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Authors: John Hamilton

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BOOK: Isle Royale
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A man wearing a black mackintosh emerged from the cabin of the yacht. Gripping the side rail, he carefully made his way to the bow and stood there, gazing forward, paying no heed to the wind and spray stinging his exposed face.

As the outline of the beach came into sharper view, a light atop the craggy granite cliffs suddenly pierced the darkness. The brilliant beam swept across the water, illuminating the yacht for an instant. The man on deck threw his arm up and winced. Then the light was gone, sailing far out over the surface of the lake.

A wave crashed over the yacht’s bow, drenching the mysterious stranger. He held the rail tight and rode with the ship as it sank down, then shot back up, sending his stomach into tailspins. He ignored the sickness in his belly and stared upward at the light perched on the cliff. His eyes narrowed to slits as he tried to focus through the wind and water spray. He cocked his head as he heard, above the roar of the wind and the pounding of the surf, the faint sound of… bagpipes.

A smile crept onto the man’s lips. Then, like water crashing against a rocky shore and trickling back to the lake, the smile held for a moment and slowly faded, leaving only piercing, malevolent eyes to stare longingly at the light atop the cliffs.

Chapter Two

T
he storm struck quickly that night, as most storms do on Lake Superior. Dark, boiling clouds rushed in from the southwest, borne on an ill wind that blew noisily across the water. The churning inland sea heaved, throwing up walls of water that smashed against the base of the cliffs below Wolf Point.

Thunder crashed overhead, announcing the squall’s arrival. As it rolled in, the tempest wrapped Isle Royale in a blanket of gloom. But perched on the craggy granite cliffs of Stone Harbor, a light pierced the darkness.

Wolf Point Lighthouse stood watch that forbidding night, its brilliant ray scanning the black water of Lake Superior 150 feet below. As thunder and lightning battled in the heavens, the lighthouse beam plied the water, moving across the lake in regular, precise rhythm. Any passing mariner could discern his exact location by the ten-second interval of the flashing beacon, which identified the lighthouse and the treacherous waters over which it stood guard.

Constructed of steel and brick, the octagonal tower was perched on the very lip of Wolf Point, adding forty feet to the sheer cliff face. The base of the tower was made of white and yellow brick, while the top was capped with black-painted steel, with a grid of iron and glass that opened to lakeside. Inside the lantern room, an incandescent oil vapor lamp lighted a huge six-ton bivalve lens. Brighter than the sun, it was impossible to look directly into the lens without being blinded. Because of the height of the cliffs upon which the lighthouse perched, the beam could be seen for over sixty miles on a clear night.

Circling the upper level was a narrow maintenance ledge called the lantern deck, upon which a man stood facing the inland sea. Dark welder-type glasses shielded him from the overpowering eye of the lamp. With both hands he gripped a strange contraption that appeared to grow right out of his body, with long, straight tubes projecting up and behind.

As he blew on a narrow pipe, he simultaneously squeezed a bag of plaid cloth under his arm. A horrible noise erupted from the device. A strange smile came over the man’s face. The music from the great Highland bagpipe drifted outward, playing an eerie counterpoint to the sound of the approaching storm.

Suddenly, lightning flashed overhead, too close for comfort. The wind gusted, tugging at the man. He stopped playing and gripped a side rail for support. The icy steel bit his weathered hand, but he barely noticed. He pushed the dark glasses up over his forehead. He squinted and scanned the water for passing ships. Far out on the lake, between Isle Royale and the North Shore, he thought he saw the running lights of an iron ore freighter. The man grimaced. It was a bad night to tempt the Lady.

Lightning flashed again, closer this time. Reluctantly, the man opened a small access door, no more than four feet tall. He hunched down and pushed himself through, retreating to the safety of the lighthouse.

Ian MacDougal stood at the window of the sitting room, looking up at the lighthouse tower. When he saw his father disappear inside the lamp room, the sixteen-year-old breathed a sigh of relief. Sooner or later, he fretted, the Old Man is going to get himself killed playing up there. At least the infernal racket was over for now. Ian shook his head and sat down at a small desk occupying a corner of the room. Next to the desk an iron stove crackled and glowed from the coal fire burning in its belly.

The sitting room was small, a one-room affair built against the base of the lighthouse. Here, the lightkeepers sat watch during the long nights, climbing the tower occasionally to check the timing and condition of the lamp. Or play bagpipes.

Ian stared at a schoolbook lying open in front of him. It was a history text as dry, dusty and boring as any produced by the American school system. Ian picked it up and flipped through crinkled yellow pages. Next to him on the desk was his father’s typewriter, an old black Oliver on which the lightkeeper filled out his daily reports. Without thinking, Ian put one hand on the keyboard and absentmindedly jabbed at a key—
snap, snap, snap
—as he wondered why on Earth anyone cared about James Madison, the Monroe Doctrine, or the War of 1812.

Ian rarely studied in the sitting room. But the assistant lightkeeper, Mr. Young, was ill with stomach flu that night, and Ian had begged to help his father. His mother had consented only on the condition he finish his homework as well. Ian agreed, but as usual, was having trouble concentrating. There were so many distractions in the lighthouse, so many more interesting things for a teenage boy to pay attention to.

A pedestal on the other side of the room held a worn-out Victrola, from which the great opera singer Enrico Caruso belted out a melody from
I Pagliacci
. Ian gazed at the phonograph a moment, then got up, happy to delay his homework a while longer. He took the heavy needle off the record, then slipped the shellac disk back in its sleeve. He frowned as he flipped through his father’s music collection. Nothing but opera and ragtime. Ian shrugged, found a Scott Joplin recording, and put it on the platter. Ragtime was old-fashioned, but anything was better than opera.

The teenager turned the crank on the side of the Victrola, set the needle down carefully on the disk, then stood back and listened as syncopated piano music drifted from the megaphone-shaped amplifier.

Ian was tall for his age, with gangly arms and legs that always seemed to get in the way. His Uncle Dave from Duluth called him “Stretch,” a nickname he liked until the neighbor kids heard about it and teased him mercilessly. He had wavy black hair that was never the right length according to his father, a sharp nose, which he hated, and strange, piercing brown eyes with a tinge of green on the outer edge of the iris. His mother said they were the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen. Ian just wished he had eyes like everyone else.

Ian discovered his foot tapping to the ragtime beat and immediately stopped—ragtime was old-fashioned. He sat back down at the desk and frowned at the history book, which waited patiently, eager to inflict its dubious wisdom.

Ian’s most heartfelt wish was to own a radio, so he could tune in broadcasts from the jazz clubs in Duluth, or maybe even Chicago on a crystal clear night. But his father couldn’t afford a radio, and besides, once a tube blew it would be impossible to find a replacement, since of course there were no shops on this Godforsaken rock his family called home. Ian fumed. Here it was, the Roaring Twenties, and they were stuck in the wilderness on Isle Royale, the most remote, accursed spot on Earth, as far as Ian was concerned.

At least, the boy fretted as he leafed through his schoolbook again, the shipping season was drawing to a close. In a few short weeks the Lighthouse Service would pick them up for the cruise back to Minnesota. They would be home in Two Harbors before Christmas.

Ian shuddered at the thought of missing the ferry back to the mainland. He couldn’t think of anything worse than being snowed in at Wolf Point. The year before, an early winter storm had nearly stranded them. Ten days late, the Light Service ferry finally did manage to pick them up, but making it back to the mainland had meant crashing through a solid mile of ice. The ship’s skipper had then prepared his vessel to head back out that very day, aiming to pick up the keeper and his family at Split Rock Lighthouse on the roadless North Shore. But then word got to him that the keeper, rather than wait any longer for the ferry, had trudged three miles through waist-deep snow and caught a passing lumber train heading south to Duluth. The skipper, much relieved at not having to venture out on the lake again, put his boat in for the winter.

When he was a little boy, Ian had heard the story of Charlie and Angelique Mott, hired in 1845 to occupy a future copper mine on Isle Royale until the owners could secure financing. When winter came, provisions that had been promised never arrived, nor did a ship to take them back to the mainland. Stuck on the uninhabited island with almost no food, they suffered through one of the worst winters in memory. At one point, Charlie, delirious with starvation fever, tried to kill Angelique and eat her. But Angelique managed to wrest the knife from his weak grasp. He died shortly thereafter, nothing left but skin and bone. Angelique nearly starved to death herself, barely surviving on tree bark and an occasional rabbit she caught with a snare made from her own hair. When she was finally rescued the following May, she sat in the rowboat with her back to the island, cursing the day she had ever laid eyes on that wretched shore.

Ian knew, of course, that the Mott’s ordeal had happened long ago, and that if he and his family ever were stranded at Wolf Point they surely wouldn’t starve to death. Every year a handful of hardy folk wintered on the island, especially at the resorts at Rock Harbor, on the north end of Isle Royale, or at Windigo, at the extreme southern tip. But since Wolf Point was situated smack in the middle of the island, that meant a twenty-mile hike in either direction through deep snow and rugged forests to reach the nearest human being.

Ian looked up as thunder echoed over the island. What was keeping the Old Man?

High in the lamp room, rough hands buffed and polished a section of brasswork surrounding the lighthouse lens, rubbing methodically until the brass gleamed like daylight. Clarence MacDougal stood back, satisfied at last with his work. A smile slowly crept onto his weathered, red-bearded face. Everything was in order.

The four-ton lighthouse lens rotated on an enormous pedestal six feet above the floor. Imported from Paris, the bi-valve Fresnel lens floated on a bearing surface of liquid mercury. Hundreds of glass prisms, both reflecting and refracting, and assembled by hand inside the lighthouse, focused the blinding white light and sent a 450,000 candlepower beam shooting out into the murky night.

Wolf Point Light was one of the first to use an incandescent oil vapor lamp, a technological innovation making it one of the most powerful of the more than four hundred lighthouses on the Great Lakes. Filtered kerosene, brought up daily from a special storage shed next to the lighthouse, was poured into a single brass fuel assembly tank bolted just under the lens assembly. The kerosene was pumped by hand each night until enough air pressure was created to keep the light burning all night. The fuel itself was vaporized by a Bunsen burner flame and, together with specially made mantles housing the flame, made a pure white light that was blinding to the naked eye.

As Clarence stooped to put his polishing rag away in its proper drawer, he caught a glimpse of his reflection in the windowpane. He stiffened and adjusted his dark blue uniform. The suit was made of sackcloth, double breasted with five large regulation buttons on each side. He wore a vest underneath, cut low to display the top six inches of his freshly ironed white shirt. His cap, also dark blue, had a cloth-covered visor and a chinstrap of cloth held by gold buttons. In the front center of the cap gleamed the insignia of a keeper—a lighthouse surrounded by gold leaf. Clarence adjusted the cap on his head, then snapped the brim with his index finger.

Tucking the bagpipe under one arm, the lightkeeper made his way to the steep spiral staircase that wound its way down the tower core. He gripped the handrail for support, then carefully made his way down the stairs. Clarence could feel the vibrations in the iron handrail as thunder boomed outside, the noise echoing off the brick walls.

The life of a lightkeeper was not an easy one. He had to be a jack-of-all-trades to deal with the many things that could, and did, go wrong in the course of his duties. Pipes froze, engines failed, storms blew down sheds, the lamp was easily fouled, the fuel tank leaked, or the hand-pump leathers went on the blink. But on this night, everything seemed to be in order. A good thing, too, Clarence thought, what with the storm rolling in.

But the trouble with everything being in order is that something always comes along to stir things up. Clarence patted his vest pocket, feeling the edges of the folded letter nestled within. He smiled grimly.

A gust of wind rattled the windows of the sitting room. Ian looked up from his schoolbook, startled to find his father standing in the entryway, staring at him.

“Everything alright up there?” Ian asked.

Clarence paused, then nodded his head. “Everything’s fine, Ian laddie. Finish up yer schoolwork.”

“Do you think Mom heard the pipes?”

“Man’s got to practice, don’t he?” Clarence snapped. “Besides, I quit when the lightning got close.”

“Mom said Old Ollhoff was complaining again at the fishing village.” A village in name only, the collection of never more than half a dozen tents and lean-to’s was situated about a mile up the coast. The fishermen, usually drifters with no permanent homes, stayed just long enough to take their fill of lake trout and coho, then left for the mainland.

BOOK: Isle Royale
11.31Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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