding vessels safely into harbor while honoring a sailor who never made it home.

In a peculiar bit of Santa Cruz symmetry, the harbor holds two memorial lighthouses. Just up the coast, the Mark Abbott Memorial Lighthouse commemorates a local surfer and now houses the Santa Cruz Surfing Museum while Walton keeps watch over the harbor entrance – a beacon for a brother lost half a world away.

One lighthouse remembers a surfer. The other, a sailor. Both prove that grief, given enough time and concrete, becomes permanence.