SHELTERED WATERS AND DAINTY ARCTIC PLANTS ENCHANT VISITORS TO THE SLATES ARCHIPELAGO. PHOTO: THEPLANETD.COM


SPECTACULAR SKIES, REMARKABLE GEOLOGY,


quickly warmed up to visitors. “The waves coming from the southwest were 50 feet high,” was Saasto’s familiar


refrain, describing a wicked storm in 1977, his first year on the job. “When they hit the rocks, the spray shattered the glass in the lantern”—which stands 120 feet above the water. More colorful still was Thunder Bay resident Maureen Robertson, who was


compelled to rent lights at Porphyry Island and Trowbridge Island for 17 summers, despite declaring, “I never had a romantic interest in lighthouses.” On vacation from her job at a health clinic, Robertson made annual solo retreats to northern Ontario lakes, hiring a floatplane to access remote fishing and hunting camps. On one such vacation in 1993, the pilot took the scenic route home, buzzing the red and white keepers’ residences on Porphyry. “When I saw the lighthouse I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, would I ever love to have that,’” says Robertson. “It was like something out of Hansel and Gretel.” Robertson sweet-talked the Coast Guard into giving her the keys to a place that


lacked electricity, running water and indoor plumbing. “At first they said I could never live out there alone,” she says. “They said, ‘What’s an old woman like you


going to do out at a lighthouse?’ Well, what’s so dangerous about an island with a nice house on it?” She spent four years at Porphyry before moving to tiny, rockbound Trowbridge.


There, she decorated each room of the lightkeepers’ two-story duplex with unique themes, including a recreated post office and a fur- and snowshoe-decked bedroom dedicated to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Nearly every room in the house had an old rotary telephone, despite a lack of phone service. All of her furniture and decorations were purchased at yard sales and thrift shops and hauled to the island by helicopter. “If people are going to think I’m eccentric,” she says, “then I’m going to live up


to it.” Robertson was 76 years old when she left Trowbridge for good in 2010, the


year the Coast Guard divested nearly a thousand lights. I felt fortunate to have encountered a woman whose simple lifestyle was likely analogous to my great- great grandfather C.J. Pim’s. Then, a few years later, I learned about a group of Lake Superior enthusiasts working just as hard to keep the lightkeeper spirit alive.


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PHOTO: PAUL STEYN


PHOTO: THEPLANETD.COM


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