The Best Housing Perks In The Land / Angel Island and other state parks house rangers in prime real estate at bargain prices.

Just imagine.

Heart-stopping views of the Pacific. A lush forest of towering pines, wildflowers, docile deer. No crime. Peace and quiet. Access to some of the best public schools in the country. And a historically important home with six bedrooms, five bathrooms and a hot tub.

All for $200 a month, utilities included.

Such is the sweet life for Ken Huie, a park ranger at Angel Island State Park.

During its most populated periods, as a base for troops during both world wars, Angel Island housed some 2,000 people and boasted a movie theater, a gymnasium and other amenities. Now, this heavenly piece of real estate is home to 27 lucky souls who have done what many in the Bay Area consider a virtual impossibility: They have found a safe, beautiful haven in the heart of the Bay Area at a rock-bottom bargain price.

In Ayala Cove and Camp Reynolds, preciously restored Victorians overlook the glimmering Bay. In the East Garrison, a row of turn-of-the-century officers' homes offer views of Berkeley and Oakland. At Point Blunt, a mid-century waterfront bungalow with a private beach faces the San Francisco skyline.

The only catch, of course, is that one member of the family must first get hired by the California State Parks and Recreation system and snag one of the positions that includes housing among its benefits. And the employee must be on call 24 hours a day and must cart every last apple and roll of toilet paper from the mainland.

"They call us the bag people of Tiburon," the youthful, 53-year-old Huie told me as I met him at the Ferry Landing one crystalline morning last week. He was pushing a metal cart full of computer paper he'd just trucked off the Tiburon commuter ferry.

As a member of this tiny, non-elite Angel Island community of rangers, boat operators and maintenance workers, Huie lives by the clock of the boat schedules. Residents use the ferries as well as a state boat that makes regular runs to Tiburon. "You kind of get used to it," he says. "You always know what time it is."

For spouses who work off the island and children who attend public schools, a 7:30 am commuter boat goes to Tiburon every morning. "I think it's hardest on the teenagers -- they can't do all the extracurricular activities," he says, adding that only half a dozen children live on the island.

But for Huie, a native San Franciscan who has worked at more than five state parks since he joined the parks system 29 years ago, these are negligible sacrifices compared to the privileges that come with being a ranger in residence. Over the years, he's become well versed in the pleasures of this special brand of government-subsidized housing. In fact, his résumé includes assignments that included living in some of the state's most exclusive real estate treasures.

As a ranger at Point Lobos, the state park just south of Carmel, he lived for two years in the Whaler's Cottage, built in 1850, which overlooks a pristine bay where otters and sea birds cavort. Then, while developing historical programs for the Marin Headlands, he spent eight years living in an oceanside home built in 1858. At Malakoff Diggins near Nevada City, he spent 14 years at the end of a 16-mile dirt road in a Sierra cabin built in the 1870s. And, for the past 3 1/2 years, he's lived in a three-story home on the eastern edge of Angel Island -- a former officer's home built in 1910.

As a third- and forth-generation Chinese Californian, Huie was drawn to work on Angel Island because of its history. Beginning in 1910, it functioned as an immigration station as a way of enforcing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

"I was interested in the story of the immigration station here," Huie says, adding that Angel Island is the last place he will work before he retires. "I'd studied a lot about the history of Chinese in California, so this was the last piece of the puzzle for me."

In 1910, Huie's own grandmother came through the immigration station and spent two weeks there undergoing interrogation before moving to San Francisco. "I feel like I have a tie to the island," he says. "Though for me, of course, it's different -- now I'm in charge."

As we wend our way through a forest of Monterey pine and eucalyptus in a state-owned van heading toward his house, I can't help but gush about how perfect this place seems. Huie acknowledges his good fortune. "I've always lived where other people want to go," he says mildly. "At night, we go for walks, and it's like you're on your own island. It makes you feel sort of special."

Huie and his wife, Karen Knox, make the most of their isolation. "Some people here get satellite TV," he explains. "But we decided that would take up too much time."

"How do you spend your time when you're not working?" I ask.

"Oh, we have a lot of hobbies," he replies.

Indeed, hobbies are to the couple what vices were to Elvis. Their living-room and dining-room walls are lined with musical instruments: He plays guitar, fiddle and drums, and her instruments are guitar and stand-up bass. Huie built the hammer dulcimer that sits in the corner in his basement woodworking studio, where he is making a kayak. They have a sewing room, where Knox makes clothes on her sewing machine and Huie weaves rugs on his loom. They throw pots in their potter's studio, complete with conventional and raku kilns. They're also passionate boaters -- they own a little sail boat, kayaks and rowboats.

The only thing Huie misses? A social life. "We used to have a community that we played music with, and we like to do swing dancing and salsa dancing," he says.

Across the country, as private real estate developers snatch up tracts of rural land and transform them into resort communities and suburban developments, it's the rangers employed in the state and federal parks who experience an increasingly rare privilege: residing in some of the most pristine, priceless real estate in the world. And, in California, where real estate prices and rental rates have continued to rise beyond what many working people can afford, housing has become one of the most important benefits the parks system offers.

Huie says such perks are not usually available to rookies, but, as rangers earn more and more seniority, jobs are increasingly likely to come with incredible housing opportunities. Ranger Maury Morningstar, who occupies a three-bedroom Victorian on the magically pretty Ayala Cove, is another California parks employee blessed with a dwelling that is among the crème de la crème of state-owned housing. Before he worked at Angel Island, he lived at the Tule Elk State Reserve in Southern California. Next month, he'll move to Lake Tahoe to become a supervisor for eight state parks around the lake. And where will Morningstar live? "At a house on the lake," he replies. "There's a couple to choose from."

If state-subsidized housing for park workers seems like an insanely cheap perk while the rest of us languish in overcrowded, overpriced housing, state employees argue that the system actually saves the state money, because staff are generally responsible for maintaining their historic homes. Huie and his wife, for instance, refinished their own floors. "It's a win-win situation," says Morningstar. "It's better to have people in these buildings, and we're on call all the time."

Cry me a river of saltwater tears!

On this postcard-perfect day, as the boat carries me away from this paradise by the Bay, I can't help think: Never has government work looked so good.

Carol Lloyd is currently at work on a book about Bay Area real estate. She teaches a class on buying your first home in the Bay Area, and another class based on her best-selling career counseling book for creative people, "Creating a Life Worth Living." For more information, email her at surreal@sfgate.com.