The historic East Brother Light Station, a fixture off the coast of Richmond, Calif. that was first lit in 1874, shines in the morning light. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)
Ever since she can remember, Desiree Heveroh wanted to be a lighthouse keeper on the East Brother Light Station, a three quarter-acre speck of an island in the San Francisco Bay. After applying three times, the Richmond resident finally got her wish in 2020, when Covid shut down the island’s public bed-and-breakfast, and she was called in for maintenance and warding off marine squatters.
Heveroh took a boat out to meet her fellow keeper, a sea captain, and settled into a small Victorian abode with unbeatable 360-degree views. That’s when the power went out.
“The submarine cable failed, and we were literally stranded on the island. There was a boat on a hoist, but that only works when you have power,” she recalls. The sea captain eventually had to leave for work elsewhere. “He strapped his dog to his chest, pushed a kayak off the island and paddled himself to the mainland. And then it was just me.”
For the next two months, Heveroh lived her own version of Tom Hanks’ “Cast Away” – although replace Wilson the Volleyball with a helpful raven she named Edgar Allen. She couldn’t shower more than once a week, due to no water pressure, and she canned her own food because freezers weren’t operational. It was rough living like it was the 1800s, but she made the best of the rent-free situation.
“I grew a garden. I trained a raven. I had a baby duckling. I learned a language. All the things you say you’re going to do, I did,” Heveroh says. “I didn’t look at clocks or calendars, and it was as glorious as it sounds.”
It takes many — sometimes odd — factors to become a lighthouse keeper. First, you need a lighthouse. In the Bay there are plenty. The surge of marine traffic following the 1850s Gold Rush saw them built everywhere from deadly open-ocean waters to rocky coastal cliffs and inside the sheltered Bay, where several lighthouses continue to aid navigators.
East Brother Light Station was built in 1874, after crews blasted the top off an island north of what’s now the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It was the home of many lighthouse keepers and their families, who averted ship collisions and groundings with a foghorn and a beaming, beehive-shaped Fresnel lens. The U.S. Coast Guard automated the station in 1969, and in 1980 – thanks to heroic efforts from preservationists – it reopened as a charming inn where anybody can stay for a one-of-a-kind vacation. (You just can’t shower, if you’re only staying a night.)
The inn has five rooms with old-timey beds, nautical art and a grand dining table where guests eat gourmet meals cooked by the innkeepers, who generally serve in pairs for two-year shifts. Guests swap world-traveling tales in the parlor before bedtime, and the next morning, ring the station’s 1930s diaphone fog horn, which shakes the entire island with a sound between a roar and a surprised grunt. Then they return to the mainland, leaving behind what are jokingly referred to as the island’s “cellmates” – the lightkeepers.
Hundreds of keepers have served at dozens of Northern California lighthouses, all built for a variety of reasons but mainly because something awful happened there. Mile Rocks Lighthouse, southwest of the Golden Gate Bridge, was erected in 1906 after a passenger steamship, the City of Rio de Janeiro, struck a submerged reef. Roughly 130 people drowned and bodies (including that of the captain, identified by a watch chain around his rib cage) washed up near Fort Point for years.
Point Bonita Lighthouse in the Marin Headlands went up in 1855 on a small promontory that’s claimed at least 10 ships – that’s among more than 300 vessels that wrecked or ran aground near the Golden Gate during the Gold Rush – including the S.S. Tennessee, whose skeletal remnants can still be seen at low tide. Pigeon Point Lighthouse near Pescadero owes its name to the clipper Carrier Pigeon, which tore apart on the ocean’s rocky bottom in 1853. The ship that came out to save her ran aground.
In 1898, San Francisco became the first city in America to deploy a lightship, a vessel that stayed anchored in place outside the Golden Gate and acted as a floating lighthouse. Lightships were used in California into the 1970s, sometimes with “submarine bells” dangling 30 feet below, ringing constantly and annoying the fish, on the theory that distant ships could sense and navigate from the sound. Lightships were constantly getting rammed by other boats, and the U.S. Coast Guard eventually replaced them with humongous automated buoys.
East Brother wasn’t built so much to warn of dangers in the water, but for navigation for local shipyards and up and down the Sacramento River.
“Back then, they didn’t have radios, radars, any of that stuff,” says Tom Butt, the former mayor of Richmond who helped restore the light station into an inn. “When ships were moving at night, the only thing they had to go by was lighthouses. They could identify each lighthouse because the rotation of the lights were all distinctive, and could plot their course by going from lighthouse to lighthouse.”
Early lightkeepers were known as “wickies” due to all the work they did on the lard oil-powered (later kerosene) lamps. They refilled the oil canisters, trimmed the wicks to keep smoke from darkening the lenses and wiped sea scum from the lighthouse windows. They painted and repainted everything, cleaned mountains of guano from the buildings and kicked dead fish that washed up back into the ocean.
At some lighthouses in deeper seas, the keepers tied ropes around themselves to keep from being swept into the abyss. (Up in Humboldt County, there’s evidence of a 150-foot-tall rogue wave striking a lighthouse.) In the open Pacific, there are no such protections. One man trying to reach his lighthouse by boat was battered so badly by waves, he simply died a few days later.
And keepers dealt with a constant ringing in the ears, thanks to the foghorns. Dennis Powers writes in his 2007 book, “Sentinel of the Seas,” which chronicles life on the St. George Reef Light near the California/Oregon border:
“As these horns blasted, keepers over time could permanently lose part or most of their hearing … Wickies changed their way of talking when the horn sounded and would only talk during the intervals of silence. After the foghorn stopped, the keepers and their families often found themselves still talking in that same strange staccato language.”
Given the isolation, lightkeepers could grow into the best of buds or become mortal enemies. One keeper in Oregon tried to murder his “cellmate” by putting ground glass in his food. Another pair arguing over a wife got into a physical fight, the fatal lesson being never take a hammer to a knife fight. Food was a source of friction. In Alaska, three keepers fell out over whether they liked potatoes mashed or fried, and for the next six months, never spoke a word to each other.
In 1937, the keepers of the St. George Reef Light were trapped by a large storm for nearly two months with no new food, no mail and dwindling supplies of coffee and tobacco.
“The four men under (keeper Georges) Roux stopped speaking to one another for one month, and to say ‘good morning’ became a personal affront,” writes Powers. “The irritating tone of men’s voices added to the screeching winds, moaning diaphone foghorns and the tower’s shuddering. Individuals ate facing away from one another, avoided the table all together or ate by themselves. Fist fights broke out, and men threatened one another; it was a miracle that no one was murdered or severely injured.”
Times of tragedy may have provided moments of bonding. A lighthouse, it turns out, is an excellent perch to watch natural disasters unfold. The crew of St. George witnessed a tsunami in 1964 strike Crescent City at midnight, killing 11 and destroying 30 city blocks. In 1906, the keepers of East Brother watched San Francisco burn after the Great Earthquake, no doubt wondering about friends and innocent others.
Many of the first keepers at East Brother hailed from European countries, including Denmark, Ireland and England. They had to read, write and be up for an immense amount of scut work. Keepers hauled coal deliveries, sometimes 40 tons at a time, up from the wharf to power the boilers. They were in charge of the foghorns, but because those take time to charge, they first rang a bell – once every 15 seconds for 45 minutes. (Nearby at Point Knox on Angel Island, one female keeper received a special commendation for banging a bell in heavy fog for an incredible 20 hours and 30 minutes. She eventually retired due to “broken health” from long, solitary fog watches.)
All that might be enough to drive a body to drinking, and there is indeed evidence it happened. “January 2 1883: Wind S., light, hazy. (Assistant keeper) Mr. Page took the mail over to San Quentin, returned drunk,” one East Brother superintendent noted in his log. “January 11 1883: Wind N.E., cold, light, foggy. Mr. Page went for the mail, returned at 2:30 p.m. drunk, mail wet.”
There was no doctor on the island, which made pregnancies difficult. When his wife went into labor, John Stenmark, a turn-of-the-century keeper who stayed there 20 years, rowed 2.5 miles to fetch the closest medic at Point San Quentin. When she had a second child, he did the same thing again – regardless of potentially perilous storm conditions.
All the potable water on the island comes from rain that gets funneled into an immense cistern and a redwood tank. Back in the day, there were concerns about lead-paint contamination – authorities told keepers to mix in powdered chalk and forget about it.
“Seagulls were always a problem,” one former resident recalled in Frank Perry’s 1984 book, “East Brother: History of an Island Light Station.” “All summer, they would fly over, eat, scream and defecate … It was rain water, and if you found a crawly thing in your glass, you just didn’t drink all the way to the bottom.”
“There was a frog in the cistern, should have brought him out,” that same person noted. “He was an albino, snow-white frog in the cistern with no eyes. He lived there for at least five years, used to keep tabs on him. Not Calaveras caliber but a good-sized frog.”
It wasn’t all grim stuff like the loneliest frog ever. Keepers entertained company from the mainland with music and dancing. There was excellent fishing for delectable rock cod and striped bass, and to stave off boredom, a traveling library sometimes docked with novels and history books. Children enjoyed playing in the boiler room, which was warmer than the rest of the island and had fun Steampunk emanations and oil smells.
The Coast Guard automated the station in the late ’60s, the death knell for the last of the old-style keepers. Community members didn’t want to let it sink into disuse, so in 1979, they formed the nonprofit East Brother Light Station Inc. and did a complete retrofit of the Victorian property. They reconstructed paint schemes with chemical analysis, rebuilt the white-picket fence and stripped asbestos shingles to reveal original redwood siding.
Lighthouses becoming guesthouses isn’t a rare thing. There are at least 14 states that offer the chance to stay in lighthouses. In California, that includes Pigeon Point Lighthouse, Point Cabrillo Lighthouse, the restored 112-year-old Carquinez Strait Lighthouse in Vallejo and Point Arena Lighthouse with its pet-friendly rooms with queen beds and fully stocked kitchens.
Today’s keepers have a different skill set. They know how to give tours, make beds and cook classy dishes like kataifi-wrapped goat cheese with organic mixed greens and vineyard chicken with truffle-mashed potatoes. Since East Brother reopened as a bed-and-breakfast, there have been approximately 20 pairs of keepers – serving more than 50,000 overnight guests – with backgrounds as diverse as retired Navy SEAL, wooden-boat builder, journalist, scientist, commercial fisherman and flight attendant.
To recruit innkeepers, the nonprofit posts a listing on job boards like Craigslist that reads something like: “Keepers must have culinary experience or abilities, must be warm and presentable to the public, and must be enthusiastic and self-motivated. Children are incompatible with this job, as are pets.” It might cite these benefits: “Incomparable views; meet a lot of interesting people; one of California’s best-known bed and breakfast inns; hard work but pretty good pay for a young couple (or couple of any age) doing something unique; birds, marine mammals, fresh air, boats; and history.”
Desiree Heveroh’s journey to becoming a keeper began with a fascination with the remote East Brother. “From the first time I saw that island, I just felt an indescribable pull, like a magnet,” she says. “I kind of have always known I was going to live there.”
Heveroh’s stories from her year-plus there might sound a little … spooky. “It was foggy a lot, and everything had a slight dampness to it in the morning. Everything had little green algae growing on it, unless you wiped it off.”
For a place so steeped in history, you might expect ghosts. Heveroh didn’t have any encounters with spectral sea captains walking out of the mirror and demanding to know the current price of whale oil, but she did have a dizzy moment making up a shared closet. “I heard ‘This was my closet‘ in my head when I was standing in there. So I feel maybe I was reincarnated from one of the keepers’ kids or something.”
The nature-watching on the island is fantastic. “When seal mothers were giving birth to pups, they’d do it on my island,” she says. “Osprey and ducklings and other birds – I learned all of them and their sounds. I saw a juvenile humpback whale moving across the Bay, blowing out of its blowhole.”
One day, she heard a noise and found an inquisitive raven. She trained it to come close using peanuts. He eventually brought over a bride she named Brandy Alexander. When the power went out for two months, and she could see her breath in her cabin, the ravens started leaving her piles of twigs for the fireplace. “They weren’t from my island, but they’d fly them over from somewhere.”
Heveroh was worried Covid would shut the light station down permanently. Restrictions started easing in late 2021, though, and she left the island content things would be copacetic.
“I’m not sad I’m not living there anymore. When you really love a thing, you want what’s best for it,” Heveroh says. “She is meant to be marveled at, meant for people to be out there and pouring their love into her energy field – getting engaged, falling in love, conceiving children. She needs and deserves all that, and I’m so happy she has it again.”
Originally published at John Metcalfe