money with what she’d raised by cashing in her retirement funds so they could buy a couple of lots on the skinny tail end of an island called Camano.
Shaped like the Pink Panther bound in a straitjacket, forty-square-mile Camano is technically an island, though it’s a drive-to. The mainland gateway is the little city of Stanwood, where a conglomeration of superstores and strip malls overwhelms the remnants of a traditional town plopped in the middle of redolently fertilized farmland watered by the Stillaguamish River. A bridge crosses the Stilly just as it deltas into the Salish Sea and offers Camano residents a twenty-four-hour umbilical to civilization—which is good and bad. The good is that people are able to live on a Pacific Northwest island with all its evergreen and coastal beauty, yet still drive to whatever they need instead of being held hostage to a ferry schedule. The bad is that because its residents have relatively easy access to other communities and services, Camano hasn’t developed its own resources like Orcas Island has been forced to, with its own kids’ programs, performing arts centers, library, museums, and high school.
In many ways, Camano sits in limbo between being a true island community and simply a suburb surrounded by water. About a third of the 13,400 Camano Islanders are retired, and many of the rest roll across the bridge twice a day as they head to and from jobs at Boeing, or in Stanwood or Seattle, or somewhere else along the I-5 corridor. Its accessibility also makes Camano a popular vacation-home market. On summer Fridays, it seems every third car crammed onto the causeway has kayaks on top or a boat on a trailer as weekenders flood the island.
Wherever you are on the island, you’re a single turn from one of the four Camano Drives: East, West, North, and South. East Camano heads down island, offering sharp views of the Cascades across Port Susan Bay. Traffic and commercial buildings peter out to nothing as you pass the Camano Plaza’s big IGA. A utilitarian stretch on the west side of East Camano Drive houses a sparse collection of county offices. Island County once encompassed a big chunk of western Washington State but was chipped away over time so that it’s now made up of just Camano and Whidbey plus a smattering of smaller islands. Whidbey, with four times the acreage and three times the population of Camano—along with the county seat, Coupeville, and a big military base—overshadows its little sister, which even geologically seems to curl defensively inside the larger island. Camano residents talk of living in Island County’s forgotten hinterlands, and since county money follows population and pull, they’re right.
It takes ninety minutes to drive the circuitous route from Camano to Coupeville. That’s about twenty minutes longer than it takes Camano residents to get to downtown Seattle. It takes that same ninety minutes for Island County police to get from their Whidbey Island headquarters to the dinky prefab that serves as base for Camano’s small group of sheriff’s deputies.
Around 70 percent of Camano remains forested with thick second-growth. Drooping cedars, showy big-leaf maples, and stately Douglas fir crowd together so tightly along some sections of road that you can’t see past the first line into the woods. Outside about a dozen small subdivisions, many of the island’s homes are hidden down long tree-lined drives. Houses run the gamut from tarped single-wides to opulent log cabins fit for gentrified Jeremiah Johnsons to modern high-windowed manses facing sweeping ocean views. As you’d expect, plots along the coastline are pricey, with values dropping dramatically as you move inland. Rough-hewn fishing and crab shacks dotted the waterfront back in the day, but most have been torn down over the last few decades, replaced with large homes. As on Orcas, many of Camano’s finest homes are seconds—occupied only on weekends or for a couple of weeks each summer.
As you continue south on the island, the houses spread out and the view is mostly wooded acreage—private property along with public land and parks—with plenty of room to roam, or hide.
Mountain View Road, near the top of Elger Bay, serves as Camano’s Mason-Dixon Line. Above the line is the bedroom community section of the island where people think nothing of making a daily trip across the causeway to civilization and its jobs. South of Mountain View, though, you hear tell of blue tarps and rednecks, primitive artists and wild-eyed ex-hippies, the cries of coyotes and the strum of banjos. And it’s all true. Sort of.
The south end of Camano is more islandy than the north part due to its distance from the bridge. It’s about a half-hour drive from the southern tip just out to Stanwood, and there aren’t many people willing to make that extra commute. That’s left the south less populated and developed. Much of the island’s long tail is only a mile wide, and you can walk that in most parts without leaving the woods except to cross the loop road. Other than retirees, many of the full-timers down here tend to be artists and survivors from the back-to-the-land movement of the late sixties and seventies. Like Orcas full-timers, South Enders cobble together a living by doing two or three different jobs. Also similar to Orcas, the south end of Camano illustrates extreme disparity in income and wealth within a remarkably small area.
“The place where time stands still and the stills still stand,” says Jack Archibald, the person most responsible for putting the capital letters on the South End. “This is hell and gone. Nobody comes down here for a Sunday drive, and we like it that way.”
Archibald moved to Camano in the seventies, “looking to get back to the land.” He drove out on a drizzly dark night and told a Realtor he had a life savings of $25,000 and wanted a roof over his head and at least five acres. “He took me to this little cabin surrounded by tall trees, lights on inside so it was glowing, chimney puffing smoke… I said, ‘I’ll take it!’”
Daylight revealed the dream cabin to be just a rickety shack complete with Visqueen windows that did nothing to keep out the winter’s cold. Replacing those sheets of plastic turned out to be an act of fate for Archibald, who’d been working as a school bus driver. “I wanted something more interesting than just plain windows, so I took a night class on how to do stained glass.” He found he had an affinity for breaking and patching glass back together. Creating spectacular installations for schools, hospitals, libraries, and public buildings became his career.
Archibald and his fellow escapees looked around their section of Camano and decided to embrace the backwoods reputation. Jack created an alter ego, Skeeter Daddle, a rural raconteur, banjo picker, and gentleman nettle farmer who, along with his South End String Band mates, branded the South End as a place frozen in time.
“One of us called the South End ‘a poor man’s paradise’ and that was dead-on because when a lot of us moved in, land was very cheap,” says Archibald. “You couldn’t believe that you didn’t have any money but still got to live in a place like this. Wow, man—utopia!”
That didn’t last. “It’s harder and harder to live on this island if you’re poor, even down here. A lot of struggling folks are kinda grandfathered in, but there are less of them all of the time. More are losing their places now because of the economy hurting real estate, which means the itinerant construction jobs go away and they can’t pay their mortgages.”
Archibald describes the South End as a mini version of Florida. “It’s rich retirees on the coast and rednecky in the middle… different worlds within a very short distance. You won’t see it on a casual drive, but in the center of the island you find some fairly impoverished people… Garbage hasn’t been picked up forever, lawn’s up, house is falling down.”
IN DECEMBER 1985, PAM and Gordy moved out of their mainland apartment and into a twenty-three-year- old, six-hundred-square-foot single-wide trailer set on five inland acres of Camano’s South End. The area remained so undeveloped back then that their dirt road didn’t even have a name, just a number, 25’55, corresponding to its longitude.
Surrounded by good clamming and crabbing waters but also within easy reach of the Cascade mountains for camping, Camano fit Pam’s dream. So did the property, with plenty of room for a big garden, chicken coop, and pigpen. Except for the clearing around the trailer, the acreage remained thickly forested, making it feel like you were in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. To Pam—never one to associate with neighbors or much of anyone else—that was perfect.
Standing at the barbecue with a beer in her hand, screened off from the rest of the world by towering walls of Douglas fir and cedar, Pam was in paradise. Gordy, without a bar within walking distance, was okay—for a while.
“Gordy was a great guy, a lot of fun,” remembers Pam’s niece, “as long as he wasn’t drinking.” With a long history of DUIs, Gordy had to pass urine tests to keep his driver’s license and get to job sites. “I got pregnant around this time, when Gordy was sober,” she says. “Pam was really doting on me, and one day Gordy says to her, ‘I don’t have any kids—why don’t we have a baby?’ and Pam said, ‘Yeah! I want another one.’”
Pam says she and Gordy tried for about five years to become pregnant, and she had to go in for some plumbing work before finally conceiving in June 1990. “When I finally did get pregnant, Gordy goes, ‘I suppose you want to get married now, don’t ya?’” she says. “I said, ‘No, Gordy, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ He didn’t really want
