His family looked after Cape Spear's lighthouse for 150 years. Now, he's beaming its history to the masses

Gerry Cantwell looks out, as he did for the bulk of his life, on a wall of fog.

It's a band of thick white at lunchtime on a Thursday in June, waxing and waning along the rocky Newfoundland coast, obscuring the deep blue beyond.

For decades, that fog was both his livelihood, and — as he readily admits — his nemesis.

Cantwell tended to the Cape Spear lighthouse, the easternmost of its kind in North America, from 1969 until it was automated in 1997. The 78-year-old was the last in a long familial line of stewards of the old lighthouse, now a national historic site visited by 300,000 people every year and perched at the intersection of the continent and the Atlantic Ocean.

But in spite of the relentless fog always seeming to haunt the Cape Spear coastline, this summer marks something novel for Cantwell.

For the first time, Parks Canada will memorialize his family's legacy.

The agency is in the midst of a project documenting the history of the historic structure and the people who took care of it. Cantwell and his siblings are heavily involved, and will have recordings of their interviews spread throughout the landscape this summer, in honour of the 50th anniversary of Parks Canada's stewardship of the site.

"I'd like to see it before I close my eyes," Cantwell says from the base of the lighthouse, steps away from where he lived most of his life.

Cantwell's ancestors became the lighthouse's keepers in 1846, just 10 years after it was built. The job was passed down through the generations, their stewardship lasting 151 years.

Those seven generations were raised inside the old red-and-white lighthouse itself until Cantwell's parents moved into a small house just beside it. That house is now the Cape Spear Cafe, where tourists unknowingly eat clam chowder right where Cantwell and his siblings used to open their Christmas presents. 

"Our family still speaks about this as being home," he said. "The fog alarm, and the radio building, this house, that house — everything was ours."

Cantwell took over the job as keeper from his father, despite urging from his parents to branch out and do something else.

The pay lured him in, he said.

"I didn't expect it to last that long.... It was money to start for me," he said, laughing.

 "[I didn't know] it would cost me 30 years of my life. But I enjoyed every moment of it."

The Cantwell family bore witness to over a century of coastal history, living through drownings along the unforgiving shore and even nearby attacks by German submarines during the Second World War. 

"We're incredibly lucky to be one of the few Parks Canada sites that actually has people who lived and worked here who can tell us their stories," said Pascale Gerdun, the site's acting visitor experience manager.

This summer's anniversary project, she adds, will include crank-operated speakers so visitors can hear recordings of Cantwell and his siblings recounting life at Cape Spear through the decades.

He has an abundance of stories to tell.

Cantwell became the lighthouse keeper in 1969, just six years before Parks Canada took over the site's care and maintenance. That wasn't the only thing that changed in that era: what was once a relatively active profession suddenly shifted in the 1970s, he said, with the introduction of electricity.

Cantwell recalls his father lamenting that the newly powered beacon marked the beginning of the end for the lighthouse era.

But even the electric light, he points out, couldn't stop the pesky fog. He'd still have to run down the craggy point to start the horn every time that wall of white rolled in — and run back down to stop it when the fog rolled out, rain or shine, several times a day.

"That," he said, "was a normal state of affairs."

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