Connor walked through the door of the keeper house, past the gift shop and the rack of postcards, and stopped in front of the glass case where the old leather logbook lay open. I watched him lean over it, and I watched his lips move as he deciphered the brown ink. He read it to the whole tour in a voice that grew smaller with every line. “December ninth, nineteen sixty four. Gale from the northeast. Lamp motor failed at twenty one forty. Assistant Keeper Elias Thorne turned the lens by hand for eleven hours until daylight. No vessel was lost. Signed, E. Thorne.” I am Elias Thorne, eighty two years old, and I stood at the bottom of the stairs with my hand on the railing, and my son was crying beside me.
In 1964, I was twenty years old and an assistant keeper in the Coast Guard, and I had been at the light for four months. On the night of the gale, the motor that turned the great lens burned out, and the head keeper was ashore with the flu. A freighter was feeling her way up the coast in the dark. I climbed the hundred and twenty steps, set my shoulder against the brass, and turned the lens by hand, one slow rotation every ten seconds, for eleven hours. When the sun came up, my arms would not straighten. The pin on my cap was given to me for that night.
The old woman from the gift shop, Margaret Pease, seventy eight years old, who had run the shop since the day it opened, came through the door of the keeper house with her hand pressed to her mouth. “Elias Thorne,” she said. “My father was the head keeper that winter. He told me about the boy who turned the lens. He said the boy never asked for a thing.” The tour group, twenty people in sunglasses and lobster shirts, stood in a hushed half circle. The little girl with the lobster balloon let go of the string, and it drifted slowly up toward the rafters.
A brass lamp pin on an old cap gave one retired hardware man the length of a lighthouse tour to bring a young guide back to the logbook in Rockland.
I gave my terms at the foot of the stairs, with the arm of my son under my elbow. “Connor, I will not speak to the park service. You are twenty five, you have learned your facts well, and you love this place, which is the beginning of everything. I ask only three things. Take me up the hundred and twenty steps, one at a time, because I have not seen the lantern room since I was twenty. Open that logbook for every tour that comes through here, and read the page aloud. And let me turn the lens once more, by hand, for the children, just a quarter turn.”
Connor came out of the keeper house with his face wet and his clipboard held against his chest. “Mr. Thorne, I know every fact about this light,” he said. “I can tell you the height of the tower, the year of the lens, the name of every keeper after nineteen thirty.” He gulped. “I never opened the book. I told you that your pin was a souvenir, and I laughed with the group.” He looked down at his shoes. “My grandfather was a lobsterman who lost his boat in a gale like that one. If a boy had turned a lamp for him, he would be here today.”
But a young man in the grip of shame will do something quick. Connor reached out, plucked the little brass lamp from my cap, and bolted for the stairs of the tower, saying he would compare the engraving with the brass keeper plaque on the first landing. He had his foot on the bottom step when Margaret Pease stepped into the doorway of the keeper house and put her cane across it. The man in the lobster shirt blocked the passage. And the little girl whose balloon had flown away planted herself in front of the first stair, hands on hips, and said, “Mister, you have to give it back.”
Connor halted with the pin clenched in his fist, and the tour group looked up at him from the foot of the tower. The fog rolled in off the water and curled around the stone. The old woman spoke with her voice of her father. “Young man, that cap has been on the head of that boy since he was twenty. It has been through more weather than you have seen. Give it back with respect.” Connor looked at the pin. He came down off the step, walked over to me, and slowly, carefully, pinned it back on my cap, his young fingers shaking, and straightened the brim with both hands.
The consequences were quiet and fine. Connor took me up the hundred and twenty steps, one at a time, with my son behind us and the tour group trailing after, and we stood in the lantern room in the wind. I put my shoulder to the old brass lens, just once, and turned it a quarter turn. The park service moved the logbook to a prominent case at the entrance, with a card telling the story of the night, and Connor, who learned it by heart, told it to every group that came after.
In the name of my wife Marjorie, who passed in 2021, I started the Marjorie Thorne Fund. It pays for lighthouse preservation and for sailing and boating lessons for young people on the coast, in Knox, Lincoln and Waldo counties. In the first year we repaired two old lights and taught seventy three children to sail. One was a twelve year old girl from Thomaston who had never been on the water, and who steered a small boat across the harbor by herself with the wind in her hair, shouting that she could see the whole world.
On a foggy morning in August, I sat on the bench at the bottom of the lighthouse stairs with a cup of coffee, and the early tour gathered at the foot of the tower. Connor stood on the bottom step with his clipboard under his arm. He looked out at the group, then at me, and smiled. “Folks,” he said, “before we climb, I would like to introduce a friend. In nineteen sixty four, this gentleman turned the great lens by hand for eleven hours. His name is Elias Thorne.” Twenty heads turned. I raised my cup. And the foghorn sounded over the bay.