Caroline Woodward - Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper

Woodycat the lighthouse cat joined the family as a kitten in Winlaw, BC and lived almost nineteen years. This photo was taken on Trial Island.

There were some concerns about an old cat on a barren island without a lot of hiding spots, with plenty of eagles cruising around and an evil-looking pack of river otters. And everyone except us fretted about the other keepers dogs. Woodycat was a street cat wed rescued in Nelson who proceeded to hang lickings on any dog of any size that went after him, and to evade all other predators coming by land, sea or sky.

Two weeks after Jeff was transferred, I was able to get over to Trial Island from the Oak Bay Marina on a sturdy fibreglass boat driven by the principal keeper. It was a twenty-minute ride over a light chop of less than a foot with no discernible swell on a rare calm and sunny day in late November. I remarked that Jeff would really enjoy handling a boat again as hed grown up with them and wed enjoyed our years on Kootenay and Slocan Lakes with an old Park Ranger Aroliner aluminum powerboat and a fibreglass sailboat of unknown vintage.

Once the station boat was winched to safety in the boathouse, a beaming Jeff waiting on terra firma helped pack my stuff (more lovely Royston prawns, chocolate, newspapers, naughty nightwear instead of my usual sturdy flannel PJ s, and for the eternal boy, wine gums too) over to his new digs. He showed me around the assistant keepers house, another variation of the three basic Coast Guard housing types. This one was a small two-bedroom house with a full basement, and previous keepers had done a wonderful job of remodelling the kitchen and the bathroom. It was a sweet little house with a lived-in and well-loved feeling, even though Jeffs furniture was minimalor as he called it, packing box decor.

From the house there was an excellent view of the Olympic Mountains range in Washington state from two windows, but to get the full picture of how high the seas were running in the Juan de Fuca Strait, it was necessary to walk up to the principal keepers house on the highest point of elevation, only a five-minute walk away. The radio room was the size of a large cupboard or, more accurately, a small porch, attached to the side of the house. There the anemometer was kept, as well as the weather logbook, the lightkeepers log, some files and manuals and the radio phone for the daily weather reports.

This lightstation was one of very few stations connected to the electricity grid of Vancouver Island so there was no tank farm of diesel fuel tanks. There was an engine room with one engine in it and a small fuel tank as backup in case the electrical connection to Vancouver Island failed. Occasionally some barrels of fuel were slung from the deck of a Coast Guard ship to Trial Island by helicopter, but unlike an all-diesel station, there were no labour-intensive refuelling operations with Coast Guard ships and their fuel barges carrying tanks of diesel, or heavy hoses to haul up rough terrain to the on-site fuel line. At some stations like Estevan Point, where the sturdy barge cannot get close enough to do the job, a helicopter has to sling bladders of fuel from ship to shore, which always makes for very long days.

The toilets here were saltwater flush, not composting, and since as early as 1910 the station had had its own phone line via submarine cable, so as far as mod cons went, Trial Island was truly state of the art. One writer friend has noted how often I include the particulars of toilets in nearly all my published work. What can I say except that I am an earthy gal who grew up with a no-frills outhouse. We all use them and appreciate their finer features at home and abroad, so therefore lavatories belong in every sort of literature, including this book. Someday, perhaps someone desperate for a PhD thesis topic will write (if I may humbly suggest a title) The Toilet in Literature: Refuge and Release. Then my lifes work will find its place in the literary firmament at last.

The principal keepers house was somewhat like the house Jeff lived in on Egg Island, a unique version of the spacious two-storey, four-bedroom farmhouse type with lots of windows and excellent views of both Enterprise Channel and the strait. The actual light tower was mere metres away, a graceful cement structure built in 1970 with a pale green flash for its light. Every single lighthouse and beacon (collectively known as navigational aids) on the West Coast has its own colour of light and its own specifically timed pattern of flashing so that mariners can locate and confirm their own positions on their charts or GPS devices and take action accordingly.

In one of the rare success stories of BC lighthouse heritage preservation, the original Fresnel lens and the cupola were dismantled in 1970 and moved to Victorias Bastion Square where they are a stationary exhibit, thanks to the BC Maritime Museum. Far too many other decommissioned lighthouses were bulldozed over the nearest cliff or burned to the ground, thanks to those bureaucrats who made such decisions during the eras when Canadian heritage was a misunderstood and even suspect concept. Its still an uphill battle to get any government department to fork out dollars for preservation, as anyone who has hiked by the deteriorating Pachena Point heritage lighthouse with its original Fresnel lens can attest. It was beautiful enough for a Canadian stamp but there has to be political will and a commensurate budget in order to pay for the extensive cost of repairs and upkeep. Its difficult enough for small island communities to rally around their local historic lighthouses with bake sales, let alone protect one quite literally in the middle of such true wilderness as the West Coast Trail. Meanwhile the lightkeepers mop the heritage hardwood floors often, floors that housed a school during the World War II era and hosted many dancing feet of an evening as well.

Trial Islands first lighthouse was built after a series of gruesome marine mishaps, including one poor man drowning because he was trapped by a line around his ankle on board a wreck in a rising tide, a hellish fate the other survivors on land could not spare him from without drowning themselves in the rough seas between them and the wreck. A beacon was built in the early 1900s but the amount of commercial traffic demanded more round-the-clock vigilance. The first lightkeeper, Harrold Shorrock OKell, arrived in August of 1907. He was a hardy young sailor with a cork peg leg, due to a nasty accident at sea involving a snapped cable.