There is a reason it is called the White Sea (or the Icy Sea). Winter lasts for about eight months up here, and for much of that time, the water is covered by ice and snow.
When the sea is open for navigation, the color of the White Sea, as in other seas, changes depending on the weather and the sky. But the sky here is austere and often completely colorless; the deep, cold water is opaque and for the most part has a characteristically grayish-blue tint. At sunset it resembles melted silver.
The water is so bitterly cold that White Sea sailors don’t bother with life jackets. If you are not pulled out of the sea immediately, you will not survive. Then again, there are no special lifeboat stations on the White Sea; those functions are performed by the lighthouses.
There are numerous islands in the White Sea. The ten or so situated along important shipping routes have lighthouses perched atop them. The lighthouse keepers are in constant contact with one another via radio, but they otherwise live solitary lives and never visit one another.
Take for example Pavel Petrovich Trofimov, a lighthouse keeper on Rombak Island. He has never been to the nearby island of Zhuzhmuy. What is more, if you don’t count his annual vacation and the short periods when workers from the lighthouse service stay on the island, the keeper of the Rombak lighthouse lives on his island completely alone. His predecessor, unlike Pavel Petrovich, lived here with his family. In 2005, he and his wife were found dead on the island, shot by a hunting rifle. Soon after, the lighthouse keeper’s job was offered to Pavel Petrovich. He accepted.
This was all we knew about life on Rombak when our group approached the island, enveloped in a mysterious fog. No one came out to greet us, which was rather strange, since, despite the fog, we could see the bright yellow building of the lighthouse on the hill right before us. All the island’s buildings were close, and surely we could be seen from above. On the other hand, we could see almost nothing but the shore. Having been warned that there could be dogs and that lighthouse keepers are generally an unpredictable sort, we didn’t hurry to go ashore. The island lay right before us, the sea was absolutely calm, and yet we waited.
After a while, we fired a shot from a signal pistol; it exploded the illusory atmosphere of tranquility. A large seagull let out a piercing cry, as if woken from a nightmare, and took wing from the water. But that was the end of it. In an instant, the bird disappeared into the fog, and the suspenseful stillness returned. After waiting a bit longer, we decided to go ashore.
As soon as we stepped on shore, a thin-faced, tanned, wiry man somewhere on the other side of 40 appeared out of the fog. He said that he had been busy on the other side of the island, then introduced himself, before asking us to explain who we were and what we were doing there. Satisfied, he quickly became amicable and agreed to talk to us.
In his abrupt and controlled gestures, in his rare but charming smiles, in the awkward way he invited us to tea, and in his attempts to be hospitable, there was the air of a real hermit. He was a true northern lighthouse keeper: independent and extremely austere, yet also open, a person whom you could ask anything of, though not quite everything. The one question I didn’t ask, and that wished I had, was why he lives alone, and whether he had ever married…
Can you tell me what happened to the previous lighthouse keeper?
I don’t know the conclusion of the expert commission, but we were told that he supposedly did it himself—I don’t know the details—that he shot his wife and then shot himself. Nobody knows why it happened here. And, by the way, this is not my first time here. Nine years ago I worked here as a technician, but I didn’t get along with the lighthouse keeper, so I decided to get out of harm’s way. We didn’t work well together, didn’t get along; all the same, you need to have a certain temperament here…
What kind of temperament?
What?
What sort of temperament does one need to have here?
In short, that of a lone wolf. You can’t be gazing and howling at the other shore, but must have everything you need in you and where you are. Over there, on the mainland, yes, there are some things you need from there, of course, but…
You mean people here need to be somewhat special?
Yes, of course. For example, would you be able to live here? Like this, without ever leaving?
Not me, that’s why I’m asking.
But I, on the other hand, can’t spend more than three days there [on the mainland], there’s too many problems there. There’s fewer here. You rub your eyes in the morning, and that’s it – you’re already at work.
And what’s next?
Well, that’s how the day starts – I come out, walk around, watch the lighthouse – turn it on, turn it off, check the lighthouse’s conditions, well everything, I have to do literally everything. If a rail falls off the fence, I have to nail it back on, it’s my job, I can’t step over it, I need to lift it, put it away… everything needs to be done around the house, right? For example, you live at home, you go to work, come back home, sweep a little something, clean, boil some potatoes, or cabbage soup, wash some clothes – it’s the same here, everything is just like at home, but then you also have your work, and everything’s right here…
And where does your home end?
The whole island is my home. Everything here is mine, everything. When I come out in the morning, I don’t know what I’m going to do. No, of course, I do have plans sometimes; suppose I need to do this and that urgently, I can’t put it off, because of the weather or something else. Today the weather is like this, and I try to do something outside, and if there is rain or, say, wind, then – there’s something inside, in the house, and sometimes in the repair shop. Like just now, I went to remove a board and got distracted by some other work, and so what – the board can wait, but I’ll do this now since the weather is cooperating. And then I was walking by here and I saw you. I look out and see a boat—what is this Flying Dutchman doing here? I didn’t even hear you pull in…
Rombak is situated in the White Sea, in the Onega Bay. It is one of the Kem skerries—a string of islands stretching from the White Sea port of Kem, in Karelia.
The island is a large, granite crag completely void of trees. The crag is knobby, with piles of stones spread about; it’s wet in places, and it’s difficult to walk quickly. What is more, you can’t see the ground clearly: the stones are covered by multicolored moss, berries, and other northern groundcover. From Rombak Island you can see the neighboring island, Little Rombak. In good weather, other islands are visible as well. It is eight miles from Rombak Island to the town of Kem, or the mainland (Bolshaya Zemlya, in Russian).
The island lies along the ancient route that stretches from Kem to the famous Solovetsky Islands (“Solovki”)— an archipelago famous for many aspects of its history and geography, as well as for being the home of famous stone labyrinths, monuments to a 4000-year-old megalithic culture. Little is known about the labyrinth’s builders, aside from the fact that they didn’t live on Solovki permanently, but would sail over from the continent, from the upper reaches of the Kem River. The ancient sailors hopped from island to island and surely did not bypass Rombak. The most convenient route of navigation from the Kem skerries passes by here; on contemporary sailing maps of the White Sea, it is called the Korabelny (“shipping”) or Poperechny (“crossing”) route. At Rombak, the complicated navigation between the islands ends, and there’s no land for many miles.
And the sea also belongs to you?
Yes, the sea is also mine. I went out, put out some nets, fed a fish to the cat, but while I was catching the fish, the cat caught himself a bird and made a mess somewhere around here, the feathers…
Yes, I saw. And the ships are also yours?
The ships… depends how you look at it… They don’t travel near me any longer; before, they passed right by here, but now they’ve changed their route a little, made it a bit more convenient, they’ve calculated it with modern equipment, but if they pass close by, they always signal me. And, if they can see me, I wave my hat at them.
Has a lot changed recently?
Not really, no, everything is generally the same, lighthouses are still lighthouses.
But now, in the era of GPS, there is no real need for lighthouses, don’t you think?
I think that, all this GPS, who knows for how long all these satellites are going to keep flying around, and if, for example, a war starts, they’ll turn all that stuff off. And then what? Turn on the lighthouses again, look for lighthouse keepers? Right? And explain to them, ask them, “Come back, we’ve turned everything off, we’ve got some problems in space.” Is that how to do it? No, lighthouses need to always be kept in working condition.
It was founded in 1903, on the precipice of the southernmost elevated point of Rombak Island. The light is 34 meters above sea level and is visible from 15 miles off, helping to determine the accuracy of a ship’s bearing en route to the Solovetsky Islands. Last year, new equipment was delivered for the beacon, but it was the wrong size. Now it’s stored next to the working lighthouse, still functioning fine with its old French lens.
The lighthouse building has been made suitable for habitation; there is a yellow, wooden house with a red roof, the northern point of which holds the tower and the beacon. In recent years, vinyl siding was added to the building, but its colors did not change, and the lighthouse keeper moved to live in the neighboring wooden cottage. When technicians and pilots come to the island, they stay in the lighthouse itself. There is also a sound-signal system on the island, a wind-power station, navigational signs, and several functional wooden buildings, the smallest of which once held a bell. In times of fog, the lighthouse keeper had to ring the bell every three minutes, and, if he received a return signal from a ship, the ringing had to become more frequent, almost non-stop. Fog on the White Sea can last for days.
Isn’t it scary here all alone?
What’s there to be scared of? The seven of you came here, and I don’t know how many are still in the boat, do you feel scared?
Well, a little scared, I guess.
And I am not scared. It’s scarier when there are seven of you, and everybody is worrying about each other. I am alone, I don’t have to be scared for anybody. That’s it. Only for myself.
You are saying that, if you were here with a family, it would be more difficult?
Well, yes, you have to think more, your own health doesn’t matter, but you worry about your loved ones. What if something really happens, even appendicitis, but nowadays it’s good that we have a cell phone connection; if something happens, one can call on the phone, they’ll send a helicopter or deliver something. But before, there was a time when we didn’t even have radio communication, I remember those times; it’s only later that we got radio transmitters. We go on the air every day to communicate with all the lighthouses and with the authorities. Oh, do you hear that signal? They are signaling to me, someone is going by. But when you approached, I didn’t hear, and I even feel bad that I somehow missed you. The island is big, you know, I can’t always watch every part of it… But really, such stillness is very rare. You might have been unable to pull in to the shore, would be circling the island, there would be wind even just seven or eight meters offshore, and you would be hard put to figure out where to pull in, where to leave the boat, you would have to pull it out of the water, couldn’t have left it on the water like that…
And do you sometimes feel bored here?
No, I never get bored, I always find something to do. I am not saying that I have to look for something to do, but, on the contrary, the day is too short to do everything. I never plan, but there’s always a pile of work, the day is not enough. One day, the boat needs to be fixed, or the nets untangled and put away, or they are lying around dirty, so you don’t put it off till tomorrow but get it done now. So, I come out, and that’s it, there’s always work to do. I walk along and see some tangled cable I’d forgotten about, and if I don’t straighten it out now, then what am I going to do when I really need it to pull the boat up in bad weather, for example? I am going to start untangling it then, right? The boat will be smashed up by then, so, no, let me untangle this cable today, even though I don’t need it today. So, I walk on the shore and check whether I left something loose, and, oh hell, yes, I did, and if the weather turns bad, it’ll all be washed away – so, I need to put it away. That’s how things are…
And what are you doing now?
Right now I am waiting for a ship, there’s food coming, some other stuff… They’re bringing it by GS [a hydrographic ship], and I need to receive it. I’ve been waiting for it for two weeks already, still no ship.
And in winter, do you have contact with the shore?
It depends on the winter, on the winds, the temperatures; the water doesn’t freeze every year, this winter it didn’t, so there was no contact; there’s no boats going by in the winter. In the spring, when the ice-breaker comes, navigation begins. And when it freezes, you can ride a snowmobile on it. But this year I never even started the snowmobile, so there was no way you could travel over there.
And does anybody come to visit you by way of the ice?
Sometimes wolves come. It happens.
Are you afraid?
Well, a wolf is afraid of a man, they stay away when they pass by, but you can see them. But this winter, a fox came over. I don’t know how it got here, maybe it drifted on the ice, so now it lives here with me.
And what kind of relationship do you have with it?
What kind of relationship… It doesn’t interfere with me, but my cat can’t stand having it around. My cat is very timid. I brought him here on a snowmobile when he was still a blind kitten, and he has never seen the mainland. That was such a stressful journey for him – the wind, the noise – so he doesn’t like noise now.
The emergence of navigation in Russia and everything associated with it is commonly linked to Peter the Great. This is not quite accurate, since the history of Russian navigation stretches into a more distant past: residents of the Russian North not only went to sea on fishing karbasses but settled the Arctic and were famous among northern European seafarers.
Recently, interest in this period of the country’s history has been on the rise, and there are seafaring enthusiasts who annually organize difficult archaeological expeditions along the country’s northern borders. The center for such activity is the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. Every summer, members of the Association of Northern Seafaring (Tovarishchestvo Severnovo Morekhodstva: solovki.info) travel from throughout Russia to work in the Solovetsky Oceanic Museum (museum.solovki.info). The museum is just two years old, but is one of the most original museums in the country, founded by individuals and located directly on the docks, in an old storehouse once used for renovating rowboats. The museum offers a wealth of information on active lighthouses and on boatbuilding using ancient techniques. According to the museum, in ancient times coastal bonfires performed the function of modern lighthouses, as navigation of the Baltic Sea also predated Peter the Great.
The first Russian lighthouse is thought to have been built on Kopu (in present-day Estonia), at the beginning of the 16th century. Still, Peter the Great started extensive lighthouse construction in the Baltic and in the North. There was also a lighthouse built in the South, in the Sea of Azov.
For a long time, private individuals could also build and maintain lighthouses. This led to numerous problems. Since lighthouse fires were of wood or coal, they looked exactly like regular fires, and thus, by lighting a false fire, one could easily cause a shipwreck. In the beginning of the 19th century, all lighthouses became the purview of the government. At the same time, stone lighthouses began to replace wooden ones, and the system of beacon-lights with reflectors was introduced.
There are some 350 lighthouses in Russia today. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, many Baltic and Black Sea lighthouses are now owned by the newly independent states. Besides lighthouses in the North of Russia, there are many in the Far East. However, the number of operating lighthouses is on the decline since their international significance is waning, and there are plans to abolish many of them. For instance, some want to decommission the famous Solovetsky lighthouse, situated in the island’s Cathedral of the Ascension. The lighthouse’s beacon had already been abandoned as a navigational bearing, but the monks continued to maintain the lighthouse in working condition and succeeded in proving its value, after which authorities returned it to official status. New equipment was delivered, along with solar panels; but the modern electrical equipment turned out to be too powerful for the ancient lighthouse structure, and so, for a full navigation season, the lighthouse stood idle, awaiting the necessary cable. In the summer of 2009, the lighthouse was finally back in operation.
The phenomenon of the deserted lighthouse causes another problem. In places where there is no other power source, lighthouses draw their power from radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which are in effect small nuclear power plants, powered by highly-radioactive strontium cores. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, RTGs are classified as a first class danger. More than 1000 RTGs were manufactured during the Soviet era, and many have reached the effective end of their working life. In the last two decades, there have been incidents where RTGs have been vandalized or stolen, with the expected environmental and human costs. More recently, international programs have been begun to replace RTGs with solar batteries. Still, traveling to a northern lighthouse can be a risky venture; the traveler is advised to take along a dosimeter.
And does this island suit you? Do you ever think about other islands? Would you, for example, up and exchange this island for a better one?
Somehow this island I… I’ve known it since my childhood. I have lived around here on the shore all my life and often went to Solovki as a boy. I just used to go there for a day, there and back, I would go there, run around and… I had family there, an aunt and uncle… I would go there, show myself and leave… And I always passed this island on the old route, and it has always been right here and always seemed interesting to me – how do they live, what do they do… I’d see the boats pulled up on the shore, see them walking around, wondered what they did here and always dreamed of coming here, just to take a look. I never thought about any job, I was just thinking as a kid – how can I get here, who are these people?
The lighthouse keeper during those days was this Chichenin, and I really wanted to get a look at him – what’s he like – I thought I’d see him, look him over, and everything would become clear. But he was the same as everyone else, it’s all the same here like everywhere. And then many years passed, and fate brought me here. And I’ve never thought about any other islands, though I was offered many times, there were other vacancies, but I didn’t…, to have a look maybe – yes, that would be interesting, I haven’t been to any other lighthouse, even to these closest ones, and I would like to have a look at their lives, what they are doing over there, I should go take a look. But this is not my first time here, you see. That time we didn’t hit it off, and I left, and it turned out I only lived on the shore for a short time, and they all died out here. And everybody used to say to me, “you see, if you had stuck it out then and hadn’t left, you would have stayed on the island without a break,” and when this emergency happened, and they offered me the job again, I immediately, without giving it another thought, accepted…
And do you have anything to defend yourself with here?
What do you mean?
Do you have a rifle?
No, that’s not stipulated. Against the rules. Defend myself from whom? From mosquitoes?
Well, you never know who might pull up to the shore.
Well, it’s actually a prohibited zone, and it’s not allowed to pull up here; only with permission from the lighthouse authority.
But you’re the only one who can send them away.
Well, I would first ask nicely, and if they don’t understand, I have a phone and I can inform someone on the shore who would do something about it. Yes, it’s happened before… And I had to apply force; they don’t understand “not allowed” around here. And other times, they are so polite, they come, they ask for some water, and sometimes, if something breaks, they ask, “could we please pull in, stay for a while,” and, of course, I let them. But others come and begin, “who are you” and stuff like that. They see that I am all alone here, and they start demanding something. But I am not afraid of you, since you don’t even know what I have, right? Yes? You just asked me if I had something to defend myself with, but maybe I lied to you. How would you know? You come and you don’t know anything, but I am protected. Why would I be afraid?
And aren’t you afraid of yourself?
And why would I be afraid of myself?
Well, you are always alone with yourself, the same landscape, sunrise-lighthouse-sunset, sunrise-lighthouse-sunset, one could go mad here all alone. Aren’t you scared?
They often ask me about this, and I never know what to say, how to explain. No, I’m not scared.
As we were sailing away, the fog had lifted, it was evening, and not far from the shore we saw a large ship, from which a small boat separated and started moving in the direction of Rombak. It turned out to be the very supplies Pavel Petrovich had been expecting for so long. We didn’t hear the words with which he greeted the new arrivals, though from the sea we witnessed one of the most life-affirming scenes I have ever seen.
There was the lonely figure of the lighthouse keeper on the empty island; he was holding his hand to his forehead, peering intently into the distance. And then, having noticed the boat, he shows it where to pull in; fanning off the mosquitoes and clomping along the pier, he hurries to meet the approaching boat. And then finally, in the rays of the evening sun, a dozen sailors, with Pavel Petrovich rushing about between them, are amicably unloading large white objects onto the shore.
We argued about what they might be, but couldn’t agree. In the evening sun, the most plausible story seemed to be that they were humongous chunks of white sugar, and, really, how else could one entertain oneself during the long winter evenings? Later, we were told that those were just mundane ration boxes; each box contained a specific portion of essential provisions and items. We were also told that the delay in delivery was due to excessive drinking by the person responsible for the delivery. RL
KEM: First noted in the historical record in the 14th century, the Kem settlement fell under the control of the Solovetsky Islands in 1450. In the 1930s, the roles were reversed, when the town became the locale from which the Solovetsky gulag (Soviet Russia’s first political slave labor camp) was administered.
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