Maine Attractions

I am almost embarassed to admit that last weekend I went to Maine to see lighthouses. I know, that sounds as geeky as going to a Star Trek convention. Except that at a Star Trek convention you won't get to see something as pretty as this.



This gem is a hundred and thirty years old and is named the "Nubble" lighthouse, after the rocky little island it sits on. And it might just become the best-known lighthouse in the universe. In 1977 NASA launched the Voyager 2 sattelite. This satellite is now well on it's way out of solar system. It carries pictures and recorded audio on a gold-plated disc, in case it encounters intelligent aliens who are curious to know who sent it. And on that disc is a picture of the Nubble lighthouse.

Yes, I know, sharing that bit of information actually made me seem more geeky, not less. Well, never mind. I am hoist with my own petard, so I might as well go on.

On to Portland Head Light, for instance. This is another beauty, an hour's drive north of the Nubble. It was built in 1791. And when it was completed a certain Captain Greenleaf was appointed as its first keeper by George Washington, who at that time was himself just 2 years into his term as the first president of the United States. Capt. Greenleaf clearly won the approval of his employers, because 2 years later they decided to start paying him a salary.

His name is engraved at the top of a plaque that honours all the keepers who were in charge of the lighthouse for the first two hundred years of its existence. But when I looked at the plaque myself, the names that caught my eye were those of Joshua E. Strout (keeper from 1869 to 1904) and Joseph W. Strout (keeper from 1904 to 1928). A quick internet search confirmed that they were father and son. But there's more to their family story than that. Joshua's wife was his assistant keeper for a decade, and his mother was a housekeeper for a previous lighthouse keeper. In fact the combined service of the Strout family at various New England lighthouses was 128 years!

Imagine that: one family devoting over a hundred years to bringing sailors safely home. I wonder what it was like growing up in their home. Was working the lights just a trade to them? Or did they, as I would like to think they did, take their job very very seriously? Did they ever get bored? When Joshua had a cold and fever how did he drag himself upstairs to climb to the top of a 100-foot tower to do his job? And when he got to the top did he ever accidentally drop something and have to climb all the way down the stairs to pick it up?

We shall never know, but we can speculate.

Seriously, though, that's what really fascinates me: not the lighthouses that are still standing on the rocky coastline of New England, but the men and women who used to tend them and are now gone. If you squeeze your eyes half shut and stretch your imagination really hard then you can sort of picture them. I imagine them as earnest, weather-beaten men and women who liked the company of others but only in small doses. I wonder where you'd find them today.