A singular lighthouse and its unique keeper are celebrating a milestone.
Boston Light, the US’ first and oldest lighthouse station, turns 300 on Wednesday next week. Sally Snowman, the US Coast Guard’s last resident keeper, is helping with celebrations.
Events are planned for downtown Boston’s waterfront and other parts of mainland Massachusetts. The lighthouse’s beam — visible for 43.5km — is even to be ceremonially relighted at sunset.
Photo: AP
“How many things established 300 years ago are still functioning as they were intended to be?” Snowman said to a reporter making a recent visit. “It was a major aid to navigation in 1716, and that’s exactly what it’s doing today. For me, that’s mind-boggling.”
The 65-year-old former college instructor has been keeper for 13 years and is the light’s first female keeper.
The coast guard has phased out resident keepers at all light stations save for Boston Light, because US Congress in 1989 mandated the coast guard specifically staff and keep the light public in perpetuity.
Snowman, dressed in the colonial dress and bonnet she wears on lighthouse tours, said she loves the solitude her job often affords.
“Island living is something that suits my personality,” she said. “I’m an introvert by nature, and I’ve always been able to entertain myself. It’s no problem to just leave me here. Just airdrop my food, and I can stay here forever.”
Snowman and her husband, James Thomson, a volunteer assistant keeper, live on Little Brewster Island from April to October, with a rotating cast of volunteers, some of whom also spend nights on the island, which is about 15km from downtown Boston.
Boston Light has been a central part of Snowman’s life.
The Weymouth, Massachusetts, resident, who holds two doctorates and taught at Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, started volunteering at the lighthouse more than 20 years ago and became a paid civilian employee in 2004.
She and Thomson married on the island in 1994 and have written three books about the lighthouse.
A spiritual person who drums, chants and meditates on the island, Snowman said she often senses spirits and other ghostlike presences.
It is not surprising, since Boston Light’s first two keepers drowned and many more perished in nearby shipwrecks over the years, she said.
Snowman also believes she was a keeper in a past life.
“The first time I went up there, I just felt like I had done it a thousand times before. There was just something intuitive about it,” she said of the lighthouse tower, which was built by the British, destroyed by them during the Revolutionary War and rebuilt by the US in 1783.
Time on the island is roughly divided between busy tour days and quieter weekdays.
Friday through Sunday, guided tours swell the roughly 1.2 hectare island’s population.
More than 200 people visit or work there on a given summer weekend, Snowman said.
Monday to Thursday, Snowman and a pair of volunteers typically do routine cleaning and maintenance in the 27m lighthouse tower, as well as the keeper’s residence, fog signal building, cistern building and boathouse.
“We’re in a marine environment, so we need to keep on top of things,” Snowman said.
However, even with the regular routine, it is easy to slip into island time, she added.
“Everything is done just a little bit slower. If it’s really hot in the middle of the day, we take a siesta. We work earlier in the day or work later into the evening,” Snowman said. “We don’t have the hum of the mainland, the cars and the noise level of humanity. What we have is the wind and the sea and seagulls.”
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the