Lake Superior Profiles: People on the Big Lake

7. Rock of Ages

Rock of Ages lighthouse. (Drawing by Sandy Slater.) 7 Rock of Ages A Reef West of Isle Royale Lighthouses have been called “America’s castles.” Thirty-three of them were built on Lake Superior. The first two, at Whitefish Point and Copper Harbor, date back to 1849. Five more are near Isle Royale. One of these, Rock of Ages, was first manned in 1908. Rock of Ages is about two and a half miles west of Isle Royale and was one of four lighthouses on Lake Superior where the keepers were isolated on reefs or islands for an entire shipping season, which lasted as long as the open water. The lighthouse keeper has gone the way of the milkman, the coalman, and the iceman, but I tracked down one, Albert Stridfelt, who worked at Rock of Ages in 1939. This beacon pokes up from a chunk of granite just big enough to accommodate the tower, which is 50 feet in diameter at the bottom and 130 feet high. At other lighthouses on the mainland, Albert was part of a crew of three. At Rock of Ages, there was a crew of four because one man was always getting away from it all on Isle Royale, where the lighthouse service had a small cabin. “We’d stay there a week, take turns,” Albert says. “It was very livable.” While there, the men socialized with the commercial fishermen who lived on the island. “It was good fellowship,” he recalls. Like sailors, the men worked four-hour watches: four on, eight off— noon to four and midnight to four, for instance. A lighthouse tender, which Albert calls “a good-sized piece of boat,” routinely came with supplies. It couldn’t tie up at the lighthouse because of a long string of reefs, so it anchored a couple of miles away and shuttled supplies and newspapers in a smaller boat. Another supply boat, the Winyah from Duluth, went regularly to Isle Royale to service the commercial fishermen, and it would deliver mail, which the lighthouse men would pick up by motoring to the island in a twenty-one-foot boat every few days. They also used that boat to carry back the moose they poached on the island. “That was the style,” is the way Albert describes the practice. The men 94 % chapter 7 stored the meat in the subbasement of the lighthouse, right on the cold water. “It was an icebox,” he says. “We had meat all year.” They also gathered seagull eggs. The keepers would go by boat to rocks where the gulls nested, mark all the eggs with a crayon or aluminum paint, then go back to the nests the next day. They left the old, marked eggs alone and picked the fresh, unmarked ones, because old seagull eggs taste fishy. Albert says of the marked egg, “That was like a tattletale.” A fresh egg, he remembers, “made a pretty good meal. They have an odd taste, but you get used to it. It’s a good egg.” “Who did the cooking?” “We took turns. Everybody cooked, but the keeper, he didn’t cook. He was a big shot.” Albert describes the fare: “We had eggs and bacon in the morning . . . moose meat. . . . Stews was easy. . . . And we made pies, too. We had apple by the barrel. Then we had fish. Good lake trout.” “How about speckled trout?” “Yah, we went in the harbor. Into Isle Royale. We got them nice little speckies and, oh, they were good. Get about ten or twelve of ’em and put ’em in a pan with some butter. That was top shelf.” They trolled along the reefs or anchored and sat. “We’d still fish,” he says. “Go on a reef and be quiet. Maybe you’ve done that, have you?” After Rock of Ages, Albert spent the rest of his working days at Eagle Harbor lighthouse, on the Keweenaw, which was in town and easy duty. Come and go as you please. Albert enjoys talking about his working days, but when I meet him, he is a forgetful, foggy ninety-year-old man. “Too bad I don’t have pictures to give you a bigger idea,” he apologizes. I manage to get that bigger idea from the Rock of Ages logbook for the year Albert was out there, 1939, which I find at the National Archives in Arlington, Virginia. All the entries...