This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Jess Rothschild: This is Finding Fire Island, Season 2, Episode 8, The Pine Walk Collection. I'm Jess Rothschild.

[0:16] Jess Rothschild: When I sat down with Pines resident Nate Pinsley, I realized pretty quickly that this wasn't something I could squeeze into a few soundbites. Therefore, instead of weaving Nate and his husband throughout the season, I decided their Fire Island journey deserved its own episode. It all starts with Nate's first trip to the Pines around 2012, a weekend that sparked a decade-long adventure. Over the years, Nate and his husband Peter would become unlikely characters in the story of modern Fire Island. They built the first iPhone app that helped share house friends coordinate their weekends. They ran the Botel for a summer. They had Cher as a one-night-only house guest. And they stumbled on a treasure trove of DJ cassette tapes that captured the soundtrack of a bygone era. A quick note before we begin, throughout this conversation, Nate and Peter mentioned their friend Bob Howard, a long-time Pines resident and real estate broker. Bob was an invaluable contributor to season two of Finding Fire Island and appears throughout the series. So here's Nate Pinsley and Peter Kriss beginning with Nate's first impression of the Pines and why it wasn't nearly as gate-kept as he'd been led to believe.

[1:39] Nate Pinsley: Part of the experience that we had was I, like many people, had felt this fear of this exclusive place that was hard to get to. And once we arrived there, we were like, oh, there's nobody gate-keeping this. It was just kind of dysfunctional. And the reason you couldn't find a place to stay was because everything was still done with like fax machines and like pen and paper.

[2:00] Jess Rothschild: How else was it dysfunctional?

[2:02] Nate Pinsley: So one of the challenges that we found that I think a lot of people still do is you don't know when your friends are going to be there necessarily, especially now that there's this quarter share system, which in the old days, like everyone was just out there all the time. And in the quarter share system, like you know this broad group of friends is vaguely going to be on the island, but which weekends or which friends out there, it's kind of left to your own devices and you show up on Friday at tea and you're like, oh, Michael, oh, Chad, oh, Brian, whatever. So in 2012, 2013, like what did you do to solve any problem? You created an app. And as you find out, now that we've been out there for more than a decade, you find out that like nothing is new under the sun. All ideas have been had before. The old timers eventually told us like, oh yeah, there used to be this thing called the phone book, which was at the pantry and it was all the gays at the beginning of the season would come and put their phone number in and which weekends they were going to be there and what their name was and everyone who they wanted to hook up with, they would like go to the pantry and be like, oh right, Michael, that's his house address and this is the weekend he's going to be there. But of course, when we were there, we showed up in Fire Island, we're like, oh, we've got this great new idea. No one's ever thought of this before. So over the winter of 2012, we like hired a bunch of Eastern European developers to create an app. We came up with a name for it and we thought, you know what we should do? It's like for shares in rental houses and we want to make it very evidently gay. So we called it Share Girl and it was like just sort of silly and bonkers enough, but also useful enough that people started like downloading it. And by summer of 2013, when we actually like started to hit our stride, like 25,000 people downloaded it. We were like, what the hell is this? This is just like a side project. It wasn't a business. There was no way to make money and we knew we were sort of onto something. So that was the start of our little Share Girl journey and eventually it would turn into us moving out there full time. I became a real estate agent out there. I worked with Bob Howard. I got to see all sorts of sites. I met my husband. We eventually ran the Botel. We ran the Madison. We started a guest house called the Pines Club and then it all sort of came to this wonderful, beautiful, catastrophic end when we almost left Fire Island for good. And now we have moved back and moved into a life of really being involved in the community and I'm on the Homeowners Association and we found this wonderful, sustainable place, but it is a tale of incredible meteoric rise and incredible Fire Island really teaches you a lot of hard lessons.

[4:47] Jess Rothschild: Okay. So you create the Share Girl app. You're not making any money. What happens next?

[4:54] Nate Pinsley: So in 2013, it was just an app and we realized from that point of everybody wants to know when everyone else is out there, people really didn't have a good way of finding a place to stay because Airbnb wasn't really a thing, especially out there yet. We started to match people to places to stay and then we ran out of places to put people and so we started taking over guest houses because we just needed more inventory. There was like insatiable demand for people to come out to Fire Island and we eventually, by the end, we were responsible for a hundred keys, as they say in the industry. So a hundred rooms full of like at least two people, usually like three or four. And when you are responsible for hundreds of people in the Pines, it's just a lot of stress and it's very hard to run a business out there. You learn the lesson of in your youth and a really entrepreneurial impulse, you're like, I want to make this place better. And there's this group of people out there who have a lot of taste and have a lot of disposable income and you could really build a business out there, but it's such a short season. It's really hard to staff because everybody wants to come out there and have their fun working out in Fire Island dream, but that often doesn't involve as much hard work as is needed to do it. And we started this great thing. People had so much fun. We had so much fun, but we didn't make any money.

[6:30] Jess Rothschild: Why did you almost leave Fire Island for good? You said it was a crash and burn.

[6:34] Nate Pinsley: You know, the ancient Greek mythology of Icarus flying too close to the sun. We like did everything we dreamed of doing and more and became responsible for so many events and so many people's great night stay and did not make any money at all and then ultimately decided that we needed to sort of leave and reset. And my wonderful husband, Peter, who was my accomplice in all of it.

[7:00] Peter Kriss: Get up on the mic, Peter. Say hello.

[7:01] Peter Kriss: Oh yeah. So after three years of running ShareGirl, I literally said on the last ferry back to the mainland, which was probably in late November, early December, like we were there from February to December for three years in a row. And I said, I'm never fucking coming back here. Like I'm never coming back here. That was so hard. I'm so done. And to prove the point, we bought a house in Hudson Valley, which is, you know.

[7:31] Nate Pinsley: In the Pines world.

[7:32] Peter Kriss: And it lasted like, well, the pandemic was definitely like, you know, we love upstate, but we were like, wow, we really don't have any friends and see anybody. And we went back to the Pines in 2020, stay with Bob Howard. And it was like, oh yeah, we do need this.

[7:46] Jess Rothschild: How did you come to run the Botel?

[7:50] Nate Pinsley: So we had started this app, the ShareGirl app, and we're solving problems left and right, because the reason the Pines really pulls you in as an entrepreneur is if you are passionate and have some baseline competency, people will throw challenges at you. They're like, oh, you should fix this, or you should do that. And in the summer of 2013, when we really had not much of an idea of what we were even doing, but we had a lot of people who needed a place to stay, we went to the hotel in its then incarnation, which was called the Barracks, and it actually had bunk beds that were sourced from a women's prison. They were not, there was no veil whatsoever, which, you know, there's a certain honesty in leaning into it. But we said to them, you know what, there's almost no one staying in this hotel. Give us one room for the whole season, and we'll just do it up. And we went to Ikea and bought a bunch of like pink pillows and got nice beds and cool lighting and did it up. And people filled that the entire season.

[8:54] Jess Rothschild: What were you charging for that room?

[8:57] Nate Pinsley: Oh, gosh, you know, what's the, probably like $150 a night.

[9:01] Peter Kriss: I don't believe you.

[9:02] Nate Pinsley: Well, on a Monday or Tuesday or something, not on a weekend. But what, I mean, we had very little cost. I think it cost us like $8,000 to rent it for the entire season. So we were able to like recoup our costs. But what we really wanted to do is just have a cool place for people to stay. And it was a room on the second floor, right over low T. It was kind of irresistible once you walked in, you're like, oh, this is actually really cozy. The phrase lipstick on a pig was used very judiciously throughout our entire career of running the Botel. And we were very proud of it. It was nice lipstick. But that company went bankrupt at the end of the season. We were like, oh, well, I guess that's the end of that. Wonderful. We'll move on next season and do something else. And over the winter, all of the machinations of the property being sold, that was all happening without us knowing about it. But we got a call because the new owners were looking through the records of the Botel and they saw that all the rooms were empty, except there was one room that was rented for the entire season. And they were asked, like, who is that? What did they do? And they got our information, their contact called us up and they said, do you want to manage the whole thing next season? And I think I asked you, I probably asked him, but I also might have just said yes.

[10:15] Jess Rothschild: What did you encounter running the Botel?

[10:18] Nate Pinsley: January that winter, there was no marketing photos. The hotel was like very not ready for primetime, shall we say. So I went out to Fire Island. I will never forget the ferries had shut down because the bay was frozen over. I was in an SUV with a couple of the folks who had just bought it and we were driving on the beach and none of them really were experienced drivers. So it was me driving this rental SUV with like the interior designer and the new owner and PJ who runs Sip and Turtle to this day. David Barton was taking over the gym and he was asleep in the backseat of the car and I was driving over the like icy sand. We get to the beach and I had, I think like 36 hours to put together all the furniture, mock it up, make it look like a real hotel room in the middle of summer. It was probably like 25 degrees and I had a little bear bulb that was lighting it because the electricity was off and shot all the photos for the website that year. And that was really sort of the spirit of everything we did with ShareGirl. It was like very throw it together, but a lot of love and we thought, let's make do with what we have. And I think people really were attracted to that. So we ended up buying all the furniture from Ikea and doing things with a certain like self-aware silliness, like not thinking that we were running the Ritz Carlton, but really with the idea of let's take this property, which has been empty for a long time and solve a problem of a lot of people can't afford to be out here. A lot of people want to be out here and don't know where to book. Let's welcome them to the hotel. And there were a lot of people who responded to that really well. And a small percentage of people showed up and were like, what is this place? Oh my God, did you know it's falling apart? And we're like, yes, we knew it. We know it's falling apart. But the other 90% of people were just so glad to be there and so glad to be welcomed and have a convenient place to say that it was really very gratifying to just open up this thing. It was kind of like taking over an abandoned building and opening it up.

[12:27] Jess Rothschild: Why has the Botel historically been completely run down and uninhabitable for lack of a better word?

[12:34] Nate Pinsley: So I could go into the economics of it. I'll whip out a spreadsheet for you, Jess, but the fundamental problem is rebuilding that place needs so much investment. And I'm so glad to see it happening today, but it needs so much investment that in order to recoup your money, you really need to like charge a large amount for it. And that's the tension with a lot of stuff in Fire Island, right? You can say like, oh, these houses are run down or why is it like this? But even today, it is so expensive to be there. It would be even more expensive if all the houses were just marble and king sized beds and all that. So it really is kind of important that there's affordable places to stay. And that's a little bit of the tension that exists to this day.

[13:17] Jess Rothschild: I'm going to jump around now. Talk to me about discovering the DJ tapes in your house.

[13:25] Nate Pinsley: Well, so that is when we decided to return to Fire Island and a little bit of trickery on the behest of Bob Howard, because we were out there staying with him and he was like, hey, you want to go see a house? And it's like, sure. We love seeing houses, especially if we've never seen them before. And he walked us into this little three bedroom, 816 square foot bungalow that was totally hidden by bamboo on Pine and the Boulevard, like right in the middle of everything. And it was a house no one had ever seen in a while because it was hidden. And we walked in and it was like, oh, my gosh, this is could this be your house? This is not running 10 hotel rooms. This is a three bedroom like ours. It just changed the script. So it really is what brought us back. But the previous owners had had it since 1979. So that's a lot of years of people's lives collecting there and lives changed, ended like it was a whole story there.

[14:18] Jess Rothschild: Who were some of the previous owners?

[14:23] Nate Pinsley: They were off, you know, they had no interest in talking to us. It was COVID. And they were like, we're never coming back. Bob sell the house to, you know, someone who cares about the Pines as much as we did. And, you know, they didn't want to talk to us. They're just like, that's our past. And there were little hints of what their lives had been. So when we first walked into the house, it was all carpeted. It smelled faintly of cat pee. There were a lot of like white and blue figurines. There was many, many drawings of lighthouses and shells. It was an elderly person's house. I mean, it just was and it was full of not our aesthetic or our memories. But there was also a poster from the last party at the Saint and with a piece of the dance floor, like right below it, illuminated with a really janky plug that like went through the wall and around the corner, like, and a little figurine of like a leather daddy guy. And we rolled out the towels and they all said bear cruise 1994. So there was like this very interesting story of people who had done the whole Fire Island cycle, like they'd lived the whole time and the gentlemen who owned it were in their 80s. And we still to this day have never met them or talked to them. But we began the process of going through all these belongings and we wanted to be loving and careful about it. A lot of new homeowners would just sort of get a dumpster and dump the stuff in. Well, I think we should also say that a common practice when somebody buying a new home on the pot or buying a house in the Pines, you also tend to inherit a lot of the belongings. For some reason, why don't homeowners take that stuff with them back or bring it into their new life or wherever they're going? It is so hard to get things to the Pines, whether it's just the groceries for the weekend or new crate and barrel couch set or something like once you get a thing to the island, it stays there. Like it's just so hard to get anything back. And so these houses accumulate and then yeah, you have new homeowners come in and that's not their stuff and they want new stuff and you get rid of it. So probably because we ran Share Girl and knew how that whole system worked, like you can get a dumpster and have it delivered across and donated it to at least a goodwill. We had committed ourselves to really trying to go through the things and see that things got a good home. And so like hours, maybe days into that process, we had gotten to the bottom of one of the closets. There were multiple sewing machines on a sandbar in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Lots of fabric, you know, projects that didn't quite get off their feet, but we're there in the closet waiting for the right time. Yeah, it's wild to now reminisce on this and realize that we are also those gays who are now living. We don't have fabric, but we've got like neon paint and black lights and speakers. But we got to the bottom of one of the closets and there was two milk crates that were just full of cassette tapes. And on the very surface of the cassettes, there was like Whitney Houston and commercial cassettes. And we're like, oh wow, cassettes, like there's so many of them. I guess these are going to go to goodwill. But we had peeled back a couple layers and saw some that were not commercial. They were handwritten with like Sharpies and they said like the St. Christmas Party 1989 or the Pavilion Roy Thode. And we didn't know anything about music, but by having been exposed a little bit to the different generations and knowing Bob Howard and hearing about him running the pavilion, we had been passed just enough knowledge that there was a spark, like we shouldn't get rid of these. We should try to ask somebody who knows more. So we reached out to our friend Joe Despinosa, who is a DJ in the Pines and happens to, by some coincidence, have a vinyl pressing company and really knows and loves the tradition of music in the Pines and the club scene in that period. And I remember him coming over and he was like, we didn't tell him much, but we assumed he would want like a handful of the cassettes. And we had really asked him like, how do we digitize these? We can't play them. We don't have a cassette tape. We don't have anything that's nice. I think the first question was like, Joe, we found all these cassettes, like how do we play them? Should we just get a Sony off Amazon for $13 or should we get something off eBay that is still $2,000 from Japan from 1981? And luckily he had said he had just digitized his own collection. And so it was like, oh, we don't need to play these at all. We can digitize them and play them as we would now, which is from our phones. And he came over to our house and we presented him with these two milk crates and he was sort of kneeling on the ground. And I remember it was like seeing a kid at Christmas time opening presents. He started to look through them and he was like, oh my God, it's Droid Thoat. Oh my God, it's this place. Oh my God. I've never seen this. Oh my God. And then he said, can I take all of these? I want to digitize them. I want to turn this into something. And he didn't know yet. And he has such a wonderful vision for putting on a mixed cloud and turning it into the Pinewalk collection. And it's brought so much joy to so many people. But it is kind of a miracle they didn't end up in the dumpster. Honestly, we digitized them to preserve them, but also what am I going to do with these giant crates of plastic from a bygone era? My house is 816 square feet. What do I do with this? Now can we throw them away? And it's like, oh, I guess we still can't throw them away because they're a thing now.

[20:07] Jess Rothschild: So now the Pinewalk collection is available. Not only is it available on like MixCloud and SoundCloud, it's now also available on SiriusXM. So how did all of that happen? And how did the New York Times article come about?

[20:20] Nate Pinsley: It was very organic. And at any given point, we were kind of amused by it because Joe saw those cassettes and said he was going to digitize them. We didn't think much of it. Then he sent us a link to this MixCloud and we're like, oh, well, that's cool. And I guess they're available. And he did the work of really trying to contact all the living DJs and make sure it was done right, which was so beautiful. And it very organically just started to get this following of people. And then finally, there was a call that was like, oh, there's somebody from the New York Times who wants to interview you. He's like, we have the New York Times on the line. Do you want to take it? And we're like, yeah, send it through. It's this journalist, T.M. Brown, who is in the music section, and that's how he discovered it. And he pitched it and it eventually turned into a real estate article. And they decided that they wanted to invest not just for it to be a written piece, but a multimedia, audio and visual spectacle kind of. And lo and behold, one day we got the paper edition and it was sort of the full page of the real estate section. And my favorite part about that whole experience is if you go into the electronic version and there's a comment section, you can see all of these people who have the most heartfelt reaction to this music and talk about that period in their life. Many of them have never been to Fire Island or never come back, but it connects them with a particular group of people in a period of time that they had not had a connection with for a long time. I mean, what's interesting is that that is a shared experience that we've had with people through running the Botel, is we lipstick on a pig, like we fix it up as best we could, paint some of those cinder blocks turquoise and add an Ikea comforter. But it was just enough and with the website to get clientele who not only had never been to the Pines for the first time, but clientele who had not come back to the Pines for 30 years. And we had some of these older guys stay with us and it was like, thank you so much for this weekend. I haven't been here in 30 years. Because I had a place to stay, I was able to do that.

[22:41] Jess Rothschild: How was it interacting with the different generations of people like running the hotel, running the Botel? You're now interfacing with people across maybe five different generations. What were some of the highlights of that or the stories you heard, people you met?

[22:59] Nate Pinsley: It's the best part, really. I mean, it was so hard running that hotel. But when you're on that weekend schedule, like everyone's coming out Thursday, Friday for a busy weekend. There was no time off. It's just this weekend after weekend after weekend. Any seasonal business knows that. But because you are out there, none of those weekenders know maybe the business owners or the homeowners. They're in the share world. And because we were out there from February until December and running a business and knowing our neighbors a lot through Bob Howard and others, it's like, we got to know the fabric of the Pines, like the people who have been there. And that was the best part. As hard as it was, that was made it all worth it.

[23:42] Nate Pinsley: One of the gifts of laying roots in the Pines and making connections across generations is age is such a thing in the gay world. And you feel at every threshold, you're like, oh, God, I'm a gay turning 30. My life is over. I'm turning 40. My life is over. And when you have friends who are in their 50s and in their 70s and in their 90s, even who are thriving and having a great time and such role models for a certain spirit that transcends a particular age, it's such a hopeful place to be in. And you can really welcome every passing of the years. One of my favorite jokes about Fire Island is it's really a retirement community that just so happens to have a bunch of young people coming and partying in it. And it is what attracted us to the idea of being there likely for the rest of our lives, even though he wanted to run away forever. Because you get a greater and greater sense of belonging with every passing year, and you're more and more connected to the social fabric out there. And in a lot of other gay spaces and gay venues, you age out.

[24:53] Jess Rothschild: Let's share the story of hosting Cher at the guesthouse you ran known as the Pines Club, maybe a little history of the Pines Club and how Cher came to stay.

[25:00] Nate Pinsley: So what we came to call the Pines Club when we bought it in 2015 was a somewhat derelict eight bedroom house that had a wonderful history. It had belonged to Jerry Herman. And it is apparently where Angela Lansbury, you know, sang around the piano. By virtue of its scale, it's the largest single lot residence in Fire Island on the bay. And it was just owned by a bunch of very eccentric characters, likely including us throughout its entire history. Probably the highlight is when Cher came to stay with us one night.

[25:42] Peter Kriss: Cher, you know, casual.

[25:44] Nate Pinsley: Well, it was before the election that year. So she was campaigning with Hillary Clinton, and it was part of that fundraising effort. And through our friend Andy Tobias, who was the treasurer of the Democratic Party, was like, Hey, guys, I want to bring Cher out here. Can you do that? And I think it was, we had like, maybe six weeks to plan it all. And we're like, Oh, yeah, for sure. We could do that. So we had a wonderful like partners and support with the DNC. And it ended up being like a 900 person party and supposedly the highest grossing event in that election where the candidate Hillary did not show up, but it was one of the surrogates. And the schedule was so packed, you know, she was just coming in, in the middle of the night, we had to sneak Cher onto the island, because obviously, people knew she was arriving.

[26:37] Jess Rothschild: Yeah, Cher doesn't show up to Fire Island in the day.

[26:40] Nate Pinsley: Yeah, so we she arrived in by the cover of night, in a private boat, we put her on one of those little electric vehicles down the boardwalk. And I will never forget, like, I was driving the vehicle, there was a bodyguard right next to me and people walking in front on all corners. And we were passing gays who were on their way to tea. And like, you've never seen a double take, like somebody looking at Cher going by on one of those vehicles and screaming behind you. And we were like, speed up speed up. So she was we get to say that Cher was one of our housemates because she stayed we were staying in that house as well that night. She was in one of the other rooms, a bunch of her handlers and folks were with her. And because we ran it as a guest house, there was one room, it was I think, September, there was one room that had been booked already by a group of friends, four of them who were just staying in this room. And we thought about canceling the reservation. And we didn't, but we sure had a talk before she showed up. And I said, you guys have got to play it cool. And they for the most part did, I think we barricaded them in the room only for certain periods of the process. Well, Cher was mostly in her room throughout the time, but she did show up at like midnight the night before. And we like I checked her into this guest house room. It's like where I had painted all the walls, like set this place up. And one of the things she said, she's like, this is the nicest place to stay in the Pines. And really it was on such short notice. I was like, yes, yes, knowing I mean, full well, there's a private house that's way nicer than our guest house, but not that night.

[28:24] Jess Rothschild: Another element that's really modernized and evolved in recent years is that it's moved from house parties to these pop up events and parties in the meat rack. How is this happening in the meat rack?

[28:36] Nate Pinsley: Well, it's interesting, you've asked us that question, Jess, because when we first learned of events that were happening in the meat rack, it was a group called the swimming pools. And they were an artist group. This was probably 2013, 2012. And they had heard that we were doing events. And because as part of Share Girl, not only were we running the Botel and the Madison and the Pines Club and all these guest houses, but we would do anything. I think in one of your previous episodes, one of your folks said, oh, yeah. And like during the week, there's all these elves that run around and do everything. We were those elves. We threw a wedding or two, we rented out speakers. So anytime someone needed something, we were like, oh, we'll buy it and give it to them. And then we can use it in the future. And the swimming pools found out about that. And we had a meeting in the canteen. And they said, hey, there's these things called the full moon parties in the meat rack. We want you to take them over. And I think this is the first time we've talked about it. And if you ask us in the court of law, we will deny it. But for many years, we had a very strange duality where during the day, our staff would run the hotel and change the sheets and greet guests at the front and then would at night, lug the generators and the speakers out to the meat rack. And then when we Yeah, so what he means to say is we invented it. We were the shepherds of it for a while. And obviously, we already shared the story of us, you know, deciding that we were going to leave Fire Island. And it was wonderful to see new people take that up. And it is, again, after you've been in the Pines for long enough, you see that there's nothing new under the sun. But also, it's so important that these traditions that there is somebody that will step up and do it and make it better and push it into new territories. So one of the most important parts about that, because it does exist in a legal gray area is they were never advertised and never should be advertised. And often they coincide with a full moon. And almost always they are on Friday nights, because you get the crowd who's walking back from the underwear party. And it is so hilarious, no matter how many years that this has been happening, to see the people who are just trying to get back from the underwear party, walking through the meat rack to their houses, and they come upon a fully realized party with lights and a DJ. And they're like, am I tripping? What is going on here? And they just jump in and have a great time.

[31:17] Jess Rothschild: You would think you're hallucinating.

[31:19] Nate Pinsley: That's what they probably are.

[31:21] Nate Pinsley: It's what the magic of it is, really. It's the, you know, it's elusive. It's ephemeral. You said that there are no new ideas in the Pines, and everything has been done before. People just elevate it and reinvent it. What is something that you can foresee in the future, or something that you hope will be reinvented by the next generation, or at least in the next five to ten years in the Pines?

[31:42] Nate Pinsley: Well, one of the things that has happened recently that I've gotten involved in that I really care so much about is Trailblazers Park in the middle of the harbor, after the George Floyd protests, and a wonderful, important conversation about inclusivity in the Pines, and the launch of Kobe and Baoback. One of the decisions that we made as a community was to create this monument to trailblazers. And every two years, there's a new group of 16 folks from across the world, across the LGBTQ community, who we honor as those who have gone before us and blazed the trail for the lifestyle that we enjoy today and are defending today. And given all of the crosswalks that are being torn up, and all of the threats that we face, I think it is so important that we built that symbol in this fortress that we have. A lot of people describe the Pines as this paradise, an enclave, which it is. But it is not just disconnected from reality. It's also such an important beacon for people who are living in a house in the Midwest, or maybe in a country where they can't be gay, and they have heard this little thing about this place where people get to be free. And I love that we now have a place that really stands for the future, more progressive values, the Pines that we all want to claim. And we need way more of that. We need a lot more of upholding the Pines, especially right now, not just as this place that sort of disappears into the shadows and sort of tries to protect itself, but stands up and uses all of the influence and power that we have the privilege of having there and uses it as a beacon for the whole world.

[33:31] Jess Rothschild: Talk to me about January, February, March in the Pines. What was it like being year rounders? Is it just a life of solitude?

[33:38] Nate Pinsley: There is a hallmark of brand new Pines homeowners. It's almost a tradition that they don't know about, but they just think like, oh my gosh, we just bought a home in the Pines. We should stay here over the winter. And then they usually don't do that again, but it's sort of a rite of passage. It's so black and white too. The light is weird. Like there's no color. There's no warmth. It's a really spooky place.

[34:06] Jess Rothschild: Do you guys have any stories of like ghosts, some sort of paranormal activity in a house?

[34:12] Nate Pinsley: I mean, it's like, honestly, it's just your own demons. It's like your own monsters that are there waiting for you. I will say one of my eeriest interactions was on a early Saturday or Sunday morning. The whole house was still asleep. We had all been going out and having a great time. I woke up, needed to go downstairs to get a drink of water. And I came down the stairs and there was a full adult stag deer in the living room because someone had left the door open and he was sort of minding his own business. And I didn't want to scare him because who knows, he could like run through a glass door or destroy the furniture. And I thought to myself, what should I do in this moment? And I just turned around and walked back up the stairs and went to bed and he was gone when I came back down.

[35:12] Jess Rothschild: Finding Fire Island is created, executive produced, and narrated by Jess Rothschild. Co-produced with the Pines Historical Society. Sound design by Caitlin White. Video editing by Evelyn Darr. Special thanks to the Pines Foundation and Sage USA.