a.k.a. V.J.

Sometimes, when I’m within sight of Lake Ontario in Oswego, the thought occurs to me that I’m sitting at the edge of America; at least the land portion of America. Somewhere, out there in the middle of the lake, is the border with Canada. The Great White North is a close neighbor, but it’s still an abstraction, lying beyond visual range across a great inland sea.

At Tibbetts Point in Cape Vincent, N.Y., the feeling of having reached the edge of the country is much more palpable. Canada, in the form of Wolfe Island, is right there in front of your face.

Cape Vincent is where Lake Ontario and the great St. Lawrence River meet. As such, the Tibbetts Point Lighthouse has been a vital navigation aid for the considerable ship traffic along the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway.

We visited the lighthouse in June. I had been to the Thousand Islands region, many times but I believe this was my first trip to Cape Vincent. Like many of the communities along the St. Lawrence, it’s quite charming and a summer tourism hotspot for fishing and boating. Tibbets Point is outside of the main part of town, at the end of a long, narrow road.

As is the case with a number of lighthouses we have visited, Tibbetts Point has a small museum/gift shop with some artifacts and memorabilia related to the specific site and the history of Great Lakes lighthouses in general. I always come away from those places with romantic notions about how great it would have been to live the lifestyle of a 19th-century lighthouse keeper…then I remind myself that as idyllic as these lakeside locations are during summer, spending a long dark Upstate winter in a cold, isolated, storm-wracked lighthouse was probably the stuff that psychological horror movies are made of.

That said, our trip to Tibbetts Point was lovely. We didn’t cross over to visit our Canadian neighbors, but we were close enough to wave at them. It was a good reminder that we are lucky to live in a part of the world where seeing another country involves just a day trip.