She Lived Rent-Free on Her Own Private Island

[0:00]East Brother Light Station. This tiny remote island is home to one of the oldest continuously operating lighthouses in the greater San Francisco Bay. And for a little more than a year, this woman lived there. Completely rent-free. Sunflowers were here, my herbs and spices were here, my corn and squash. I really had like a full garden. In this video, we're heading to East Brother with Desiree Heveroh, who you might recognize from previous videos here on World of Nuance. We're going to explore the history of this little known Bay Area landmark, and hear how Desiree faced her greatest challenge while living there, surviving two months without power in near isolation.

[0:57]Now, in case you missed my first two videos about her, Desiree currently lives in two very unique places in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first is the SS Red Oak, a World War II victory ship that's docked at the Richmond Kaiser Shipyards. I got a phone call from my old board, the RMA, we need a shipkeeper. Would you be interested? I said on the Red Oak? They said, yeah. Hell yeah, I'd be interested. The second is the Hotel Mac, where she works as its manager and innkeeper. Tell me what that arrangement is like. So whenever my co-ship keeper, um, has vacation days or house sitting days or out of town days, we coordinate our schedule about one to two months ahead of time. So I know when I'm on duty, and then if not, I'm sleeping here at the hotel. Now, since posting those videos, she along with the Hotel Mac and Red Oak have received some extra attention. Hey Jonathan. Hey Desiree, I'm outside. Okay, I'll let you in. Okay, thanks. Hello! I'm outside. I know. How are you? Hey, nice to see ya. Hey, a lot of thanks. Look, now you have a bigger film crew. In fact, when we reconnected again, a German television crew happened to be filming their own documentary about her experience living on the Red Oak. You're planning for the the lighthouse. No. Yeah, the lighthouse, yeah. Yeah, we're shooting um basically the third part in her interesting life trilogy. Because that one's a little different, because I'm not there anymore, so it's more of a telling of what it was. Yeah. And not many people were out there, so I've got a lot of footage and whatnot. Located on a tiny rocky island where the San Francisco and San Pablo Bay's meet, East Brother Light Station was built in 1873. Its lighthouse and fog signal were built to serve as critical aids for ships navigating the straight's often swirling currents and choppy conditions. For nearly a century, innkeepers maintained the light station manually, but in the late 1960s, the US Coast Guard decided to automate the station and announced plans to demolish the lighthouse. Fortunately, community efforts stopped that from happening. In 1971, the station was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. And in the late 70s, a non-profit group was formed to restore its buildings following a decade of neglect and decline. Today, that same non-profit operates East Brother Light Station as a fully functioning bed and breakfast with five bedrooms for guests to choose from. At more than 150 years old, the light station continues to live on as a vital part of Bay Area maritime history.

[3:47]It's not hard to understand the depth of Desiree's love for East Brother when you learn about how much time she's dedicated to the place. For well over a decade, she played an active, involved role with preserving and promoting the light station. When did you become first introduced to it in the first place? I was driving back from San Rafael to Richmond. My daughter was very young, under 10 at the time. And she said there's a house out there. And I looked, and yeah, there was, out on the water on an island. This is the early 2000s, okay? So computers weren't quite what they are now, but you could still do searches, you know, AOL dial up and. So I, I typed in something like. House on an island in the water by the San Rafael Bridge. And then I had to keep reducing because there was too many words. And finally, I found the website, and it was a bed and breakfast. Over the following few years, Desiree simply admired the light station from afar before finally discovering through its website, a way she could contribute. I saw a section where you could sign up to be a volunteer. So I became a wiki. My first project was removing from around the window frames, the old grout and taking off the paint and refilling it and repainting it on the fog signal building on the left side window. And I worked on it all day, because I wanted it to be perfect. Around her second or third year as a volunteer wiki, Desiree found out that the light station was hiring someone part-time to help out with marketing. So without hesitation, she pitched her services to the board and earned a shot. Working on East Brother's marketing projects opened the door for Desiree to become even more closely involved in the inner workings of the light station. I would attend board meetings, uh to give updates and take suggestions and during one of the board meetings they were discussing that it was the annual renewal as boards do every year. And did anybody have any ideas about recruiting new board members? And I was like, I'd love to join if there's an open spot. And there was an enthusiastic yes and I joined the board and then I took on the gift shop and I took on the wiki volunteer list and I was taking on a lot of the work. Happily. Desiree's desire to help out as much as she could was motivated by one ambitious goal. I kept thinking, I'll learn every facet, I'll learn every angle of this, and I'll work my way up towards being innkeeper. But for a little more than a decade, the stars simply wouldn't align in her favor.

[6:55]Then came 2020. And like the rest of the world, the bed and breakfast was forced to shut down due to COVID. March passes, April passes, May. And we started all kind of collectively, I think, reading the writing on the wall about how long we might really be in this situation. The keepers weren't able to make any money because there were no guests and they moved on and there was not a plan for what to do for something like this. None of us were ready for COVID. Luckily for the light station, Desiree was able to step in and she moved in on July of that same year. I was able to like uproot and they even were like, you know, we don't know how long this is going to last. Don't give up your place, because it could just be two more months, three more months. But the place that I was living in was the back house. There were two houses on the lot. And it sold. So I got a check to buy me out of my tenancy and then the company I was working for closed because it was tourism and COVID. And I got a severance check and I got those checks the same week that I moved out to the light station. I got the light station in a way that no one else has and I was also taking care of financially and my confusion, I think, was for good reason. Because when it's fate, it does work out. Each step gets you closer, it does work out magically, the tapestry is woven so intricately that even what you thought you wanted and wished for all these over a decades, is nothing compared to how it was actually going to happen.

[9:59]Yeah, living out there is really great. So we love it a lot. It's nice and peaceful and quiet. Also with us that day was Tom Butt, the former mayor of Richmond. He also happens to be the president of the East Brother Light Station Foundation. I started the whole thing. Oh, wow. Okay. 1978. What are some of your earliest memories of, of that time? Well, we, we didn't know how we were going to do it. We just figured that we'd figure it out and we did. We were able to get a modest grant, we were able to get ultimately about 300 volunteers. We spent about a year rehabilitating it, and in 1980, we opened up the Bed and Breakfast. So we've been doing it ever since. This, love this. This is the a suicide knob for a wheel. I use this to steer the wheel, not the wheel. And you turn the car on. The car. Well, it is a Honda, too, just like yourself. The boat, the boat, just like my Honda, right? Um, then you would put her in reverse, back up into there. Straighter out.

[11:17]Whoa, hold your horses.

[11:24]Do you see her? Do you see her? Yeah, I do.

[11:46]I'm driving the stir.

[11:54]Put an eight on it. I will.

[11:58]Got it? I do. I'm just going to pull her in a little tighter. God, that felt good. It's been a minute.

[12:08]Oh, right, I'm tied. Wait, wait, wait. Swear to God, every time I picture that's going to be me. I'm going to be 80 and jumping up that ladder like Tom.

[12:25]All right.

[12:47]In total, Desiree wound up living on East Brother Light Station for more than a year. And for the majority of her stay as the island's caretaker, she really had it made. I got it so great. You know, I didn't miss the sunsets because I had to I had to clear the dining room table, I had to get the dishes started, I had to get the food put away, you know. I didn't miss any of it because I didn't have to do the job. I just got to be there.

[13:21]My God, it was so lucky. Want to see where we painted? Yay! I want to see how my place looks.

[13:36]Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Not bad, huh? Totally different. Oh, my rug's still there. I brought this chair out. I brought a lot of the the office stuff out. I brought a lot of stuff out here and just wanted it to live here. Oh, this is all I like the green. Yeah, yeah. This is how small my shower here was. And I used to put a tea kettle right here because this leaked and it was a slow leak. So in the morning my tea kettle would be full and I'd just go water plants with them. Okay. Um, one of the features that I loved most in the bedroom, um, you can see here, you would unlatch these and bring the window flap down and it would be just a beautiful. It's all good.

[14:23]A beautiful, like, breeze of fresh air just kind of coming in. I had plants hanging all over here and all along the the sill. This view is what I would wake up to in the morning. The house. I mean, I would literally be laying there and the house is what I would see when I would wake up. Would you just leave the window open and then just wake up? I would leave the front door open. Oh, yeah.

[14:50]That little section was my potato garden. Where the aloe vera plant is? Yeah, where the the those baskets, I had um types of potatoes, russet, gold, purple and red. And I had um garlic. This is my garden. Well, it was my garden. It looked different when it was mine, but. So what did you plant here? Is this where the broccoli was and other? Yeah, sunflowers were here. My herbs and spices were here, my corn and squash and beans were here. My lettuces, oh, there's a little hummingbird. Um, my lettuces, my broccoli, lavender, I had a Meyer lemon tree, Brussels sprouts, radishes, bell peppers, tomatoes. I, I really had like a full garden.

[15:43]So guests cannot come down here like this. Okay, but we're going to.

[15:58]So, in this area there's a dirty job and Fred does it. One of the, Hey sisters! Um, Fred does it. The, the waste has to be scooped into buckets and taken off the island. Um, I remember one at one point, he said, you're eating different. Although Desiree lived on the island alone, she wouldn't have been able to manage if not for the mentorship she received from Captain Jared Ward. An accomplished boat captain in the Bay Area who volunteered his expertise to help the light station while it was closed down during the pandemic. When he had a day off, we would spend about half an hour to an hour teaching me how to drive the boat. Out on the open water that's not hard to do. It's the detail stuff. It's the landing, parking. You know, that stuff's hard because imagine a car and you're trying to parallel park, which is a hard thing to do, right? But imagine water's moving that car in whatever direction it wants, and you have to really finesse things. I'm not the easiest person to teach. I tend to be overly certain of myself. And Jared's not a teacher. So there were a lot of moments where I would be throwing my hands up. You know, he's yelling, I'm crying, you know. This is this is too hard, but I would keep going and he would keep going and Jared would teach me if he was going to repair something or something happened. The first really big rainstorm, he said, all right, he texted me. He said, up and up and Adam real early, we've got some repairs to do. He didn't provide me any crutches, any training wheels, and that was hard. But again, and neither one of us knew, but I needed to know that stuff because what was coming was that the power was going to go out.

[18:14]In March 31st, 2021, nearly nine months into her stay, the power went out on East Brother light station. Failure from the 2,000 foot submarine cable that connects the lighthouse to the mainland was the main culprit. Dang. That's just come apart like that.

[18:34]So that's where it failed, huh? These are pieces of the cable that failed, that they had to cut out. Oh, wow. You can take a look on in there.

[18:46]So this was it. Yeah, you see some of where the damage. Yeah, that's an one an actual damaged part right there. Wow. Desiree would go on to spend the next two months living without power. This is Gentry, the 1930s Depression era generator that kept me alive for the two months that I had no power. Now, he didn't always work. Sometimes he broke down and I learned how to change out his starter and I could at a certain point, I could smell or even hear if something wasn't right with this generator. I became very attached to him. One time that tank was full of diesel fuel. And I was running him for my hour of power that I could get per day. And I came back in to turn him off, because the hour was up. I had charged my stuff, and the floor was wet. This whole floor was covered in diesel fuel, and I mean, these are covers and there's holes deep under here. Everything was filled with diesel. And I absolutely panicked. I don't have a lot of experience with diesel. I later learned that it's not as flammable as regular gasoline, but in my mind, if my phone rang or if I flipped on the light switch, this place was just going to go up and I did not want that to happen on my watch. So I spread all my flour, all my baking soda, all my powders to soak it up. And scooped it all up and put it in uh trash bags that I sealed and took out of the building and I meticulously cleaned everything. You see, I had time out here. I had all the time in the world for when these things came up to solve them. But if you can tell the difference, like I had to clean all of this part of it because the diesel had leaked. Do you see how clean that is still compared to this? Wow. A lot of cleaning. This freezer was the one freezer that I had the first month to kind of try to keep some things frozen. So when the generator would go, it would be on for an hour, which would give it a chance to freeze a bit. And I had these big tupperware's full of stock that were acting like blocks of ice. And then when I would run the generator, the ice machine would be on and I'd fill buckets up with the ice and put them in there. So it was a constant rotation of trying to keep this as cold as possible, so that it had some perishables. Right.

[21:29]Uh, and thank goodness, too, because two months is a really long time to go without perishables. Right? There's a lot of steps involved in not having power. More steps than one could really realize. Okay, let me give you an example.

[21:37]I was down to like 26% battery on my phone. My laptops were fine because I could plug those in when the generator was going. But when the generator didn't work, I couldn't plug anything in. And if I got down to zero and there was a real emergency, how could I call for help? Not only was conserving power for her electronics critical to Desiree's survival, it was also critical when it came to getting the word out about the plight of the light station. News outlets were calling left and right and I was taking all the calls. I felt like it was critical for me to spend that time with them on the phone. It was critical for me to translate the urgency of the situation on everyone, to touch every person's heart who called. Because maybe they know someone who can help. Tell me about what you remember from that time when the power went out. Well, fortunately, I guess there weren't any guests here, right? So it wasn't anybody. It wasn't anybody out here, but Desiree. So what's the big deal, you know, what does she need power for? At that point in time, we just needed to provide whatever power so that Desiree could stay out here and babysit this place until we opened up again. Did I I'm curious. Did I surprise you guys or make you proud at all of how I handled everything that came up here when I was here? Of course. I don't know how she did it. She just she just moved in, took over everything and kept it uh, kept everything operational until we opened up again. Do you think you would have been able to manage if you were in her shoes? I wouldn't have known. You could have done it. Not that you would, not that you wanted to or not, you could have done it. You're the most capable person I know. And, and he said that I wouldn't be able to to drive the boat, right? Yeah. How well did I do on that? You did it. She just she did it. Boat's still there. Boat didn't sink. A lot of people thought I was going to leave. Captain Jared even said, you know, I know you love this place, but you might really need to think about that you might have to leave. And just even more. I was even more resolute.

[28:57]I don't stress out as much about things and I don't try to control the outcome. There are moments where you have more faith than other moments. And usually when your life is going not as great, your faith is not as strong, right? Faith in whatever, whatever that means to you. My faith was always like this because my life was always like this. But I now fully free fall trust in the plan, in destiny, in fate. I watched it happen to me. Even for the naysayers, you can't dispute how it all fell into place, just like that. I couldn't have steered my direction to that at all. I had to just let it be what it was supposed to be. And now look where that has taken me. The ship, this hotel, the possible future. Well, who knows? I don't I don't care. I don't need to force it. I trust. It'll happen for me the way it's meant to. She is inside of me and I am inside of her, so no matter where I go, it's going to carry that magic with it.