There are a few good reasons to become a lighthouse keeper in B.C.: To watch the migrating birds and the migrating grays, humpbacks, and orcas, and the white-sided dolphins in their super pods. To feel like you are helping people, even if they never know it was your weather report that stopped them from going out that day.
And there are a few good reasons not to: Because you think it’s romantic, you want to run away from your past and drink yourself to death, or you finally write that novel.
For over a year, a job posting for coastal B.C. has been open, as lonely as a lightkeeper on some solitary rock.
Assistant lightkeepers are needed for the province’s 27 lightstations, but not even the recently bumped salary range — from $49,813 to $66,842 — or the offer of work in “beautiful, remote, and rugged locations on British Columbia’s breath-taking coastline” is beacon enough to draw interest.
“It’s not for everybody,” said Barry Tchir, regional vice-president at the Union of Canadian Transportation Employees. “It’s not a great wage, it’s one of the lowest in the public sector.”
The upside is that your housing is included, and you’ll get trained on the job.
There are a few downsides. Food is dropped off once a month by helicopter. Alcohol is not allowed. You’ll have “some” internet, but it’s spotty. If you use satellite, you’ll pay for that on your own. Cellphone coverage is hit or miss. You’ll have to capture rainwater, and distill it for drinking. As for the toilet, well, “it’s complicated,” said Tchir.
You’ll work 10- to 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. You’ll do weather reports every hour. Maintain the lights, the generator and the grounds — and your pesky toilet. You’ll monitor marine traffic, look for vessels in distress and provide safe harbour if, say, a lost kayaker washes up on your shores in the middle of the night.
Caroline Woodward used to scour the waters off Cox Bay for kayakers or the black, wetsuited heads of surfers washed out to sea during the years she and her husband Jeff George were lighthouse keepers on Lennard Island, near the entrance to Tofino.
The couple started as relief keepers, swapping in here and there for short stints before settling in for 13 years at Lennard island.
They had run a bookstore for years in New Denver, and “cobbled together” a living in a variety of jobs, but were “bored spitless,” and ready for a change.
On Lennard Island, Woodward fell in love with gardening. She grew raspberries and blueberries and asparagus and baked bread. For entertainment the couple walked the well-worn brushed path that encircled the island. They built a gym in an old engine room.
“It was truly our home,” said Woodward, who documented her experience in the memoir Light Years: Memoir of a Modern Lighthouse Keeper.
As idyllic as it sounds, Woodward cautions, it’s not a place to run away or try to shake off an addiction, whether emotional or physical.
“Whatever baggage you are carrying comes with you.”
And there is the work: You have to be ready to haul yourself out of bed at 3 a.m. to go to lookout points to read the sea and the sky and the cloud ceiling.
“You are giving weather reports to air ambulance pilots, and you want them to come in safely,” said Woodward. “There is a lot of responsibility.”
There are hourly weather reports, and hours of nothingness, and then, suddenly a crisis.
“The worst times are when you can hear people in trouble, the Coast Guard are trying to find them in the dark, and they don’t know how to use their GPS. We go up the tower to look for people, we’d be doing a grid pattern looking for that person out in grey seas.”
But there is also time. Woodward wrote and published five books during her time as a lightkeeper. She and her husband retired with 13 years of savings, and stories to tell.
“For us, it was perfect,” said Woodward.
