The once-cheery white paint on Michipicoten Island lighthouse’s flying buttresses is peeling. The doors and ceilings of the 80-year-old lightkeeper’s house sag.

Michipicoten Island’s compact cluster of eroding buildings isn’t alone. Late last May, the federal government of Canada quietly declared the still-active beacon “surplus” along with nearly 1,000 of its maritime brethren across the country.

The announcement came packaged with the new Heritage Lighthouse Protection Act—legislation “to conserve and protect heritage lighthouses” that elected officials, the Heritage Canada Foundation (HCF) and various other groups across Canada worked for over a decade to enact.

“This move undermines the intent of the Act, leaving the door open to the lighthouses’ abandonment and demolition by neglect,” says HCF spokesperson Carolyn Quinn.

The Act establishes a process to select and designate federally owned lighthouses for heritage status, requiring their maintenance by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). However, it excludes surplus ones— which, not incidentally, now constitute 96 percent of all major light stations—from being designated. Unless, that is, community groups or private individuals commit to buy them and take responsibility for their upkeep.

Surplus lighthouses will be on the auction block for two years—until May 29, 2012. Interested parties must apply to Parks Canada for heritage designation and present a business plan to prove they can manage such a site. Ac- tual navigation aids would remain the property of, and continue to be maintained by, the Coast Guard. Preference is being shown to non-private buyers—community conservation groups, not-for-profits and municipalities—for whom the price is just $1.

“We’re trying to do good things,” says DFO Senior Divestiture Analyst Andrew Anderson.“We’re very sensitive to the fact that these [lights] are of enormous value for heritage purposes.” Anderson continues that the sale of lights isn’t new, “We’ve been doing this for 10 or 15 years.”

Only now the clock is ticking. After the divestiture period, those lights that remain unsold will face an uncertain future.

My Canada includes lighthouses

“It’s difficult to speculate what would happen to unsold surplus lighthouses,” says DFO spokesperson Nelson Kalil.

Kalil says that maintaining the 480 still-active—and 490 inactive—surplus lighthouses is beyond the budget and mandate of the Coast Guard. He emphasizes it is the lights, not the structures themselves, which are essential. “They can be replaced with simpler structures whose operation and maintenance would be more cost-effective.”

The view is every bit as unique and spectacular as the viewpoint.

I am standing 20 feet above Lake Superior with arms outstretched to steady myself. My form fills the dark, rectangular defile cut into the rock face of South McKellar Island.

Like me, the men who carved this mine adit—a horizontal tunnel burrowing roughly 450 feet into the heart of this tiny outcrop—were on a fervent search. Where they sought silver nearly 130 years ago, I am looking for a healing peace. To me, the true treasure here is the lake itself, as gentle this day as an outsized millpond.

Below my feet, our three kayaks are lashed to a giant iron staple driven into the rock. Looking landward toward Pie Island, the view is of stunning headlands, sheer cliff faces and rugged shores cloaked in spruce. In an exchange of roles, the lake seems to have switched with the land as a place of refuge. Sky and water ap- pear interchangeable. It is a peace-giving place, and that is precisely why I am here.

I slammed the door last summer on a 29-year career as a special education teacher serving deaf and hard-of-hearing students, terminally fed up with administrative bureaucracy.

A mutual passion for paddling has connected me with some amazing individuals over the years. On this two-week trip from Pigeon River to the tiny hamlet of Rossport, Ontario, I travel with a lifelong speleologist. We poke our bows and noses into every rock fissure, mineshaft and sea cave.

Stillness of the Paddle

Keep your senses open and your ego in a box and you have quite a lot to learn from the company you keep out here. What you see on the surface is rarely all there is. This is as true of the wilderness as it is of the people passing through it.

We are blessed with another ethereal calm on the morning we make the 10-kilometer crossing from Pie Island to Thunder Cape through the heart of a busy shipping channel. The huge lake freighters steaming in and out of Thunder Bay will not even see a kayak, much less adjust course for one.

No one speaks as we paddle. We are all keenly alert for ship traffic, but there is so much more to this stillness. Gulls, cormorants and calling loons are the only witnesses to our passage. I will remember this fine morning as one of the most peaceful I have ever experienced kayaking.

I am a bit past middle age right now. There are certainly many other waters to explore. However, in the time I have left to paddle, it is my choice to travel deep rather than travel broad. The peace I find kayaking on Lake Superior is a gift that can be shared only between intimates.

Tim McDonnell lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is busy savoring retirement and dreaming of his next Lake Superior kayak trip.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

I was conceived in a tarpaper shack. It had a door handle of silver-polished driftwood scavenged from the neighboring beach, and a chicken wire window through which carried the sound of waves gently lapping or violently thrashing three-billion-year-old volcanic greenstone.

My parents never set foot in this rustic hut. I’m not referring to the conception of the large-lunged, platinum-haired infant they named Virginia and raised in a semi-rural colonial. Rather, it is my adult identity—a sea kayaker by passion and trade—that was born here.

Few people can pinpoint the protozoan moment they became the essence of who they really are. Identify the choices that defined the course the rest of their lives would take. I can.

For me, it was during one of those golden, bewitchingly long summer days just after solstice on Lake Superior, when shadows seem to stretch to the horizon and the lumpy hills turn softly purple.

I arrived on the lake eager and impressionable, a week out of college and sopping-wet-behind-the-ears—even more so after a first day initiation in the surf.

I had an extra large mesh duffle containing my worldly possessions, a Rubbermaid full of books and an invitation to work as an assistant kayak guide.

My Evolving Kayak Identity

For the next four months, I divided my time between the shack known to my co-workers as the Taudis des Souris (not without good reason, I soon discovered), my no-longer-new-smelling tent and the cockpit of a kayak. At season’s end, I was a sea kayaker.

Even more than the incredible tripping and surfing or adjective defying landscape, the other kayakers with whom I shared those blissfully isolated, uncomplicated months defined me. From them, I learned to be master of my craft, confident on open water and in avalanching waves. I discovered how to live simply and comfortably out of 130 liters of plastic for weeks at a stretch. I listened to remarkable stories that would eventually lead me to my own thrilling adventures. I fell in love and shared the shack with more than just mice.