In Nantasket Roads—the narrow, hazard-strewn historic main route into the harbor—we passed above the sites of scores of early shipwrecks. Gradually, a classic tableau came into view: a tapering stone tower, a white clapboard keeper’s house with green trim, a small boathouse. As we stepped ashore, Snowman cautioned, “Watch out for seagull poop. The gulls have taken over.” Unlike the forested islands along the way, Little Brewster had no trees—presumably cut down long ago, for building material and fuel. A neon-orange No Trespassing sign was planted on the lawn, and the boathouse was empty; water rats have burrowed underneath. Snowman unlocked the keeper’s house, built in 1884 near the water’s edge. In the vestibule was a wooden sign painted with a beaming lighthouse and the legend “We will leave the light on for you.”
This is not a given. The United States currently has about eight hundred and fifty lighthouses, only half of which serve as active “aids to navigation.” The rest have been made obsolete by G.P.S., or rendered untenably expensive by damage from increasingly rough weather; the active ones use automated electric lamps. In 2018, Boston Light failed a safety inspection, and the Coast Guard had what Snowman described as a “reality check.” The tours of the island that she had led were halted, and her presence there was restricted to maintenance trips, outside of storm season. On December 30th, when she retires, at seventy-two, the station will be “unmanned,” or, as she said, “unwomanned,” and the profession of lighthouse keeper will go the way of the rag-and-bone collector.
Boston Light, and the lighthouses built after it, provided a crucial service to a growing nation. The ninth law passed by the United States Congress, shortly after the Bill of Rights, established an agency to oversee them. As they were increasingly displaced by new technologies, their admirers fought to protect them, as icons of the national spirit. In 1986, Senator Ted Kennedy declared, at a fund-raiser for a lighthouse on Martha’s Vineyard, “When we preserve lighthouses, we’re preserving part of ourselves.” Kennedy, who belonged to a coastal clan of devoted sailors, invoked the words of his older brother John: “All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean.”
Commercial ship pilots tend to be hardheaded, by necessity, but even they say that lighthouses still have a place. Captain Brian Fournier learned his trade as a tugboat operator in Boston Harbor. “Boston Light was my back yard,” he told me. These days, he generally pilots oil tankers in Maine, and like other professional navigators he uses G.P.S. Still, he prefers to rely on the evidence of his eyes and the reassurance of a long tradition. In low visibility, Fournier said, “I’m looking for the flash of a buoy, the flash of the lighthouse.”