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magazine / ja07
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July/August 2007 issue |
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THE LIGHT FANTASTIC
In the lighthouse keeper's cottage on Flowerpot Island in Ontario's
Georgian Bay, volunteers take a trip through time
By Andrea Curtis
Down by the bay
With a climate regulated by Lake Huron and Georgian Bay, the Bruce Peninsula is home to a unique assortment of botanical life. Ancient white cedars are rooted
in the dolomite cliffs, and wild orchids and ferns provide lush and colourful ground cover.
In early June, the region hosts the Bruce Peninsula Orchid Festival. Garry
Keast, a coordinator of the volunteer lightkeeper program, provides tours for those seeking out the calypso orchid, which grows in small multi-hued patches
off Flowerpot Island's trails. It is one of a number of guided hikes available.
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It's quiet at the lighthouse keeper's
cottage on Flowerpot Island, our
only regular company a pair of
ravens gliding on the north wind,
alighting occasionally on the wide
beach to peck at something caught
among the large, smooth stones. Since
my father and I arrived to be volunteer
light-station "hosts," not a single vessel
has passed by this rocky cove surrounded
on two sides by steep limestone
cliffs, the view an unobstructed
vista of whitecaps rising and falling on
Ontario's Georgian Bay. Though I have
inherited my father's love for this
inland sea and both of us have spent a
lifetime of summers exploring its rocks
and waters, hearing stories of the passions,
courage and loss it has inspired,
this is our first time staying at Flowerpot.
It is as solitary as it must have been
for nearly a century of keepers on this
once remote island off the tip of the
Bruce Peninsula.
Built in 1897 during the height of the
shipping industry on Georgian Bay, the
original wooden lighthouse offered guidance
to the schooners and steamers
carrying logs and fish, passengers
and their cargo to the isolated
regions of the North. The light
— perched on Castle Bluff, just
below the island's highest point
— marked the channel through
a perilous patchwork of islands
and shoals between the mainland
and Manitoulin Island.
But even with Flowerpot's
beam and those of other nearby
lighthouses reaching far out into
the bay, founderings and shipwrecks
were common. In the
112-square-kilometre expanse
of water and limestone rock
around the island, an area now known
as Fathom Five National Marine Park,
there are the skeletal remains of more
than 20 vessels.
The region's shipping industry began
its slow decline after the turn of the last
century, petering out to almost nothing
by the 1950s as roads and railways
reached the areas once accessible only by
the Parry Sound Coast Guard station and
are on their regular fall trip to check the
lights. I think they're almost as surprised
to see us as we are to see them.
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
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