The Forty-Fathom Garden

00:03:41

MVMr. Tibbetts, you took the Petrel Point Light in the winter of 1936, and you kept it until the station was automated in the spring of 1962. That is twenty-six years on the rock. I’d like to start with the trip out, if I could — from the mainland dock out to the rock, and what you brought with you when you went out to stay.

RTFebruary twenty-eighth, and there was still drift ice in the bay — great pans of it, grinding on the ledges all night like millstones. Chris Dow ferried us out in his lobster boat, and he would not come about on the east side on account of the swell, so we landed on the west ramp with my dunnage in potato barrels and a crate of books. My wife and the two boys came out in June, when school let out. Bill Rann, the keeper I relieved, met us on the ramp with a lantern, though it was two in the afternoon. He had been alone out there since November, and I believe that lantern was the first light he had thought to show anybody in four months. [laughs] No — he was glad to see the boat. A keeper is always glad to see a boat, whatever he tells you afterwards.

MVWhat did the station hand you that first week? What does a light station actually consist of, on paper?

00:07:12

RTKeys. A great ring of keys, nineteen of them — tower, oil room, fog-signal house, boathouse, the two outhouses, each with its own key, as though the sea were particular about which door it came through. And a book of instructions that read like a sermon with the mercy taken out. Trim the wick thus. Wind the clockwork thus. Log the weather each four hours, and the truth if you can spare it. [laughs] It’s a fair book. I came to know it the way you know a hymn — not by reading it again, but by living inside it.

MVYour son mentioned, when I spoke with him, that people in Spruce Head still talk about the keeper’s garden at Petrel. Could you tell me about the garden?

RTThat garden. People thought it a joke — a garden on a rock where there is no dirt to speak of, nothing but ledge and a hand’s depth of black sod. But every northeaster, the sea mows that forty-fathom ground below the light and throws the whole crop up on my beach. Kelp — great cables of it — rockweed, dulse, and once a bolt of undressed cloth off a freighter, though the cloth was no use to the peas. I forked the weed onto the beds and let the rain do the rinsing. By June the peas were up, and by July we ate the first mess of them out of what the storm had delivered free of charge, in any weather, and never once sent a bill for any of it.

00:11:36

RTYou learn the economy of a place like that or you don’t last. The garden kept us in vegetables; the tide brought bait fish for the lobster traps I was allowed to work; the rain barrel topped the cistern. Money was for flour, coffee, coal oil when the allotment ran thin — and for the boat, which came on a schedule whether the weather agreed or not. The station made you frugal the way the sea makes you humble: not all at once, but every single day you stood the watch.

MVCould we talk about the light itself — the lamp, the lens, and what an evening’s work actually involved?

RTThe fourth-order lens¹ came with the tower in ’57 — 1857, that is — and it was old when I got it and perfect when I left. An evening was this: up the tower at ten to seven with the oil can and the matches, trim the wick so the flame stood the height of a shilling, wind the weights that turned the clockwork, and light her at seven o’clock sharp, for the shipping. Then down, and up again every four hours to wind and trim, all night, in any weather the North Atlantic could invent. You did not ask yourself whether you felt like it. There is no feeling in the matter at all — that is the first thing the light teaches you.

00:19:26

MVI want to ask about the January gale — the storm of 1944 — but before that, could you set the ordinary winter for me? What was a bad night, before the famous one?

RTA bad ordinary night was the glass falling and the wind coming round northeast with the tide under it. You would carry the oil up early, double the wicks, lash the boat, and get the family down into the oil room where the walls are four feet thick. The tower would hum like a struck bell, and spray would go over the lantern — ninety feet, and it went over like fog. You sat with your hand on the clockwork and you listened for the sound the weights make when they stop, because that is the sound of the light standing still, and a standing light is a lie told to ships.

00:24:53

RTJanuary of ’44 was that, with the volume turned up past anything I had been shown. The wind came on Tuesday and by Thursday it had taken the boat-rail, most of the tramway, and a ton of water through the lantern room, and the glass — the storm glazing — went at two in the morning. I carried oil up the tower hand over hand with the rail iced to the thickness of a fence post, and my wife held the lantern for me at the landings. The light never went out. That was the whole of the religion out there — you could drown, the tower could ring like a struck anvil, but you could not go dark — and in twenty-six years, we never did.

MVThe station log for that night³ reads almost exactly as you have just described it. Do you remember writing it?

RTI remember my hand. The log wants a fair copy, and there is no fair copy in eighty miles an hour — you write it after, with the water still in your boots. The book never says what a thing cost; it only says what the light did. I used to think that was a shortcoming of the book. I have since decided it is exactly the point of the book.

00:38:10

RTYou asked me before the tape what the light paid. Fourteen hundred and forty a year, with the house, fuel, and a garden you could eat off of by August.² People hear the number now and pity me, and I let them, but the number kept a family and bought my sons their teeth. The assistant’s wage was nine hundred and ninety, and from ’37 to ’52 there was no assistant — there was my wife, who was never once paid, and never once asked to be.

MVThe fog signal — your son says the bell is what he remembers first about the station. Could you describe the bell, before the diaphone came in and took her place?

00:41:44

RTShe was cast in ’75 — 1875 — and she hung in the signal house striking her three seconds on and three off, day and night, in thick weather. In the house you heard her through the walls; on the water, they tell me, she carried six miles, and there were fishermen who knew her from any other bell on the coast the way you know your mother’s step on a stair. At night, in thick weather, that bell was the only neighbor we had, and she never once went to bed early.⁵ When the diaphone came in ’51 she went to the church in South Thomaston, and to this day I cannot sit through a service there without feeling I have left something running.

MVLet me ask about the end of it — automation, in 1962. Can you walk me through the day the switch went in?

00:46:29

RTThey put a switch on it in the spring of ’62. A man in Rockland throws a lever at dusk and the light comes on, and throws it back at dawn and the light goes off — one motion, no oil, no wick, no clockwork, no man on the rock. They asked would I stay on as caretaker, keep the paint up, mind the generator. I said no, thank you — a caretaker keeps a house, and I was hired to keep an appointment, and the appointment had been given to the man with the lever. I trimmed her wick at seven o’clock on the last evening, the way I always had, and I did not blow her out. The man in Rockland did that.

MVDo you mind it? The lever, I mean — the way the work ended, after all of that.

RTMind it? No. The light does not care who keeps it, and a ship two miles off the Head in snow cannot tell a shilling flame from a switch — that is the whole argument for the switch, and it is a good argument. What I mind is smaller than minding. Some evenings at seven I still reach for the oil can, the way a man who has sold the boat still checks the sky. [pause] But the garden is still there, and the sea still mows it, and there is not one thing wrong with the peas. That’s all of it, I guess, unless you want the pigs — and there were no pigs, not once in twenty-six years, though the government suspected us of it twice and searched the coal shed both times, and found nothing in it but coal.