keepers of the light
ABANDONED TO AGE AND OBSOLESCENCE, LAKE SUPERIOR’S HISTORIC SENTINELS ARE EXPERIENCING A REBIRTH THANKS TO A HANDFUL OF DEVOTED ENTHUSIASTS
STORY BY CONOR MIHELL
Craig jiggles the handle and elbows the rickety, wood-panelled door. From my paddling buddy’s devious glance I know in a few moments we’ll be inside the cupola of the tallest, most remote lighthouse on the Great Lakes. I dig out a Swiss Army knife from my PFD pocket and with a few turns of a flat-head screwdriver, the hinges release from the rotten jamb and we step into the dark and musty Caribou Island tower. Red-enamelled stairs switchback to a trapdoor; inside the glass room at
the top it’s unbearably hot. Through windows caked with desiccated insects, the watery horizon of Lake Superior stretches in all directions, our sea kayaks yellow and white slivers on the rocks below. I justify forced entry by a sense of entitlement: My great-great grandfather
worked here for 11 years in the late 1800s. This is the climax to a six-hour open- water crossing—a nerve-wracking affair Craig and I will repeat tomorrow as we begin our 150-kilometer journey back to civilization. But I’m disappointed to realize the signs of lightkeeper C.J. Pim’s Caribou Island tenure have long crumbled away, erased by time and technology. The only tangible evidence of my ancestor’s career is the photocopy of his life insurance policy—valued at $2,000 and dated 1896—stored at home in a desk drawer. The 100-foot-tall cement structure we’ve broken into replaced Pim’s stone
tower in 1911. Impressive Gothic-style flying buttresses, designed to anchor the tower in hurricane winds, symbolize the halcyon days of lightkeeping, when hardscrabble men and women and their families were integral to maritime safety—responsible for tending whale oil and kerosene lamps, operating foghorns, recording weather observations and bravely assisting mariners in distress. A century ago, the Caribou Island lightkeeper was paid $1,260, from which he pulled a salary for an assistant. Since then, the occupation faded into obsolescence. With the advent of accurate charts, improved navigational tools and, finally, solar-electric power, the Canadian Coast Guard de-staffed the last light on Lake Superior in 1991. Final abandonment came in 2010, when the government listed 986 lighthouses in Canada, including 12 on Lake Superior, as “surplus”—meaning they “could be replaced with simpler structures whose operation and maintenance would be more cost-effective.” Coast Guard lightkeepers still maintain beacons in a few isolated spots in the Pacific Northwest, but as the lights of Lake Superior wink toward an uncertain future, a handful of hopelessly anachronistic individuals have found their own creative approaches to reinventing this long-lost way of life.
MICHIPICOTEN ISLAND'S EAST END LIGHT WATCHES OVER THE STORMY WATERS OF LAKE SUPERIOR. PHOTO: VIRGINA MARSHALL
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