The Harbour Review
The last lighthouse keepers of the north coast
Automation came for every light on the coast except one. We spent a winter with the family who refused to leave.
The lamp at Skarholm has not gone dark in one hundred and twelve years. Every evening, a little before sunset, Maren Aas climbs the ninety-four steps to the gallery, wipes the salt from the great lens with a chamois that was her grandmother’s, and waits for the light to fail. She does not hurry. “The sea keeps its own time,” she says, “and so do we.”
Below her, the keeper’s cottage glows with a peat fire and the radio murmurs the shipping forecast. Her husband, Jonas, mends nets at the kitchen table; their daughter does her schoolwork by the window, one eye on the horizon. The coastguard sent a letter in March, politely suggesting the tower be switched to a sensor and a solar cell. It is still pinned beside the barometer, unanswered, gathering a faint rime of steam from the kettle.
“They ask who will be here when we are gone,” Maren says, trimming the wick of a lamp that has not needed one since 1974. “I tell them: the light will be, as long as someone climbs the stairs.”