Every year, a couple hundred thousand Coppertone-smeared visitors board the Island Express Ferry at the end of the road on Harkers Island. Their journey across Back Sound and past the grazing horses of Shackleford Banks culminates in the shadow of Cape Lookout’s reigning queen, the Diamond Lady. As flip-flops and tennis shoes hit the dock, visitors step back in time to a sacred place that’s more than the sum of its picturesque parts. Some do a double take as a tall gentleman in head-to-toe 1880s U.S. Lighthouse Service regalia moseys down the dock, tipping his hat in welcome.

It’s a natural role for Heber Guthrie. The National Park Service volunteer is the great-grandson of a lighthouse keeper, descended from residents of Shackleford Banks’ Diamond City. He was raised in a legendary Core Sound boatbuilding family whose ancestors were whalers and commercial fishermen. He’s the embodiment of Down East Carteret County. “I was born and raised on Harkers Island, married my high school sweetheart, and moved ‘off.’ We moved way, way off — about seven miles is about as far as I got,” he says with a chuckle.

In 2019, Guthrie took a job on Cape Lookout, shuttling tourists from the ferry landing to the beach on the island’s southern point. “My shuttle route passed right behind the lighthouse,” he says in his Down East brogue. “I’d go by it 20 times a day, and I got real interested in the construction. I wanted to know how in the world they built it.”

At almost 70 years old, the summer job meant to keep him busy ignited a new interest in a part of his heritage that he’d taken for granted. He began studying the beacon’s architecture — its brick formation, window placement, double-walled construction, and distinctive paint pattern. He committed every statistic to memory, learned about the structure’s history and its keepers, and dug up local myths and legends not found in history books.

While waiting for his ferry one day after work, Guthrie was chatting with a park volunteer. “Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody over here had a lighthouse keeper uniform on? Think about it. It’d be like it was the 1880s. That would be neat,” Guthrie said before hurrying off to catch his ride to Harkers Island. After crossing, he stopped in at the main park office and asked if they had a keeper’s uniform lying around. Lo and behold, there in the vault was a replica. Guthrie removed it from the garment bag and tried it on. He secured the eight brass buttons on the navy jacket, adjusted the thin tie, and pulled the hat snugly down. The uniform was just his size. He signed it out that day.

Now, it has become a part of Guthrie’s identity. Two years after he first slipped on the embroidered jacket, he’s taken his show on the road, visiting schools and giving presentations to local civic groups about Cape Lookout. He volunteers to lead programs for the National Park Service and is a valuable resource for the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center. Occasionally, he’ll even wear the uniform to church on Sunday. But it’s the school groups visiting the lighthouse that Guthrie loves the most.

He addresses them on the same spit of sand where his grandmother went to school, sharing his knowledge with groups of kids from all over the country. But the stakes are higher when local kids visit. He wants to be a bridge across generations, helping instill pride in Down East traditions and in the place they call home.

“I wish I’d paid attention to the older generation when I was young,” Guthrie says. “I want our local kids to know how important that lighthouse is. I want them to understand what a hard job it was to be a keeper. I want them to have pride in that story and understand it is part of who they are.”