by John Demont
No wonder, during drive-in season, Paul and Nancy forgo their farmhouse for the apartment over the projection room. During the day there are toilets to unclog, speakers to rewire and popcorn machines to fix. (“I didn’t start out doing stuff,” Paul says, “but picked it up as I went along because I had to. My job is a little bit of everything, whatever it takes.”) Whatever else is going on, come 6 p.m. Paul has to start rewinding the previous day’s movies. He threads the film through the projector, He looks outside to see how many cars have arrived. Because, baby, it’s showtime.
PAUL may move slowly around his domain, but after a while you notice that he is seldom at rest. He makes his rounds: sticking his head inside the none-too-pretty bathroom, checking on the projectors, strolling around the grounds. Come daylight he might find wallets, the occasional hooch bottle, even an iPod or two lying in the grass. “I find lots of unpleasant things too,” he says, then adds, “It’s good that people are doing things safely.” Sometimes he wakes people up in various states of undress. Last season, as he approached a car, he was startled to see two naked females exit, open the back seats and then sprint the two feet to the front seat, slamming the doors behind them.
Generally, though, things are tame. It’s been years since he’s slapped a hammerlock on a high school senior crazy on Canadian Club. When he’s satisfied that everything’s under control, he takes Anna by the hand and they head up the stairs to watch some Shrek 2 from the back-screen projection booth. At 11:50 p.m., when the first cars are starting up their engines, Paul is already in the kitchen, helping Nancy clean up. By his estimation, the rain cost him about three thousand dollars at the gate and canteen tonight.
He can’t afford too many more nights like that. Margins are thin in this business. A few days of rain is a drag. A week is a catastrophe. But time moves slowly at this point in the evening. Paul is fifty-four years old; after a full day in a long week the bedroll beckons. He daydreams about getting out on his motorbike on the highway, and about what the season ahead will hold for his beloved New England Patriots. Sometimes he thinks about the moment he and Nancy shut the theatre for the winter, hop in their RV and join the caravan to Florida.
At 12:45 the credits roll down the big screen and Paul flips on the transmitter:
Tha … tha … tha … as Porky Pig used to say. Well, that’s our program, folks. Thanks for coming, thanks for leaving. I hope you had fun, and if not, you figure out why you stayed till the end. See you on the other side of next time. Good night.
Then, as the credits continue, he cranks the AC-DC, has a seat and waits. Some people return their radios. A sheepish-looking father, son in tow, appears at the door of the projectionist’s room and asks if Paul has some jumper cables. Paul tells him not to sweat it. He just smiles, hoists his gear up and follows them to their car. It happens three more times, which is about par for the course. At least every engine turns over. No one has to be driven home.
By now all the cars are gone. Stars crowd the country sky. The air has a crunch like a Granny Smith. From where I stand, I can see the headlights disappearing into the night. It’s a lonely image, really.
God knows where exactly they are going. And what precisely waits for them there. It’s all out of Paul’s hands. All he does is his thing: Show a few movies. Try to bring some people together to take their pleasure the old-fashioned way. It’s a small dream, he knows. He’ll tell you this too: we’ll only miss it when it’s gone.
CHAPTER
TEN
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
CHRISTINE Curtis was a lazy youth and a dreamy, sleep-until-noon teen. So it still surprises her that when the alarm clock jangles, she does not snake out a hand and hit the snooze button for the extra five minutes in the sack. Instead, at 3:45 a.m. she punches the alarm into silence. She tosses off the covers. She swings a leg over the side of the bed. She pulls herself into the sitting position. She might run a hand through her hair, which is reddish and thick with cowlicks. She might rub her eyes, which are green. She might yawn and groan. But always, on muscles hardened by lots of time outdoors but not a single spinning class, she eventually rises. She throws on her sweatshirt and sticks her feet in an old pair of slippers lined with fleece.
After six years, Chris could do the walk with her eyes closed. Sometimes it seems like she actually does as she heads into the kitchen, where the coffee maker automatically whirred into action twenty minutes earlier. She pours a mug, through pinched eyes watches the steam rise, then pushes open the door and steps out beneath the big beam of light. This woman, who once missed a plane because she simply couldn’t bring herself to run through the air terminal, gets to work. Because people are waiting.
While her eyes are still accustomed to the dark, Chris looks up at the cloud cover. She takes a few steps from the back porch to the Stevenson screen, a box containing thermometers, to get the temperature. Then she walks over to the seawall and looks out at the ocean. Dawson Island sits at the confluence of Gulf Channel and Orca Sound, on the central coast of British Columbia. The island is about 160 miles south of Prince Rupert and 250 miles northwest of Vancouver. The lighthouse faces west, toward Queen Charlotte Sound. She uses familiar landmarks to calculate visibility. She looks at the waves. About thirty yards from her residence she opens a porch door and enters a room that, mercifully, is only partly lit. Using abbreviations, she writes down in a lined ledger everything she has learned. She stretches her back. She sips her coffee.
At 4:40 she reaches for the lighthouse radio, which looks like an old telephone. She listens, waiting for her turn, as the radio operator in Prince Rupert collects the “weathers,” beginning at the northern stations and moving south until it’s Dawson Island’s turn.
“Go ahead with your marine local, Dawson,” the operator finally says.
Chris waits a beat, then replies, “Prince Rupert, Dawson. We have cloudy, one-five plus. Southwest two-zero, gusting two-five. Two-foot chop, low southwest. Over.”
What this means is the sky is cloudy, but the visibility is great, one-five, or fifteen miles, being about as good as it gets. The winds are blowing to the southwest about twenty miles an hour with gusts of twenty-five. There is a two-foot chop on the ocean.
All useful stuff for the occupants of sailboats, float planes, commercial freighters and tandem kayaks that look for the information online and on the continuous marine broadcast on VHF. When the radio exchange ends, Chris looks at the clock. It is ten minutes before five now. Everyone else on the island—her husband, Rob; head keeper, Miles, and his wife, Janelle—is asleep. Chris, one of eighteen female light keepers on the west coast, is human. On a point of pride, she would never head back to bed in her and Rob’s bungalow, with its sturdy plaster walls and circa 1950s design—which, to the knowing eye, is immediately recognizable as a keeper’s house. Old-timers used to refuse to shut their eyes for even a few minutes during a shift. But, times have changed. On a lazy day Chris can catnap right up until her next report, in three hours’ time. Then she’s awake for the day.
Her main job is ensuring the Dawson light keeps shining. It’s a heavy responsibility: the light has pretty well shone hour after hour, day after day, since 1898, when the tower was built as one of a half-dozen lighthouses erected to guide starry-eyed prospectors to the Klondike during the gold rush. The current light, the fourth on this site, was constructed in the early 1980s after high seas drove a huge log into the last tower, knocking it on its side. Now it sits atop a metal, twenty-foot skeleton on a concrete base. Dawson Island is some fifty acres of old-growth rainforest. Only three of British Columbia’s twenty-seven staffed light stations are accessible by road. The light itself—along with the engine room building and the two keepers’ homes—sits on a three-acre islet connected to the rest of the island by a thin natural causeway that can be submerged at high tide or during rough seas. “When that happens,” Chris says in her flat Ontario way, “this place can seem a whole lot smaller.”
Automation means keepers
have little to do with the lights anymore. All the staffed stations on the British Columbia coast are automated, meaning that the navigation aids can function even if neither keeper is around. Technicians from the mainland change the bulbs, which are now about the size of her thumb, compared with about the size of a human head when she started as a keeper around fifteen years ago. “We really just do maintenance now,” she says. “We check that it’s rotating and flashing at the right frequency. We check that it’s operating correctly. Once a month we shut it down and clean it.” The cleaning used to take a day. Now it takes about ten minutes.
Foghorns, which went electric in the 1970s, are equally low maintenance. Most lights don’t even bother with them anymore; Dawson Island’s is one of only seven now operating in all of British Columbia. Chris keeps the fog detector lenses clean so that they can send out sensory beams. Otherwise, they operate by solar panels that don’t need to be changed. If something is wrong, she calls the technicians. She’s been on Dawson Island for eleven months a year for the past eight years. So far she has called the techs a grand total of four times. They come via a helicopter, which puts down on the landing pad at the far end of the islet. Supplies can come on the helicopter or on a Coast Guard workboat, which uses an aerial derrick or “highline” to move stuff back and forth to the island. Chris also uses the highline to launch the light’s boat, which, other than the helicopter, is the only way on or off Dawson Island.
“I USED to be a banker,” Chris says, snickering in a way that says, Now look at me. “I used to wear a power suit with shoulders big enough to land a search-and-rescue helicopter.” Now she wears a different uniform: jeans with a hole in the right rear pocket, a plaid work shirt over a navy T-shirt, worn black army-surplus-style workboots, a ball cap with a faded-to-unreadable patch. She’s forty-eight years old—medium height and build—with lines around the eyes to prove it. A face with a lot going on: freckles, pale colouring, a vertical scar beside her right eye courtesy of a street hockey game back in the Leaside area of Toronto where she grew up.
Life was comfortable for the daughter of a lawyer and a CBC Radio producer: a nice high school run devoid of major crisis, a business degree at the University of Toronto, then an MBA at the same institution. Chris got a job in finance. There was a marriage and, three years later at the age of twenty-eight, an amicable enough divorce. She met Rob, a paramedic, at the Horseshoe Tavern during a Stompin’ Tom Connors concert. Not long after that, Chris signed on with a gold exploration company. She later left for a tech start-up, watched her equity soar, then plummet, after the dot-com bubble burst. Then, within the space of eighteen months, her father died in a car accident and her only brother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“I was thirty-five years old,” she says. “Rob [by then her husband] was three years younger, but burned out from his work. We were looking for something new. Somehow someone got us thinking about light keeping, which sounded pretty romantic and pretty different than what we were both doing. We got the forms from the Public Service Commission. One night over a few too many glasses of wine we said what the hell.”
Light keepers, to her relief, weren’t your standard civil servants. Work that involves complete isolation for eleven months a year tends to attract old hippies, misty-eyed romantics, ’Nam War draft dodgers, painters looking for a little solitude, along with folks who want to be close to nature and far from the civilizing influences of big cities. Oh sure, the service on the West Coast had its share of misanthropes and nut cases: authoritarian types who insisted on dressing in military uniform, who wouldn’t let their assistant keepers use the radio telephones and decreed that everyone in the light drop whatever they were doing and wave at the Queen of the North ferry whenever it passed by. In one lighthouse, during the 1960s, relations between keeper and assistant keeper grew strained enough to culminate in a report that noted, “Apparently there has been very little communication between them since the shooting incident some time back.”
What Chris is trying to say is that they were forewarned about what the job does to a person. What’s more, the dark days of light keeping in Canada were under way. They knew then that this probably wasn’t a job with a long career arc. Yet for some reason all the bad stuff they’d heard—the isolation, the cabin fever, the food and drink that had to be coptered in from the mainland, the difficulty with raising kids on a rock in the Pacific—failed to dissuade them. “We were smitten with the idea,” she said, “and that was that.” In March of 1995 she got word that they were in.
Lighthouse keeping used to be a man’s world. By the 1960s, a few now-legendary women had talked their way onto lights as part of a two-keeper rotation. By the last years of the twentieth century Charlotte Point, which sits at the extreme northwest end of Haida Gwaii, was one of only three lights with female keepers. The most remote of all British Columbia’s northern lighthouses, it is one hundred nautical miles west of Prince Rupert and thirty nautical miles south of the Alaskan border. The light, which was established in 1913, was built to guard the Dixon Entrance, the disputed boundary between Canada and the United States. During the Second World War it was painted camouflage green and a radar station was built nearby to keep watch on the North Pacific. Frances Mills, the head keeper, had worked her way up from assistant keeper at two other lights. Tall, with prematurely white hair and eyes that laugh, she lived there with her husband, Mel, who had his thirty years in as a weapons tech with the Canadian navy. She was standing by the landing pad the day that Chris and Rob—their minds whirling with oh-God-what-were-we-thinking uncertainty—whump-whumped by helicopter toward the island.
We’re outside now. Sun has broken through the clouds, sending weird beams of light onto the tower as Chris dabs a little white on some chipped paint. This, she tells me, is what she mostly does: keeping everything shipshape. It’s as much for the keepers themselves as for the bosses back on the mainland. When your world is virtually just a few acres of land and a few buildings, you can’t just let things go. Keepers, by necessity, are self-starters: they grow and catch their own food; when something breaks, they fix it. When it’s time for a little R and R, they entertain themselves in a place where boxed sets of The Wire are hard to come by.
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.
