The Keepers

Tomás Ruane was twenty-six and on his third posting when the relief boat failed to come. The arrangement on the rock was a month on and a fortnight ashore, three men always out on the tower, the fourth at home with his family in the keepers' dwellings at the harbour. Tomás was due off on the eighteenth of December. His wife, Nuala, was due to have their first child on or around Christmas Day.

The gale arrived on the sixteenth and did not leave. The logbook for that winter, written in the round, careful hand of the principal keeper, records the wind in the old Beaufort shorthand down the margin: SW 9, SW 10, WSW 10, W 9, NW 8, SW 10. On the twenty-second a sea broke over the gallery, more than forty metres above low water, and cracked one of the lantern panes. The men fitted a storm panel from the inside and went on with the watch.

It is easy to forget how much of keeping was simple arithmetic. They counted paraffin in gallons and days. They counted the tins of corned beef and the sacks of potatoes and the hours of fog, because the fog signal had to be wound and fired, and the fog signal ate stores. By the first week of January they had cut the bread to two slices a day and were boiling the tea leaves twice. The log notes, without comment, that the principal keeper caught a pollack from the landing platform on the third of January and that it was “divided”.

News came by radio telephone, a crackling schedule twice a day with the shore station. On the night of the twenty-seventh the shore operator, who had been at school with Tomás, read out a message in the flat voice the job required: Ruane, daughter born 26th, mother and child well, name Bríd. The other two keepers shook his hand. Then all three climbed to the lantern, because it was nearly time to light up, and the light did not care.

The relief boat came alongside on the twenty-sixth of January, forty-one nights late. Tomás went down the rope ladder with a bag of laundry and a letter he had written to his daughter every night he was out, a page at a time, in the back of a stores ledger. Bríd, now in her seventies, still has it. It is mostly about the weather.

When Jaan Kask died of pneumonia in November 1924, the lighthouse authority of the young Estonian republic sent a letter of condolence and asked how soon his widow could vacate the keeper's house. Liisa Kask wrote back, in a hand she had learned at the village school, that she would vacate it in the spring, and that in the meantime the light would be kept as it had been for the past eleven years, by her.

She was not exaggerating. In the last years of Jaan's illness she had done most of the work: carrying the oil up the long stair inside the great limestone tower, trimming the burners, and winding the clockwork that turned the lens. The clock was a brass and iron machine with a weight that dropped down a shaft in the tower's heart; wound fully, it would run for about four hours. So every four hours, through the long Baltic night, someone had to climb up and wind it. That someone was Liisa, with a shawl over her nightdress and a storm lantern in one hand.

The winter was a cold one. The sea froze out to the horizon in February, and for six weeks there were no ships to warn. The regulations did not care about the ice; the light was to be shown from sunset to sunrise all the same. Liisa's notebook, which her grandson gave to the island museum, records the temperature in the lantern room each night. On the coldest it was minus nineteen, and the paraffin thickened in the reservoir until she warmed it with hot bricks wrapped in sacking.

An inspector came out in March, travelling across the ice from the mainland by horse sleigh. He found the brass polished, the log complete, and the stores accounted for to the litre. His report, which recommended that “the widow Kask be retained as assistant keeper on half pay”, is still in the archive. It is the only document in the file that mentions her by her own name.

She kept the light at Kõpu for another nine years. When I climbed the tower in August 2023, I counted the turns of the stair and tried to imagine doing it six times a night in February. I could not, quite.

The Breton lighthouse service had its own theology. Island stations, where a keeper might keep a garden and a goat and walk to the village on Sundays, were paradis. Shore stations, with their dull regularity and visiting inspectors, were purgatoire. The rock towers, standing alone in the sea, were enfer. And the furthest of them, on a ledge of rock west of Sein that the ocean covers at almost every tide, was known simply as the hell of hells.

Yann Le Goff was posted there in 1936 at the age of thirty-one, after six years at a shore light near Douarnenez. Changing the watch was done by a line strung between the tower and a boat that stood off the rock, since no boat could come alongside. Keepers and supplies went across sitting in a canvas sling, hauled hand over hand above the swell. In heavy weather the boat could not even get close enough to throw the line. Yann's first relief was nineteen days late. His second was thirty-one.

He wrote to his sister in Audierne every week, letters that went ashore in batches whenever the boat got through. They are the reason I know that he grew cress on damp flannel in the kitchen windowsill, that the other keeper on his watch had a gramophone with exactly four records, and that he could tell the height of the sea by the sound it made in the stairwell. “When it hums, it is nothing,” he wrote. “When it knocks, you put the kettle on. When it is silent, you go up to the lantern and you watch, because a big one is coming.”

In November of that year a wave struck the tower so hard that the stove door blew open and scattered coals across the kitchen floor. The two keepers put out the fire with the drinking water, then sat in the dark and laughed, Yann wrote, “like two boys who have broken a window”. The light was not interrupted for a single revolution.

He served on the rock for four years and then asked, very politely, to be sent to purgatory. The service obliged.

Elsa Lindqvist was eleven when she started the list. Her father was the second assistant keeper at the tall white tower on the southern point of the island, and on misty autumn nights the lantern drew migrating birds the way a candle draws moths. They came out of the dark in hundreds, wheeling around the light, and some of them struck the glass and fell onto the gallery.

Every morning her father swept them up. Every morning Elsa asked him what they were, and he did not know. So she borrowed a book on Swedish birds from the pastor's wife and began to write them down: date, weather, wind, the species where she could tell, and a count. Goldcrests, most of all. Redwings. Robins. On the night of the fourteenth of October there were three hundred and eleven birds on the gallery and the sill, and a woodcock which was still alive and which she kept in a hatbox in the kitchen until it flew out of the window two days later.

She kept the list for seven years, in four exercise books, and nobody thought very much of it at the time. It was a girl's hobby. But when ornithologists began to study migration over Öland properly, decades later, they went looking for old records, and Elsa's notebooks turned up in a trunk belonging to her niece. They are among the earliest systematic counts of night migrants at a Baltic lighthouse, and they show, quite clearly, which weather brought the birds down.

Lighthouses learned from this, eventually. Many towers in Europe were later fitted with perches below the lantern, and lights were sometimes dimmed or the tower floodlit on heavy migration nights so the birds could see the structure and rest instead of colliding. When I stood by the ringing station at Ottenby at three in the morning last midsummer, watching a volunteer free a reed warbler from a mist net, I thought of a girl with a hatbox.

Arai Tetsuo had been a ship's carpenter before the war and a prisoner during it, and when he came home to Chōshi in 1947 he could not settle to anything. He took a job at the lighthouse because it was quiet, because the pay was regular, and because his uncle knew the head keeper. He stayed for thirty-two years.

The station had been badly damaged in the last year of the war, and in 1951 a new lens arrived, packed in straw in a dozen wooden crates. It was a great beehive of glass prisms in a bronze frame, each prism ground to bend the light from a single lamp into a horizontal beam. Arai was given the job of unpacking it, because he had a carpenter's hands, and of keeping it clean, because he had a carpenter's patience.

He polished it every day for the rest of his career. He used a soft linen cloth, a chamois for the brass, and a little spirit for the soot; never anything abrasive, because a scratched prism scatters light that should go to sea. He wore a linen apron with no buttons so nothing could catch on the glass. In summer, he hung curtains around the inside of the lantern each morning, because a lens that can focus a lamp out to the horizon can also focus the sun onto a wooden floor, and in his first year it had scorched a neat brown line across the boards.

Keepers there kept a guest book for visitors, and on the inside cover of each volume Arai drew a tiny sketch of the lens, a little more detailed each time. By the last book, in 1979, the drawing was accurate to the number of prisms. When the station was automated he asked if he could keep one of the old cleaning cloths. They let him keep the apron as well.

“My father hated fog and loved the lighthouse, which is a hard combination at Point Reyes.” That is how Carol Mendes began, when I met her in a cafe in Inverness, California, in May 2025. She was nine when the family moved to the keepers' quarters on the headland in 1966, and fifteen when the station was automated and they moved away.

The lighthouse there sits far down the cliff, below the fog line, at the bottom of a long concrete stair. Her father climbed down and back up it at least twice a day, more when the fog came in. In a bad summer the fog signal ran for weeks with only a few hours' rest, a deep two-tone blast every thirty seconds that, Carol said, you stopped hearing after a while and only noticed when it stopped. “When it went quiet, everybody in the house woke up. Even the dog.”

Her job, from about the age of eleven, was the weather. Every three hours in daylight she walked to the instrument shelter with a notebook and read the wet and dry bulb thermometers and the anemometer, and wrote the numbers on a form that went to the weather service once a week. Wind of sixty miles an hour was unremarkable. On one January afternoon the anemometer cups simply flew off.

The last manual watch was kept in 1975. A new automatic light on a concrete building nearby took over, and the great French lens was left in place as a museum piece. Carol remembers her father making the final entry in the log and then, after a long pause, writing underneath it the word “Well.” Nothing else. She said she has thought about that word a great deal over the years, and decided it was the most accurate thing he ever wrote.

I asked if she still visits. She does, about once a year, in the fog. “You can't see anything,” she said. “It's perfect.”