March 5 2003

THE HANDLE SHE used was "Miss All-Nighter," and she hailed from San Rafael. Word of her washed up on the shore of Brooks Island in San Francisco Bay, by way of a message in a bottle. –Miss All-Nighter's message, including her phone number, was discovered by the island's only human inhabitants, a couple of castaways who have been living there, just a wet half mile from the Richmond Marina, for two and a half years. Rubbing the bottle did not produce a vaporous Miss, offering to grant three wishes. But her missive is one of four such bottled messages received by Roy Tedder and Heather Hailey since they started working as the island's live-in caretakers, contracting for the East Bay Regional Park Service.

In fact, messages in bottles have a better chance of reaching the couple in their solar-powered, off-the-grid enclave than a telephone call does. They don't have a phone – though they do have DirecTV. There are no roads on Brooks Island, just a two-mile pathway that meanders down the beach and then up and around a modest 159-foot-tall hill, which offers a 360-degree, four-bridge, who-could-ever-afford-this? ga-ga view.

At various times the island has been used as a "sheep pasture, a quarry, an orchard, a piggery and a shrimp camp," according to Harold Gilliam's 1957 canonical history San Francisco Bay, which also notes, a little sourly, that the island has "little to claim distinction." No one can even remember why it's called Brooks Island, not even the park service that's been in charge of it since the late '60s, according to Hailey.

To get to Brooks, you paddle past submerged shipwrecks that sank quickly, filled with rocks quarried from the island. Work crews of prisoners from San Quentin once mined ribbon chert from the island's hillside that was used to build the south cell block of the penitentiary – meaning they were busting rocks to build the very walls that would hold them prisoner. (Paging Johnny Cash!) Bing Crosby and Trader Vic legendarily owned a private gun club here. There are still wild pheasants, originally imported for hunting, wandering around.

While the island is public land, it's only open to visitors by appointment, as it's a bird sanctuary, boasting more than 100 feathered species, including oystercatchers, bufflehead ducks, blue herons, and Canada geese. Terns – free from harassment by most mammals – build their nests on the ground. "Experiments to establish a deer population failed," the park service's official literature about the island explains, "as the animals persistently swam back to the mainland."

One side of the island faces Richmond, where a row of town houses bunch together at the water, shoulder to shoulder, looking cross that the island blocks their bay view. When there's a traffic jam on the Bay Bridge, Hailey and Tedder know something is going on in the city because they can smell the exhaust.

While large chunks of the island's leeward side were hauled off to build prisons, on the windward side the Army Corps of Engineers beefed up the natural landmass, adding a spit of landfill – with a view of the nearby Chevron storage facility on the shore – to create a breakwater for the Richmond harbor. As much as its very shape has been changed by the dueling plastic surgeries of mining and landfill, though, the island retains a surprisingly wild feel. Some fetching, rare native California bunch grasses that have been lost on much of the mainland persist here, free from competition with invasive European grasses.

The island's also a junk heap for all kinds of bay detritus, ranging from romantic weathered driftwood to mucky tires, Coke bottles, and pieces of Styrofoam. "If you drop something at Fisherman's Wharf, it probably ends up here," Hailey says. The weirdest debris the caretakers have found so far: an upper denture. Tedder stresses that it's not laziness that keeps the couple from cleaning up the chunky hunks of Styrofoam scattered on the shore. Under many of them voles hide out from the birds of prey that rule the island, such as peregrine falcons and northern harriers. It's the rodent version of dumpster-diving.

Depending on the tides, Hailey and Tedder go to Richmond about once a week to pack out their own trash and run errands. And when they aren't showing off the isle to view-bedazzled official guests, the couple's primary duty is running rogue boaters off the shores. They've yet to spy any packs of teenagers kayaking over on a drunken late-night dare, but they did once get a sailboat that beached up at night so its crew could build a bonfire. It's so romantic – and illegal.

Interlopers tend to arrive on weekend days, trying to steal ashore to have a picnic, take a rest, or just get a closer look around. But most of the time, Hailey and Tedder, who used to live in San Leandro, sandwiched between two freeways, are marooned with just each other – and their DirecTV – on their island.

On stormy nights, Hailey says, when the wind blows up to 100 miles an hour, she sometimes likes to venture outside on the hill and open her jacket like a sail. "I feel like I could fly," she says.