The Lighthouse Keeper’s Rain-Soaked Exile
A desperate account of life on Tatoosh Island, where the constant thunder of the foghorn and relentless rainfall drove a keeper to the brink.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
I was sent out from Washington where I had been working in the general office, and you can imagine my feelings when arriving at such a desolate place. Going up, the steamer could not land me and I was obliged to go on to Victoria, then return to Port Townsend and from there take a little coasting schooner. After sailing about 100 miles we reached Neah Bay, which was yet six miles from the island that was to be my home. Arriving, the island was found to be a fragment of a mountain from 80 to 120 feet in height with perpendicular walls facing the sea on every side.
Here I was doomed for a season at least to live upon this isolated point with no companions save the three lighthouse keepers. I am confident of being able to prove that more rain falls upon that little island than upon any other spot of the known world, the fall of water for the year I was there being between nine and ten feet. For eleven long days and nights it rained without ceasing, until it had soaked through the roofs and walls of our dwelling. Then fogs would roll up and blot out the world in an instant. All this time we would have nothing to connect us with the world without but the sound of that horrible foghorn, which would shake the island to its foundations at every bleat, and drown all but the sorrows of those who were compelled to hear it. Every day and every night that horrible sound flooded my being with horror until all the other miseries of that life were obliterated by the presence of this supreme torture, and its absence brought happiness even in that place.
“Every day and every night that horrible sound flooded my being with horror until all the other miseries of that life were obliterated by the presence of this supreme torture.”
Tatoosh Island, located off the tip of Cape Flattery, remains one of the rainiest and most isolated points in the United States. While modern technology has automated the lighthouse and eased the crushing solitude, the extreme environmental isolation described here resonates with the experience of modern remote workers and climate researchers stationed in the Pacific Northwest's most rugged corners.
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