A Good Day's Work (34 page)

Chris—who grows tomatoes, beans, peppers and herbs out behind the house and plays bridge in addition to the French horn—is well suited to it. So is Rob, who makes sculpture from driftwood and does the
New York Times
crossword every day online. Rob catches fish that Chris smokes. He also does a passable imitation of Relic, the character on the old
Beachcombers
television series.

BY now it is time to reveal something that you may already have guessed. There is, as far as I know, no Dawson Island lighthouse. It is my deepest belief that there is not a Dawson Island either—at least, not one off the West Coast. I'll concede that there may well exist a Christine Curtis and that she could exhibit some of the qualities my Chris Curtis would display if she didn't live in my mind in a nonexistent lighthouse on a made-up island. If so, this is entirely coincidental.

I wanted to talk to a keeper of a British Columbia light because only three provinces still have humans manning the switches. (One of them, New Brunswick, keeps a single manned light on Machias Seal Island in the Gulf of Maine so that Canada can claim sovereignty over it.) The keeper I contacted said come on over. Then one day she sent me an
email advising me that the only way I could in fact step onto her light was with the approval of the Canadian Coast Guard, which administers what's left of this country's lighthouses. My request to the Coast Guard bounced around a few times before finally being denied. “We think you're probably going to write about the de-staffing of the lighthouses,” a Coast Guard spokesman told me. Which was and wasn't true.

Admittedly lighthouses are a touchy subject for the feds, particularly in British Columbia, where public outrage twice forced the government to shelve plans to make keepers obsolete. But not letting a reporter talk to the last men and women who will do this work made me double-click on the Coast Guard website to ensure they hadn't, in the dead of night, vapourized every existing light and secreted the folks who manned them away into the bowels of the civil service with the promise of a nice pension as long as they spoke not a word about the whole matter. The keepers, as far as I know, are still there. But the way the government is keeping them from journalists' eyes makes me think not for much longer.

That causes my heart to sink. We all know that in the twenty-first century everyone and everything must pay their own way. And liability issues are liability issues. But lighthouses aren't just majestic and symbolic. They aren't just old. They are history, which is way different. The first lighthouse on record was the Pharos of Alexandria, built in about 280 BC to guide sailors into the great harbour of Alexandria. Considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it was, by all accounts, something to see. The Pharos reportedly used fire at night and a sun-reflecting mirror during the day. The whole thing, including the foundation, was thought to be
384 feet high, which, if true, makes it the tallest lighthouse in history and the highest building in the ancient world.

Its fame, therefore, spread: The British called a lighthouse a “pharos” until 1600. The Romans—who built more than thirty lighthouses throughout their provinces, including the 1,900-year-old Tower of Hercules still overlooking the Atlantic coast of Spain—memorialized the Pharos on their coins. Some of the lights built after the end of the so-called Dark Ages, when trade among ports on the Mediterranean and beyond blossomed, still stand today: the
circa
1245 lighthouse at the tip of the Hook Peninsula, in County Wexford, Ireland. The 700-year-old Cordouan lighthouse, which stands near the mouth of the Gironde estuary in France. But it wasn't until the fifteenth century that lighthouses began to be installed offshore to warn seamen of hazards to their vessels along routes to the port cities. Author D. Alan Stevenson estimated that the number of lighthouses worldwide grew from about thirty-four in 1600 to around 175 by 1800.

The first lighthouse in Canada—the second on the entire coast of North America after Little Brewster Island in Boston Harbor—was built on Cape Breton Island in 1734 at the fortress of Louisbourg, the major landfall for France in the New World. No surprise there: eight years earlier, three hundred people died when a French transport ship ran aground a few miles east of the fortress. When completed, the Louisbourg light tower stood about seventy-five feet high. The first light was a circle of cod liver oil—fed wicks set in a copper ring mounted on cork floats. Its flame was visible for eighteen nautical miles, an impressive distance for those times. Not far from the base of the light was a small house containing room
for oil storage and quarters for the light keeper. From 1733 until 1744, this was Jean Grenard dit Belair, a retired sergeant of the Compagnies franches de la marine, and Canada's first full-time light keeper.

“THERE'S something about the light tower itself,” Elaine Graham—a real person—tells me over the telephone. “People are smitten with them. I think it's a real click magnet: everyone wants to take a photo. I guess it is romantic in a way. A light is the ultimate lifesaving symbol. It is an expression of compassion.” She says these words, in her English accent, from the Point Atkinson Lighthouse station, which also really exists, on a point of land in West Vancouver. It was here in 1871 that the federal government built a light to help coax British Columbia into Canada. The station she and her keeper husband, Donald, moved into in 1980 had been rebuilt sixty-eight years earlier on the foundation of the first light. She lives there still, even though the station turned automated in 1996 and her husband—who worked in tandem with another man as the light's last keepers—died five years later.

It's her home, but it's also a museum. Someday that's what every lighthouse in this country will be. At that point, a dramatic human narrative will have run its course. Death brought the first light stations to this land: along the coast of British Columbia, where the mouth of Juan de Fuca is nicknamed the “graveyard of the Pacific” because of the large numbers of shipwrecks there in the days before light stations were built.

But also on the east coast, where wrecks led to the construction of a lighthouse at the summit of Gull Island, off Newfoundland's Bay de Verde Peninsula after a sealer discovered the bodies of fourteen passengers and the crew from the Welsh brigantine
Queen of Swansea
in 1868. Lighthouses, in time, stood on Sable Island, a spit of land known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” where since 1583 there have been some 350 recorded shipwrecks. They blinked on both ends of St. Paul Island, north of Cape Breton, where each spring fishermen from the mainland would find the frozen bodies of shipwrecked seamen huddled in crude shelters, waiting for help that never came.

The waters around Seal Island, off the southwest tip of Nova Scotia, were particularly treacherous. Before anyone lived on the island, shipwrecked mariners who reached its shores routinely died of starvation and exposure during the harsh winters. By the early years of the nineteenth century, a grim tradition had evolved: every spring preachers and residents from the mainland villages of Yarmouth and Barrington would get in boats and make their way to the island to find and bury the winter's dead. One year twenty-one people had to be buried in shallow graves in a single day.

In 1823, two families, the Hichens and the Crowells, settled on the island in the hope of assisting the unfortunate souls cast ashore during the winter storms. In time, Richard Hichens, who himself had been shipwrecked on Cape Sable, married Mary Crowell, who had heard first-hand many stories of the deaths on Seal Island from her father, a Barrington preacher. On the night of November 28, 1831, the island's fixed light was lit for the first time. That same evening a daughter was born
to Richard and Mary, thus beginning a family light-keeping tradition that would last more than a century on Seal Island.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, Canada had more than eight hundred manned lighthouses. They stood on lonely islands and in the harbours of burgeoning metropolises. A few even winked in the Prairie province of Manitoba. In the country with the longest coastline in the world, the keepers kept the light on in the dark. They guided the ships and sailors home. From the beginning, they were the heroic men and women who climbed into boats in weather capable of sending schooners and brigantines to the bottom, to come to the aid of the shipwrecked.

Yet as I write these words, there are precisely fifty-one manned lighthouses in Canada: twenty-seven in British Columbia, twenty-three in Newfoundland and Labrador and one in New Brunswick. What the heck happened? Technology, mostly. New equipment meant it was no longer necessary to have a human on-site to operate lights and activate foghorns. Radar, radio beacons, satellite-based global positioning systems and advances in communications made navigation more reliable and safer for anyone with a boat that had the technology. Between 1970 and 1996, 264 lighthouses—including every one in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Prince Edward Island and Ontario—were automated. Keepers' houses were razed. Lighthouses were destroyed, replaced by utilitarian skeleton-tower lights. Many of the buildings that remained standing were abandoned and left to vandals. Individuals and entire communities stepped forward to save the historic stations. But red tape made it hard to do much.

That was just the way the universe seemed to be going: by then a few countries with remote and expansive coastlines, like
Chile and Brazil, still had staffed lights. A few technicians in charge of operating and maintaining navigational aids could be found in lighthouses in Portugal and Denmark. But Australia had de-staffed its stations. Every lighthouse in the United States was by then automated and only one, Boston Light, still had a government-paid keeper.

Only the loudness of the public outcry saved the last of the keepers in British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador. The government ran into such resistance that it abandoned a 1998 plan to remove the light keepers in those provinces. A year later it tabled, then put on hold, another bill designed to do the same thing. Before long the government was back with its Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act, under which it declared 487 active and 488 inactive lighthouses “surplus” to Canada's requirements. The fifty staffed light stations in British Columbia and Newfoundland and Labrador were, for the moment, safe. In 2010, according to a Senate report, British Columbia's lights employed thirty-seven full-time staff.

Which, I guess, is where this book began.

LIGHT keepers, there can be little doubt, will someday soon take their place alongside voyageurs and trappers, matchmakers and milliners. At some point, they will invariably join buffalo hunters, whalers and buggy whip makers. In time, their names will stand on a roll that includes seamstresses and steeplejacks, butchers and bootblacks, cobblers and clock-makers, gandy dancers and gravediggers. Their day is surely coming, just as it is for nuns, long-haul truckers, general-store
owners and telephone linemen. The die is cast. It is written in stone. The fat lady has sung. Technological change, anyone can see, is part of it. Other cruel forces are also at work here. The dogged pursuit of “efficiencies.” But also a global marketplace that doesn't just mean you can sell your goods or services to Mumbai; it means those smart, fast, hungry folks in Shanghai can sell their stuff in Moose Jaw or Little Heart's Ease. The way things stand, that's not really a fair fight.