"Go for it! You’re not getting any younger!" Given that benediction by my little brother, did I hesitate?

Only long enough to ask if I also could borrow his daughter’s sleeping bag for the adventure!

And that is how I came to find myself on a warm, late April night contemplating the belly of the beauty: The Drum Point Lighthouse. Not a foreboding light, not one of those remote, windswept and wild places on a treacherous shoal. This beautiful, two-story hexagonal cottage nestled in a cat’s cradle of red girders resembles many of the modest clapboard homes that dot southern Maryland’s shores and farms.

It bears similarities to the farmhouse I grew up in 35 miles to the north, except this one stands on seven screwpiles and is crowned by a dainty cupola and lens.

The gem of the Calvert Marine Museum at Solomons, Md., the screwpile light was built in 1883 at Drum Point, on the mouth of the Patuxent River. It guided mariners until it was decommissioned in 1962, fell into despair, and eventually was sawed off at its ankles in 1975 and moved two miles to Back Creek, where restoration began. Since its dedication in 1978, it has been open to visitors - the daylight variety.

But tonight? Ah, a first among firsts!

Drum Point was the last site on Chesapeake Chapter’s April 25 hit-and-run lighthousing day in Southern Maryland.

As the sun glinted across the red tin roof and ducks rediscovered spring in the creek below, visitors heard the unexpected chatter of a dressed-for-the-part toddler on the cottage’s main floor, a circle of 
four rooms around a tight central stairwell. The child and her mother were living history interpreters, telling visitors about yesteryear life in Drum Point Lighthouse.

At 20 months, the little girl cavorting in her long white dress and leather slippers riveted everyone’s attention. Her mother was perfectly at ease ("I really have to chase her a lot," said mom, prodding us to 
consider the hazards of child rearing on such a perch.)

They set a curious stage for the night ahead.

Then we were seven.

Actually, we were five-plus-two-plus-critter.

Two Ohio lighthousers and their dog pulled their RV to a spot near the lighthouse foundation. While they chose to remain on the ground for the night, they provided us with coffee and security. Accommodating!

The remaining five climbed to the promised night aloft. That’s 17 steps from foundation to deck, 12 more to the first level of the cottage, 14 more to the gabled second story, and though none of us stood watch for the night, another 17 steps to thread ourselves into the fourth-order Fresnel light.

The night’s real obstacle was the 12-rung ladder to the main living area of the cottage. "Check-in," with baggage, is through a not-quite-square trapdoor roughly 20 inches on each side. Scarcely a wing wider than grandma’s turkey platter, it was a tight press with a sleeping bag, water bottle and flashlights.

Geared and game, we five dropped our bags and ourselves on the yellow pine floor of the only room with lights -  two mysteriously backlighted panels depicting the structure’s architecture. The panels would 
eventually fall dark, leaving us in a museum-on-stilts without lights or plumbing, and only an emergency phone in a closet.

Primitive? Not quite. Drum Point light is bathed in the white glow cast by the museum’s soda shack machines (providing plenty of light for 4 a.m. ladder descents to a nearby portable toilet). Casting its friendly if not Victorian-era glow over the setting is the yellow "Comfort Inn" sign over a boat shed to the east.

Oh-my-gosh silliness overtook us, this idea of five people spending the night in a museum. I flattened a bug that scurried past, observing that I hoped he wasn’t the scout for an army. We chatted, watched the panels flicker, exchanged jokes and hometown information, wondered aloud about snoring. Well before midnight we chose our slots on the cottage floor.

Two ascended to the bellroom-bedroom suite and became the keepers of the 1,400 pound bell installed there. By default, they also became the first line of defense against whatever ghosts of district inspectors past might burst from the cubbyholes tucked under the caves. Yessiree, I had checked out those dark recesses by daylight and resolved to spend my night locked inside the unused privy on the gallery if there were no other choices.

Two spread sleeping bags at angles on the kitchen floor. Brave young sorts, they were farthest from the trapdoor and would be negotiating the monstrous New Alton cookstove, table and chairs, a kerosene lamp and an arsenal of cast iron cookware if they ventured out.

I chose the "master" bedroom, sliding aside a sturdy rocker and noting that I would be flanked by two china chamber pots and guarded by the fixed stare of a Raggedy Ann doll.

I unrolled the borrowed sleeping bag and eased myself into its recesses, giving passing thought to the errant bug. I pressed a sweater into service as a pillow. Piece of cake, I chuckled. My friends will think I 
spent the night lashed to the dank walls of an abandoned lighthouse, fending off pigeons. In truth, it is more like the musty but altogether welcoming guest room of a favorite aunt’s home.

Giggles from the floor above. We would learn the next morning that those keepers were "lightheaded" from trying to inflate their air mattress.

Silence from the kitchen keepers.

A soft breeze wafted along the floor inside the open screen door, moving the dust left there by generations of keepers and tourists.

I am stretched out across history. My mind ricochets to other nights and places a night under a thatched roof in rural England, in a 400-year-old German inn, in a rustic cabin under the shadow of Mt. Sinai in Egypt (with scorpions). This night, spent on my back, will be a half-dreamed encounter with other native Marylanders my relatives, perhaps keepers and their families rooted in the land of tobacco, rockfish, oysters.

I think of the toddler chewing on her deer-antler teething toy affixed to a silver base. How many children have romped through these four, gray angular rooms, played tag on the gallery and hide-and-seek in the 
cubbies? How many wet diapers have dried on the handrails and stovepipes? How many colicky babies kept their weary keeper-fathers from sleeping between their duties? How many toddlers learning potty skills have wandered these very pine floors...

This house-yard-playground was a scant 45 feet wide. Cozy, actually. And solidly built, 1 thought. I drifted toward sleep.

Then I heard it. The WHOOSH in the night. The low, seamless sound that was half slither, half hum. The rumored ghost? The captain of some ship grounded at Drum Point before the light was commissioned? The district inspector arriving to white-glove our LENS???

No, no, just the gentle roar of traffic flying along the Gov. Thomas Johnson Memorial Bridge several hundred yards away. This high, mile-long span boomerangs across the Patuxent River, linking Solomons and St. Mary’s County. The lighthouse keeper rowed twice that distance from Drum Point light, 120 yards offshore, to Solomons Island for supplies.

We’re a softer breed, I concluded, given to vicarious experiences when the lights have been automated and the keepers relegated to living-history re-enactments. I was resigned to the ache that was 
invading my neck and back.

I longed for morning. I longed for coffee.

Dawn broke under gray skies; there was no sunrise, but there were smiles on the faces of the five who gathered on the gallery to stretch, reflect. We emerged refreshed from the first night for visitors in the 
Drum Point Lighthouse. Until now, only a former museum director and curator of paleontology had spent a night here since its acquisition by the museum.

Richer for the experience, enlighted, we dropped our sleeping bags over the gallery rail.

To Chesapeake Chapter members who’re polishing their USLHS brass button covers and waiting for the chance to night in a light: Pick your night (warm and dry was almost too easy; damp and dirty would also be memorable); pick your light (we’ve got several dozen in the region, so perhaps you too can be a "first") and GO FOR IT!

Editor’s Note: A special thanks to the folks at the Calvert Marine 
Museum for letting us spend the night.