Green Island Lighthouse
There’s a great story about a former lighthouse keeper’s wife on Green Island who used to pin her children to the clothes line so they wouldn’t blow off into the sea. Green Island is a rocky wasteland 25 miles north of Prince Rupert, eight miles from the Alaska border and the most northern lighthouse in BC. No trees grow on this lump of ice in winter, where 50 knot winds constitute a light breeze and last for weeks. Serge Pare has tended the light at Green Island since 1995 sharing his duties with another keeper. “I am hoping that I will still be here until I am 70 years old or too old to live on an isolated place like here,” he wrote to me in an email. Pare starts work at 3:00 a.m. every morning. He tends the main light and gives the first of seven weather reports at 3:30 a.m. throughout the day these weather reports help boaters, sea planes and helicopters. Some years he takes two weeks holidays, some years none at all.