Private island ideal for social distance
Innkeeper couple wait out pandemic while maintaining historic outpost
The days are idyllic on East Brother right now. There’s the view of San Francisco, clear enough without the traffic fumes to see the hard outlines of the city, not just a hazy sketch. There are the seal pups sunning on the island’s rocky edge, the hummingbirds flitting to and fro, the flowers and the pelicans and the butterflies and the nest of sparrows and the incessant seagulls and their incessant poop.
If the coronavirus pandemic weren’t wreaking havoc around the world, it would be a particularly lovely spring to visit this scrappy mound of windswept rock 1,000 feet off Richmond’s Point San Pablo.
As it happens, it is a particularly lovely spot to shelter in place for Tiffany Danse and Tyler Waterson. The sole residents of this tiny island, the couple are halfway through a twoyear post as innkeepers at the nonprofit East Brother Light Station Bed & Breakfast.
When the “dream job” opened up last spring, it attracted thousands of inquiries from as far away as Bulgaria and China. Danse and Waterson landed the gig, and they’ve spent the past year working 60 to 80hour weeks as the historic inn’s only employees. They manage reservations, ferry guests to and from the island, give tours of the 147yearold Victorian lighthouse (where a Coast Guardrun LED now flashes at fivesecond intervals), cook fourcourse
dinners and hot breakfasts, do the dishes, make the beds, clean the bathrooms and sound the 1934 diesel foghorn in great, farty blasts.
At least, that’s what they did until midMarch, when the coronavirus ground their practiced routine to a halt.
“It’s kind of a funny way to end our first year,” Waterson says of the coronavirus shutdown. “We were so on a roll. It’s been a little bit of a shock.”
Instead of welcoming visitors to the fiveroom “dinner, bed and breakfast,” the couple have spent the past six weeks slowing down and catching up. They’ve propagated succulents for the guest rooms, stocked the freezer with homemade ravioli, ticked off longterm projects and taken some time to absorb the island and its quiet. Ferry traffic has almost evaporated, and the only visitors are a crew of workers repairing the boat crane.
Without guests hanging over the picket fence, the seal pups are less skittish. Without a constant todo list hanging over their heads, Danse and Waterson have found herbs growing wild and spotted more animals lounging around.
“It’s hard to tell if there’s more of it or if we’re just noticing because we’re not racing around scrubbing toilets,” Waterson says.
“You live here, but we never got a chance to take it all in,” Danse says.
The couple shudder at the thought of passing the pandemic in their former home: a 32foot boat with a dormsize fridge. Comparatively, the ¾acre isle is vast, and, though essential errands are a boat and car ride away, they feel almost guilty for sheltering in such a beautiful, isolated setting.
“We’re very fortunate to be here,” Waterson says. “Nowhere I’d rather be.”
East Brother has offered refuge during an outbreak before. When Spanish influenza swept through the Bay Area in 1918 and 1919, killing more than 6,000 people, Walter Fanning fled to the island. Fanning was 9 years old at the time, and his grandfather, John Kofod, was keeper of the light station. “My mother, sister and I lived in Berkeley (my
father was in France),” wrote Fanning, who helped preserve the lighthouse, years later. “The schools were closed for weeks at a time during flu epidemics. We stayed at the island whenever this happened and so escaped the flu.”
Now, Danse and Waterson are doing the same and imagining how the fiveroom inn could reopen in a postcoronavirus world.
“Our program here is just so intimate,” Waterson says. Guests congregate in an upstairs game room and sit down to dinners around one big, communal table. “The minute you get in the boat, you can’t social distance.”
Maybe visitors will get tested before they hop aboard the transfer boat. Maybe the innkeepers will cut nightly capacity from 10 to six or four. Danse and Waterson are envisioning a way forward for the nonprofit — private meals spaced out around the lighthouse, more day tours and fewer overnight guests. While the inn isn’t an essential business, the money it brings in is a means of protecting the lighthouse and its history.
The past is always present on East Brother, but during the coronavirus shutdown, the couple have felt it especially acutely.
“We feel more like lightkeepers than ever before,” Danse says. “We’re not tending the wick, but we really are caretakers.”