Donald Vollenweider was not born beside the sea, but he carried its pull inside him from an early age. He grew up in a modest neighborhood outside Trenton, New Jersey, the kind of place where the sky always seemed heavy with factory haze and the hum of freight trains was the soundtrack of life. His father, a quiet machinist, taught him precision. His mother, a school librarian, taught him patience. Together they raised a boy who built model ships from balsa wood and spent hours staring at the patterns of rain on the window. “I always liked things that lasted,” he once said. “Things that didn’t need to be plugged in to work.”
When Donald was nine, his family took a rare summer trip to the Jersey Shore. They stayed in a creaky rental cottage that smelled of salt and sunscreen. On the third day, during a walk at dusk, he saw the faint beam of the Whitestone Lighthouse cutting through the haze miles away. He stood frozen on the boardwalk, transfixed by that pulse of light. His father had to call his name twice before he moved. “It looked alive,” Donald recalled years later. “Like something breathing for all of us.” That night, he promised himself he’d visit it again.
But life, as it does, took him inland. He studied mechanical engineering at Rutgers, married young, and built a career designing ventilation systems for hospitals and office towers. It was practical work, steady and respectable, but it left him hollow. “I was good at keeping air moving,” he said, “but I wasn’t keeping much else alive.” After his divorce and a company downsizing in his late forties, he found himself adrift. It was around that time he saw a newspaper article about the Whitestone Lighthouse restoration project, looking for volunteers. The name alone hit him like a wave. He drove down the coast that weekend and signed up on the spot.
The lighthouse was in bad shape. Paint peeled from the tower walls, pigeons nested in the stairwell, and the lantern room’s glass was clouded with salt and dust. But to Donald, it was perfect. “It wasn’t broken,” he said. “It was just waiting for someone to care again.” He threw himself into the work with the same focus he once gave to blueprints and deadlines. Mornings began with the groan of gulls and the rhythm of the tide. He carried buckets of rainwater up the spiral stairs, polished the lantern glass until it caught the sunrise, and logged each task with quiet pride.
“The light still turns,” he would mutter to himself, “because a good light doesn’t ask if anyone’s watching.” That became his way of understanding the world: purpose without audience. In the evenings, he’d read in the lantern room by the faint hum of the rotating lens—Melville, Conrad, and old maritime journals filled with stories of people who’d lived harder, lonelier lives but still showed up each day for the sea.
He grew obsessed with their histories. Ida Lewis of Lime Rock, rowing into storms to save stranded sailors. Captain Joshua James, who led rescues into the surf at sixty years old. Robert Louis Stevenson’s family, who built lighthouses on cliffs no sane man would climb. Donald loved them not for their heroism but for their endurance. “They weren’t chasing glory,” he told visitors. “They were chasing clarity. Someone had to keep the light, and they did.”
Still, he saw the melancholy beneath the romance. “Automation took the keepers first,” he told a local reporter. “Then tourism took their ghosts.” The Coast Guard had replaced human watchmen with solar panels and sensors. Lighthouses had become photo ops for road-trippers. “There used to be a heartbeat here,” he’d say, resting his hand on the cold brass fittings. “Now it’s a monument to when people still looked outward instead of down at a screen.”
But he never resented the change. He respected the pragmatism of it, just as he respected the pragmatism of the old keepers. “Most of them went half-crazy,” he admitted. “It was lonely work. The isolation was the tax they paid to keep others safe.” When storms hit, he worked by instinct—securing shutters, draining sumps, bracing for the surge. “The ocean doesn’t care about nostalgia,” he’d tell younger volunteers. “You work or you drown.”
Over time, he became the heart of Whitestone. He started keeping a weather log that no one asked for, writing notes about wind, tide, and cloud cover in small, careful handwriting. He repaired the hinges, cataloged ship sightings, and taught newcomers how to polish the lens correctly—always in slow circles, never straight lines. “You don’t keep the light for yourself,” he told them. “You keep it so someone you’ll never meet finds their way.” Most smiled politely before returning to their phones, but he didn’t take offense. “Maybe every generation lets go of something sacred,” he mused. “For us, it’s the patience to wait in the dark.”
By his third summer, the tower gleamed. The museum board offered him a stipend to stay on as caretaker. He declined the money but stayed anyway. He began writing essays about forgotten keepers, sending them to small maritime journals. A few printed them, though often only a paragraph or two. Each one ended the same way: The sea never stops moving, so neither should the light.
In the end, Donald became what he had admired all along—a man who tended something larger than himself. When the lamp flickered on each evening and the beam swept across the dark Atlantic, he would stand on the gallery rail, hat in hand, salt wind in his hair. Sometimes, he thought of that boy on the boardwalk, watching a distant beacon cut through the night, and smiled.
“I guess,” he’d whisper to no one in particular, “the light’s still worth keeping.”