His T-shirt identified him in white lettering: “ KEEPER’S HUSBAND.”Īs we cut through a sliver of water between Grape Island and Slate Island, the flash of Boston Light pulsed at the horizon. Snowman met Thomson in 1993, when he attended an advanced training session that she led for the Coast Guard Auxiliary, the service’s volunteer corps. The crew-her brother-in-law Jack Richardson and her husband, Jay Thomson-was preparing for departure. could be a bit bumpy.” A slight woman with a tanned, friendly face, she greeted me on the gangway in Coast Guard blue: ball cap, fleece, and drip-dry cargo pants. We met for an excursion to the lighthouse one morning in August, at a marina in North Weymouth where Snowman keeps a banged-up Maritime skiff. “Imagine what they felt when they spotted the light.” When gales raged, one emigrant wrote, people “cry and pray most piteously,” and “everyone believes that the ship will go to the bottom.” A woman on that crossing, incapacitated by a stalled labor, was shoved through a porthole into the sea. Along with violent seasickness, passengers suffered from fever, dysentery, boils, scurvy, mouth rot, rat bites, and lice so copious that they could be scraped off the body. But sometimes, standing in the lantern room, she contemplates what it was like to undergo the voyage to the New World on a merchant’s galleon-made by hand from little more than oak, rope, tar, and flax cloth. Snowman, a plainspoken New Englander with mariner roots that reach back three centuries, maintains a crisp official manner while on duty. The lighthouse is a white tower, eighty-nine feet tall, whose east windows face across the North Atlantic toward the English coast, some three thousand miles away. The lighthouse, opened in September, 1716, was the first in the American colonies, and Snowman is the last official keeper in the United States. Under the auspices of the Coast Guard, she serves as the keeper, and the historian, of Boston Light. For the greater part of two decades, Sally Snowman has lived and worked contentedly on Little Brewster Island, a craggy patch of bare rock, crabgrass, concrete, and dilapidated buildings in Boston’s outer harbor.
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