Who Mourns The Vanishing Wickies?

Bill Chapel is a wickie.* Or was one. For thirty-six years a keeper of lighthouses up and down the coastlines of Connecticut and New York. Thirty-six years of three-weeks-on and one-week-off the tall, lonely, isolated lights that illuminate the black night over Long Island Sound.

A keeper in the classic tradition, he is a short, stocky man with a grainy, weathered face and clear, alert eyes, broad shoulders, thick arms, and large, muscular hands. And even now, nine years since his retirement, there is about him the smell of salt air and seaweed.

Thirty-six years on the lights will do that. Thirty-six years and twenty-four days, to be exact. It was a natural direction for him to choose back in 1924, to leave his young wife and go out to Penfield Reef to tend the light there. Almost a family tradition. His father before him had been a keeper, and his uncle and cousin and brother-in-law, too. He had, in fact, grown up on Plum Island, where his father was keeper for nineteen years, which means that Bill Chapel has spent more of his life on lighthouses than he has on the mainland.

That’s all over now, of course. He lives with his wife, his dog and cat and bird in a pretty little house with a lush green lawn in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. His time is spent not in cleaning contact points or polishing lenses but collecting his pension from the Coast Guard and doing occasional work for a local antique dealer.

Still, traces remain. Not just the plaques on the wall or the pictures of his old crews, but the way he talks, quietly about most things, more quickly and intensely about the lights, about Whale Rock and Penfield Light, and especially about Race Rock. Even the way he walks, with a rhythmic gait, as though keeping time with the swelling sea.

And he remembers, he remembers the days of kerosene vapor lights and lenses turned by clockwork mechanisms and enormous counterweights, the days when getting to the mainland meant rowing an open boat and provisions were what you brought back with you.

He sometimes sits in the late afternoons in his stuffed easy chair with his feet up and his head back, looking into yesterday and rubbing the once injured and still disfigured knuckle of his right hand, and he remembers twenty years on the pile of granite called Race Rock and the savage storms there, the vicious seas and hurricane winds that stranded him with his crew and his light, their only order being to keep the light lit.

He remembers the loneliness, and the waiting, remembers it all.

And if you tell him that, too, will soon be over, that all the men are being taken off the lights and replaced by machines, he will not even blink as he says he doesn’t care.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he says, “I loved the lights. I wouldn’t have stayed all those years if I didn’t. But it’s a job, far from your wife and far from your kids, and as long as machines can operate ‘em, what difference does it make?”

The U.S. Coast Guard doesn’t think it makes any difference at all. The lights are their responsibility, and they think any tasks necessary for their operation can be handled by machines as well as men.

And just like that, they are doing it.

After 2,250 years of men like Bill Chapel keeping the lighthouses lit wherever land endangered ships, from the very beginning when the open flame of Pharos showed the way to ancient Alexandria, to the first American light near colonial Boston, to modern light stations totally self-sufficient for three months at a time, the men are being pulled off, leaving the lights to be cared for by the computers and transistors that are so efficiently speeding the end of the rest of the twentieth century.

A lot of people are surprised and very unhappy. Somehow they thought lighthouses were safe from the rush of progress. Though certainly mechanical, they seemed not simply to be made of brick and stone but to be something almost mystical, a blending of man and nature, standing there where the two part.

A lot of people thought the lights and the men inside were inseparable. But that is a romantic view, the view of those who stand on the land and only look to the sea. It is not Bill Chapel’s view, or the Coast Guard’s either.

Soon after taking over the old Lighthouse Service in 1939, the Coast Guard turned to automation, to getting their men off. In the early 1950s they began putting some of the smaller lights on battery power, but the dependability required of major lighthouses halted any real progress.

Now, through the work of their own engineers and private industry, technology has been pushed to the point where it meets their demands, and the odd man out is the keeper.

Commander Victor Robillard, headquarters, U.S. Coast Guard, Washington:

“The lighthouse keeper gave a reliability critical to the equipment of his time. It was equipment susceptible to failure and needed constant attention. Technology has changed. We no longer need a man there 24 hours a day with an oil can.”

The new equipment, cold and clean and efficient with its transistors and solid-state circuits, permits a degree of standardization the Coast Guard considers necessary for a national program. Under LAMP—the acronym for Lighthouse Automation and Modernization Program—each of the twelve Coast Guard districts evaluates its manned lights with the thought of replacing the crews. Likely candidates are suggested to headquarters, where they are evaluated and fitted into the schedule.

Eighty-three lighthouses have been automated since 1962. That leaves 195 manned stations in operation, down from 405 in 1940.

By 1980 less than 40 will remain.

Those recent increases are due to the advance in monitoring systems. Twenty years ago, actually seeing a light was the only way to know if it was working; today telephone lines or UHF radio give a complete report of a station’s status. A man sitting at a panel can monitor all systems of seven or eight lighthouses a hundred miles away. He knows if the first generator has gone out and the second has taken over or if the main Iight is out, and he knows it within minutes.

Within five minutes, officially. That is how often each station must be checked.

Much of the Coast Guard’s confidence in the new program is the redundancy—as they call it—built into each station. Two lamps, two fog signals, and two radio beacons (if a fog signal and radio beacon are required). Power is supplied by generator, and for each lighthouse there are three. Or if the light is so situated that it can use commercial power, there is a generator for emergencies.

The estimated drop in efficiency from manned to automated stations is from 99 percent to 94 percent, and the Coast Guard doesn’t feel it is worth having a crew aboard for that five percent. The benefits, in addition to freeing the four or five men for other duty, are easily calculable. Automation costs about $100,000 per station, and with the average savings per year being $25,000, the conversion is paid for in four years.

Financial savings, however, is listed as only the secondary goal. Commander Robillard:

“Lighthouses are bad duty, the worst in the Coast Guard. At the least isolated of stations, men are stuck for two or three weeks at a time. In some places it’s a full year. Our primary interest is getting them off.”

It is easy to tell a bad duty station from all the others. If you can walk to the nearest bar it isn’t too bad. Those offshore lights where getting off is not only difficult but dangerous are bad. How bad, however, is relative.

The lights in the Great Lakes, like Detour Reef in Lake Huron and White Shoal in Lake Michigan, are subject to severe weather and total confinement, but the crews are taken off late in December when the lakes freeze.

Some of the lights off the California and Oregon coasts are not only confining but extremely hazardous to reach and leave. Three men have been killed and several injured while being transferred by cable and basket from a Coast Guard ship to St. George Reef off California.

But the worst place of all is the coast of Alaska--at Scotch Cap in the Aleutian Islands, Capes St. Elias and Hinchinbrook in the northern part of the Gulf of Alaska, and just a little farther south, Capes Spencer and Decision. Because they are so inaccessible, duty there is not three-weeks-on and one-week-off or two-on and one-off, but for a solid year.

All are foul assignments, but if one must be picked as the worst, Cape Spencer is a nomination hard to contest. Not so remote as Cape Hinchinbrook (the northernmost manned light in the United States) or so notorious as Scotch Cap (completely wiped out by a tidal wave in 1946, now rebuilt), it carries the kind of reputation a nonbeliever would dismiss as exaggeration.

But the reputation is deserved, they told me. Especially during the seven months of winter.

It was winter, a clear morning last December, when my single-engine seaplane made the 90-mile flight from Juneau and touched down in a quiet cove completely protected from the wind. “Tomorrow,” said the pilot, handing down my gear to the open Coast Guard skiff that met me. “Tomorrow,” I said.

The plane headed in one direction and the boat in another, out of the cove and into another, only slightly less serene cove, then out into the open channel and another world.

Winds nearly solid from the cold tore out of the east, whipping up six-foot waves, slamming and tossing the outboard and forcing torrents of icy water over the bow and gunwales and drenching men and equipment.

A mile to the station, my two hosts told me, but it took more than half an hour as the inept little craft fought for every inch, sliding down the back of one wave and crashing into the face of another.

When we reached Cape Spencer—a little house perched seventy feet atop a huge, black rock—I looked for some hidden break in the cliff surface, an entrance shielded from the wind and waves. Someplace to dock.

There was none. Instead a great hook, suspended by cable from a crane at the top of the cliff, was slowly lowered as we circled there in the swelling sea. One of the men snatched it in midair and attached it to the apex of three cables lying on the floor of the boat. And we were Iifted, straight up, swinging in the frigid Alaskan wind like an errant pendulum.

I tried to hold on to the side of the boat. “Better grab the lifeline,” said one of the crew, “survival time in that water’s 30 seconds.” I wondered how he knew, but I hung on tight to the line until we were lowered onto the wooden landing deck that was Cape Spencer Light Station.

It wasn’t much--a rock in the middle of nowhere surrounded by water and more rocks, a mile from a mainland supporting no civilization for 90 miles--and everyone in the Coast Guard seemed to know it. No one had even heard of a man arriving sober for his year at Cape Spencer.

The station itself is reasonably comfortable. Each of the four-man crew has his own room, and there is a well-equipped kitchen and bathroom. And in the basement, in addition to the storeroom and two large freezers, there is a pool table and a wooden cover for table tennis.

But outside there is virtually nothing. A half-acre of rock fitted with a hundred yards of wooden walkways--safe passage to the crane and boathouse, and to the garbage slide. Nothing more.

Duty responsibilities are minimal. Maintenance of the light and generators mostly, and the hourly reports to the National Weather Service. Other than that, like any other lighthouse, it is a place for waiting.

Except waiting is more difficult at Cape Spencer. Radio reception is poor, and television nonexistent. The crewmen have a 16mm projector and are sent fourteen films every two weeks or so, but triple features the first five nights take a heavy toll, and few are worth seeing more than once.

In summer the boat can be used for excursions, but good weather must be reserved for outside painting and repairs, for summer does not last long.

Winter begins in October, and in Alaska, where winter is born, it is an event. Actual cold is not a problem. The Japanese Current rarely lets the official temperature at Cape Spencer fall below zero. But the wind there is special.

They call the big wind from the west the Taku, and it attacks the station like a giant on a vendetta. It rattles every door and window, forces open the outer door and causes the oven exhaust trap to flap open and shut violently. It whistles in the middle of the night through cracks in the walls that don’t even exist, and undulates the water in the toilet till it thrashes like the sea at the base of the rock.

Combined with the temperature, it produces an effect called the wind-chill factor. At 20 degrees and a mild 15-knot wind the factor is -5. A more realistic 40-knot wind and 10 degrees—the winter average—makes it feel like 37 below.

Travel becomes an hour-to-hour proposition. The small planes serving Cape Spencer fly only during the day, a brief six-hour period ending abruptly at four in the afternoon. In addition to daylight, they require good visibility, temperatures above 10 degrees, and winds less than 30 knots. The 180-foot Coast Guard tender supplying the station can travel in most weather, but must rely on the crane, which cannot operate in winds above 30 knots or attempt to lift a boat from seas over six feet.

Supplying—called logging—is scheduled for every two weeks, but food for three months is kept on the station. It is this kind of uncertainty that keeps life on Cape Spencer from getting too dull. There is simply no way to predict when arrival or departure might be possible.

My overnight stay was stretched to three days by 5O-knot winds, extended to five days by snow and fog, and to a week when the temperature in Juneau dropped to eight below. But for me it was only a visit. For the men there it is a way of Iife, and some react to it strangely. When offered three weeks’ leave in a new program, the men I spoke with preferred to turn it down.

Seaman Danny Story, 20 years old, completing an uninterrupted tour on “The Rock”:

“Sure I miss people. But going through that crap to get off for a week or two, no sir. Getting all packed and ready and then sitting around waiting for the weather to break. And even when you get off, the whole time you’re thinking you gotta come back. Better to stay here and have it done with. There’s stuff to do. I painted this whole station. Painted my room four times.”

Not all lighthouses are like Cape Spencer, of course. Rarely are conditions so extreme, but the isolation and boredom are similar often enough and the tangible compensations negligible enough—an extra 30 days’ leave a year—that the Coast Guard has made LAMP a high-priority project.

Headquarters continually requests that districts reevaluate each station with automation in mind, while the engineering department continually works to improve equipment, making it more efficient and requiring less maintenance. This last point is vital, for unless the equipment will take care of itself for an acceptable period the program is worthless. Once a month is the most often service stops should be made.

The real problem with the modernization and automation of lighthouses, however, comes not from equipment but from people. Some of them just don’t like the idea.

The most troublesome dissent has come from within the federal government itself, from the National Weather Service, which uses lighthouses as monitoring stations. In addition to regular duties, crews periodically report the temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, barometer reading, visibility, and sea conditions.

The Weather Service has been understandably slow in keeping up with automation. Heretofore they have had only to equip lighthouses with measuring apparatus and wait for phone or radio calls. But after considerable urging, the additional equipment has been developed and is expected to be installed this year, if somewhat reluctantly. It will cost the Weather Service about $25,000 to equip each station, and in anticipation the Coast Guard has left a channel open on its new monitoring lines.

What the new equipment cannot do, however, is talk, and there begins the civilian displeasure.

It seems the Weather Service is not the only party interested in instant weather reports. Fishermen, pleasure sailors, and other mariners call the lights for on-the-spot information. In areas such as Maine, the West Coast, and especially Alaska, where rapid and radical change is common, periodic issuances from the Weather Service are no substitute for talking with a man actually looking out the window at the conditions in question.

And there are other sources of dissonance, many others. Not so clearly defined, perhaps, but with no less emotion or volume.

Not the voices of fishermen or seamen or anyone directly dependent on the men who tend the lights, but just people, the people who have been carrying on a silent and sentimental love affair with lighthouses for centuries. It probably began with the first light and grew as did the use of lighthouses, to surface in literature and be embellished in verse and song. (Can anyone not know of the sexual exploits of the keeper of the Eddystone Light?)**

Lighthouses have captured the affection of those living under their beam and fascinated many who have never even seen one, and they have the power to charge small boys in Cape Cod and Iowa equally with wonder at the prospects of a visit. (As a teenager living in Miami, I tried several times to reach Fowey Rocks light in a small boat, only to be driven back each time by high seas and severe cowardice.)

To many, lighthouses are this country’s version of the great castles of Europe, prized as national monuments and tourist attractions, and frequently as homesites. So it should surprise no one that tampering with them in any way is not taken lightly.

Unfortunately, they are constantly being tampered with. It might be found that a major light is no longer so crucial and can be reduced in power, dropping its range from 20 to 10 miles or even less.

Old, compressed air diaphone foghorns wear out and are replaced with electric ones, the classic, deep, high-to-low sound replaced by a less romantic, somewhat irritating single-note blast. Or, because modern mariners have so many other aids—radios and radar and such—the audible fog signal on a light might be phased out altogether.

The result is invariably a howl from the local residents, who complain to the Coast Guard and local legislators until, eventually, they get accustomed to the change.

Often, however, the tampering is more than changing the pitch of a fog signal. The same ingredient in time that wears out air compressors and alters ship traffic also takes a heavy toll on masonry and brick and iron. And when it becomes no longer feasible to repair an old lighthouse, the Coast Guard’s preference is to wreck it and build a new one.

But new lighthouses rarely look like old ones. Since the new structure will be no man’s home, the Coast Guard likes to build skeleton towers--something like an oil derrick with a light on top--or at the least shave off the top of the old station and erect a single pole with a light. It is cheaper right from the beginning, and is nearly maintenance-free thereafter.

It is also very unpopular, and tends to draw official and animated criticism from Congressmen and local civic groups and anyone else unhappy with the degeneration of “his” lighthouse.

Often they are successful. Modernization efforts at Penfield Reef and Green’s Ledge on Long Island Sound were stopped by local opposition, as were those at Sankaty Head on Nantucket and in more places than the Coast Guard cares to recalI.

And so it was through much trial and nearly as much error that a modus operandi was devised.

Lieutenant Robert H. Miller, systems administrator of LAMP:

“We tell the community what we intend to do, and if there are any objections we hold public hearings. If there are sound reasons for leaving the light as is—navigationally sound reasons—that’s what we do. If it’s just sentiment we try and get some local group to buy the light, and we go down the coast a few yards and build our tower.”

It is an inconvenience, but one the Coast Guard is learning to live with. They lose time but, though slowed, the trend continues, as station after station that qualifies becomes unmanned. As soon as its turn comes and the equipment is satisfactorily installed—they run it for six months with the crew aboard—they pull their men off.

It’s progress, and it is happening all over the country. It’s happening in Canada and England, too, and now they’re talking about lighthouse automation in Norway.

Still, even in the face of such a well-orchestrated movement, some lights will apparently be spared. Montauk Light, a national monument on the tip of Long Island, is one, as is the Ambrose Light Tower at the entrance to New York Harbor, a modern offshore platform with a crew of six, comfortable quarters, and an oceanographic laboratory on board. And the Coast Guard’s newest lighthouse, the ten-year-old Charleston Light, with its 28 million candlepower superlamp, brightest in the country.

And there is another not scheduled for automation, though it is neither particularly modern nor historic.

The lighthouse at Loggerhead Key in the Dry Tortugas is the very last light on the East Coast. More than a hundred years old, it is certainly isolated enough to qualify for LAMP, but there are extenuating circumstances. First, it is located where the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico meet, at a place so busy with tourist and fishing boats and freighter traffic the Coast Guard feels any equipment left unguarded would be gone within weeks.

And, though 70 wet miles from Key West, no one complains about the duty there.

A perfect little island of 27 acres, its natural resources include clean, white beaches, pleasant year-round temperatures hovering between 65 and 85 degrees, clear green water ideal for fishing and skin diving, and a healthy flow of pretty tourists.

There is work, but as on all lights it is limited, and the rest of the day is for sun and the beach. Evenings can be spent reading, shooting pool, or watching color television in air-conditioned quarters. Or, if one is fond of walking, there is on the encircling beach an awesome stillness, the only movement the breeze, the rhythmic lapping of the sea, and the constant sweeping of the great white beam, 160 feet up in the tower.

Isolated, but a difficult place to hate. Any unhappy Guardsman is granted a transfer, though that rarely is a problem. Of the three men on duty when I visited, all wanted to finish their enlistment right there. So, obviously, if elimination of undesirable duty is the prime reason for automation, Dry Tortu gas Light may go unautomated forever.

But paradise islands are few. Fewer even than those modern light towers with comfortable accommodations and easy access to land. Mostly the duty is, as the Coast Guard says, bad. And for most of the men tending lights the end cannot come too soon.

On St. George Reef, on Rock of Ages in Lake Superior, and Farallon Lighthouse on a rocky island off California, the men are anxiously waiting to be relieved by machines. And the men of Cape Spencer--who interpret the Coast Guard motto of Semper Paratus as “Simply Forgotus”—are looking forward to this spring, when their automation equipment is due to arrive. Like Bill Chapel, who has spent most of his life on lighthouses, they figure that as long as machines can do the job, what difference does it make?

“It’s just a job,” is what he had said as he sat in his living room, surrounded by the plaques he had been awarded during his 36 years of service, surrounded by models of lighthouse lanterns and pictures of the different lights where he had served.

“Just a job,” he repeated, still sitting far back in his favorite chair.

And then, rubbing that swollen knuckle, his eyes suddenly came to a hard focus on my face, and he leaned forward to the edge of the chair, his copy of TV Guide rolled tightly in his fist:

“But I telI you this, you’II never see Race Rock without personnel. Twenty years I was keeper, and I know. It’s just too tough. No machine will ever run that light.”

Sorry Bill Chapel. Race Rock will be automated within 24 to 30 months, just like the rest. 

 __________________________

*Lighthouse keepers were called wick-trimmers, or wickies, in the era when kerosene lamps sent a beam over the darkened sea. The wicks-made of asbestos or flax-had to be trimmed each day to remove the residue of the previous night’s burning. Kerosene lamps were used in some lighthouses until the early 1950s.  

**For those who might not know, I quote from the old English song “Eddystone Light,” the words copied from the men’s room door of a public house on Pickle Herring Street, not far from London’s Hay’s Wharf: Me father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light And he slept with a mermaid one fine night. From this union there came three, A porpoise, a porgie, and the other was me!