Orcasional Musings | The Patos Light

— Orcasional Musings by Steve Henigson —

Today, the lighthouse on Patos Island is merely a museum, an artifact of an earlier way of life. But not too long ago, besides the lighthouse and foghorn, there was also a home in which resided two separate light-keepers’ families who were cut off from the rest of the world for months at a time. These people had to be completely self-reliant, of course, but they also had to be deeply dedicated to their duty of assuring that an important aid to navigation functioned reliably and continuously, night and day, every day, year in and year out.

The Lighthouse Service made occasional trips to Patos with the supplies that kept the light lit and the horn sounding, but if the island’s families wanted fresh fruit and vegetables, fresh meat, and even clothing and furniture, somebody had to row a boat all the way to Bellingham, on the mainland. It’s a 20-mile trip, at least six hours, both to and from. One of the lighthouse keepers did the rowing, leaving all or most of his family, and the other keeper, on Patos to keep the equipment running.

The keepers’ families included children, and those children needed both education and free play time. The keepers themselves had quite enough to do, keeping both light and horn fueled and maintained, buildings repaired and painted, and wood for heating and cooking cut and stacked. So it fell to the keepers’ wives to both educate and supervise the children, all the while also cooking, cleaning, mending, and seeing to the various other household chores that needed doing.

Among the children’s chores were caring for the cow who gave them milk and butter, and attending to her offspring. There were also chickens who gave them eggs, and even a small herd of pigs, all of whom had to be fed and cleaned-up after. The children collected kelp, which the keepers’ dried and then used to fertilize their vegetable garden, and they fished for cod and other, smaller fish. Visiting Indians taught them to enjoy eating sea urchins, and how to trap sea otters for their warm fur.

Because they were living on a small island, the light-keepers’ children had free run of the place. They did a lot of exploring, and, as children will do, a lot of fantasizing about the interesting things that they observed and found. The orcas swimming by gave rise to “big black fish” and salmon-skeleton stories. Other stories came from the dark depths of the woods. And for a while, the children shared the island with a strange hermit who would appear and disappear mysteriously, always when least expected.

As the keepers’ children grew older, they had to go to the mainland for their schooling. Their parents arranged for them to board with mainland families, because the adults’ work of keeping the light and horn working properly went endlessly on and on. While the children attended their mainland schools, one of them began to write stories about what life was like on a small island. In time, those stories were published in a very interesting book that is still available today, and it’s well worth the time it takes to read it. The book’s name is The Light On The Island, and its author was Helene Glidden, one of the light-keeper’s daughters. The Patos Island lighthouse itself, still functioning but now automated, is maintained by volunteers as a museum, and it is open for visits during the summer.