"MY WIFE HAS GONE CRAZY - one of the isolated upcoast lightkeepers in this astonishing book writes to his Victoria supervisor. "PLEASE SEND SOMEONE UP HERE AT ONCE."It could be an incident from any one of many poignant stories which unfold as Don Graham, himself keeper of Vancouver's famous Point Atkinson Light, breaks the lighthouse fraternity's 150-year tradition of silence and exposes life as it really has been lived in and around those prim white-and-red light stations which have made British Columbia's otherwise forbidding coastline a safe place for ships.Can you imagine wind strong enough to blow away a lightkeeper's cow? It happened at the ill-fated light on exposed Triangle Island, finally abandoned after the storms cost 25 lives. Here are shocking new revelations about the supposed Japanese bombardment of Estevan Light, a pivotal event in Canada's WWII history; a front row view of the most notorious wrecks along Vancouver Island's "Pacific Graveyard"; stories of absurd and fatal government bungling; stories of suicide, murder, mysterious disappearance, heroism, starvation and occasionally, happiness.Keepers of the Light is the definitive book on coast lightkeeping maritime history buffs have been waiting for, the result of 40 years' research by Capt. L. Cadieux, founder of the Maritime Museum of Victoria. A further ten years research and writing was dedicated by lightkeeper Graham, a former University history lecturer who had editorial help from both Farley Mowat and Silver Donald Cameron in making this one of the most gripping sagas ever to be written about the west coast.With spectacular full-colour covers painted by the celebrated lighthouse artist Buzz Walker and 200 drawings, photos, maps and plans in an attractive pictorial format, Keepers of the Light is as handsome as it is exciting to read. About the Author Donald Graham was keeper of the Port Atkinson Lighthous at the treacherous confluence of Howe Sound and Burrard Inlet for seventeen years. He was considered the foremost authority on BC lighthouses and authored two Keepers of the Light and Lights of the Inside Passage. Graham was a recognized community and political activist who toiled for peace, more compassionate government, and the environment. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTIONIt must be a great life!" gushes the clerk at the Prince Rupert grocery checkout, waving away the proffered I.D. when she sees the unlikely address on the cheque. "It must be fantastic to have all that time to yourself. Do you get T.V.?" It is a moment a few lightkeepers, those who affect pea jackets and peaked caps in town, might relish. Most come to loathe it. The only thing worse than explaining the obvious is to be asked to again and again.Some myths die hard. The childhood fantasies we all have about cowboys, firemen, nurses or train engineers seldom survive kindergarten. But when it comes to lightkeepers people never seem to grow up. Whether inspired by great artists, pulp novels, or postage stamps, people persist in fancying lighthouses as idyllic and romantic settings.We all bring them with us, these notions, all the way from Regina, Montreal, Los Angeles, wherever. I did, even though I honestly can't remember absorbing them. My grandfather was a Prince Edward Island bluenose with a fair measure of saltwater in his veins, so I may have learned of them on his lap. I can still recall being mesmerized by the lighthouse stamped on the face E.B. Eddy's tissue dispenser in Regina's Roxy Theatre in the early fifties.Something seemed awesome and remote, and I may as well write it - romantic - in the curl of that stainless steel wave against Eddystone's tower. Little did I suspect that one wild, seasick night, thirty years and two thousand miles away I would find myself and my family headed for a lighthouse in the middle of nowhere, alone.Even those who go on the lights cling to the illusion long afte

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