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knew someone was in real trouble. Faced with public criticism of the demanning proposal, the Coast Guard cancelled the scheme last spring. This means that at some of the most dangerous spots along the province's 25,725-km coastline – Cape Scott, Pachena Point, Nootka Sound, for example – there are humans still here, listening and watching. T British Columbia Vancouver Island Pacific Ocean Yuquot's abandoned Catholic church is now a meeting hall; nearby, master carver Sanford Williams transforms the totemic spirts of the Mowachaht into cedar images. off Yuquot. The Mowachaht rushed from the 20 or so longhouses lining the bay, amazed at the bizarre, floating apparitions. They'd never seen ships; they'd never seen white men. Still, it didn't take Cook long to learn that the waters off Vancouver Island teemed with sea otters, commencing a fur trade that initially brought fortune to the 1,500 seafaring natives of the place Cook called Friendly Cove. But as often happens, things soon became less friendly. The sea otters were mostly exterminated by the 1830s. There were massacres of natives by Europeans and Europeans by natives. There was smallpox. And in time, there were missionaries, residential schools, alcohol and cultural collapse. A lmost 150 years after Cook's arrival, the first Nootka lighthouse was established – in 1911 – on rocky, two-hectare San Rafael islet, located just south of Yuquot. Storms and 30 W E S T W O R L D p28-31_Lighthouse.indd 30 >> SPRING 2012 shipwrecks and keepers have come and gone over the past century. And regular efforts by Canadian Coast Guard officials to automate the province's 27 remaining, manned light stations have always elicited outrage from fishermen, boaters and ocean kayakers who take comfort in knowing there are lightkeepers inside these remote facilities. So when authorities in Ottawa again called for the demanning of Canada's lighthouses, Ed Kidder, the keeper at Nootka until his retirement nine years ago, retold the story of what happened on the night of January 10, 1989, at 2010's Senate coast guard hearings. Kidder's emergency radio had picked up the accented words, "Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!" He called the Coast Guard's Search and Rescue team, and immediately headed into the wintry blackness in his own boat, trying to decode frantic directions spoken in Vietnamese. What he found was a family of six, unconscious in their enclosed boat from carbon monoxide poisoning, and close to death. But with his help, they all survived. In fact, due to his 33-year tenure at Nootka, Kidder figures there are two-dozen people alive today because he was the only person nearby who he decision not to automate Canada's lighthouses came as a huge relief to Tiglmann. Solitary by nature, a long-haul trucker for 30 years, he has always loved – as does his wife – being self-sufficient. Society's pressures to consume and conform seemed like a curse rather than a blessing. So when his son told him in 2002 that the Nootka lightkeeper – Ed Kidder – was retiring, Tiglmann thought for a few nanoseconds and decided that moving plywood south from B.C. or broccoli north from California were tasks he was prepared to relinquish for having his own Pacific island and an isolated lighthouse to maintain. However, he got a cruel initiation into lightkeeping by having to spend – due to low seniority – his first years at Green Island Light Station, 45 km northwest of Prince Rupert. There were times the fog lasted for weeks; times the winds were deafening and the vibration in his walls sent kitchen counters dancing. In fact, ropes linked the station's buildings one to the other so the unwary didn't get swept off the islet's barren rocks. "From hell to heaven," he says today of his last seven years at Nootka. Each day, Tiglmann shares with his wife the responsibilities of their 24/7 job. Marine and aviation weather reports are made every three hours. Daily measurements of air and water temperature are recorded, ocean salinity tested, station machinery maintained and emergency radio channels monitored. Several times each year, he's involved with assisting mariners whose boats have lost power and are drifting onto rocks. Most important, it's his job to climb to the top of the station's light tower, 35 metres above sea level, to scrape the salt (or frost) encrusting its glass and to check the operation of the rotating light itself. On clear nights, the powerful, 12-second-interval beam spans 26 km of blackness, warning mariners that the Pacific Ocean ends here. And once a month, a Coast Guard helicopter arrives, loaded with fresh food to reprovision the isolated Nootka site Douglas Peebles/All Canada Photos 1/27/12 8:28:16 AM

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