The island that waits for rain

On East Brother, rain isn’t just weather. It’s the water supply.

When the lamp was first lit on March 1, 1874, the fog whistle stayed quiet. It ran on steam, and “there had not been enough rain to provide water for the boiler.” The district engineer had a choice: wait for the next rainy season, or buy fresh water and ship it out. Then the fog drifted in, and that settled it. On May 1 the whistle went into regular use whenever there was fog.

The island was built around catching rain. A concrete slab covers most of it, a catch basin that drains into a cistern, and it needed looking after. Jack Lewis, who wrote down memories of the station in 1973, remembered gulls all summer, and then: “Come the rainy season the watershed would have to be thoroughly scrubbed and the cistern cleaned. As long as I was around that was my job.” The keeper, Willard Miller, would lower Lewis down in a bosun’s chair to clean out the debris. The cistern even had a tenant: an albino frog, “snow white and had no eyes,” who lived there at least five years.

When the station was automated, the plan was to tear the old buildings down and put a light on a pole. A group of Richmond residents vowed to save it. Today a nonprofit runs it as an inn, and it still lives on rain. Stay one night and you can’t shower: “We rely on a rainwater catchment and cistern to meet all of our water needs.”

Most of us get our water from a tap, but every roof still catches rain. Before the rainy season, the leaves and debris come off it and out of the gutters, so the water goes where it should. No bosun’s chair required. If ladders aren’t your thing, that part’s ours.