Keepers of the Light

Harper’s Tories are behind an attempt to extinguish the lights on a distinctly Canadian vocation.

Every couple of years since the late 1980s, whatever government is in power floats a plan to save money by automating Canada's remaining manned lighthouses. Harper's Tories are behind the latest attempt to send Canada’s last few dozen lighthouse keepers into retirement.

There are economic arguments to be made on the government's side; You don't have to pay wages to an automated lighthouse, nor do you have to be concerned with the safety issues, which lighthouse keepers do – except that, in an emergency, a real human being can be much more useful than a flashing light. But my own views on the matter are shaped by nostalgia as much as anything else. You see, my father served as lightkeeper at the East Point Lighthouse on Saturna Island, off the Coast of Vancouver Island, in British Columbia.

When dad left the armed forces in the mid-1970s, he spent a couple of years going from job to job, before he gathered enough of a modern education to start a career in the civilian workforce. One of those jobs was as temporary keeper at East Point, during a six-month period when the previous keeper retired and before his permanent replacement arrived. My brother and I lived most of that summer with our dad.

I'd like to say it was one of the highlights of my childhood, but for the most part, it was a pretty boring summer. The town of Saturna is about ten miles across the island and since I arrived after the school year, and was too young to drive, I never really got a chance to meet other island kids.

But there were interesting moments. For example, isolation had driven dad's predecessors to study the island around them in minute detail; they made large and thorough collections of the local species – of butterflies, beetles, snail shells, pinecones, and so on – arranging them all in glass display cases. They also had extensively collected books on the local wildlife – and I had spent many hours pouring through these, and many more still tramping around the island looking for the animals in the pictures.

Time and solitude had turned another one of the early lightkeepers towards folk art. Down by the shoreline, you could find relief chiselings of killer whales in the soft sandstone that is unique to the island. These were crafted in iconic fashion, as though meant to represent the spirit of East Point, and there were a dozen or so of them carved here and there, among the rocks, in hidden places – as though the artist had intended them to remain a secret. Since the lighthouse was built in 1888, I am sure some of these carvings are over a century old by now.

And if you stayed at East Point long enough, you came to understand why the old lightkeeper would have chosen to represent this particular creature. As I say, that end of Saturna Island is all sandstone, and easily eroded by ocean currents. So, the "shore" is really just a rock shelf – maybe three inches thick – that juts straight out over water more than 600 feet deep. Every week or so, a pod of Orcas would swim past, – sometimes not 10 meters away from the ledge you were standing on – so close that you could see their eyes under the water, watching you – so close that you could have jumped on their backs; it made me feel dizzy the first time I saw them.

I remember one occasion, when several oceanographers motored past a family of whales in an inflatable, looking ridiculously fragile among animals three times the length of their boat. They yelled over to me and made me write down a phone number; later, I dialed it, and told the voice at the other end that, “J Pod was heading North at East Point.”

Today, a metal skeleton has replaced the lighthouse proper, but when my dad kept East Point, the original structure still stood (as left). In fact, given the dates I've found here, I imagine I am one of the last people to have been inside the old tower. I'd like to say that this was fascinating, but in fact, the tower was a plain, off-white building that contained very little beyond a generator room, a winding staircase and the light room up top. The only thing that really made an impression on me was the lighthouse keepers’ log, which contained page after page of short-handed code that seemed quite magical – even after you realized that all it symbolized was the state of the equipment, and names of the occasional tanker that would steam past.

It must have been an incredibly lonely existence for the permanent keepers. I remember the second time we arrived on the island, near midnight one evening, after taking the day's last car ferry. When we drove up to East Point, we could hear my dad conversing intensely with the two dogs that remained in the lighthouse. Needless to say, he was happy to see us.

So, while nostalgia is not an argument for preserving the keepers of our lighthouses, I am nevertheless kind of hoping that this latest effort to automate our last manned lighthouses goes the way of the other attempts. I don't particularly care if they aren't the most economically efficient devices on the planet – I just like them!