him back, but the controversial policy of “social promotion” kept graduating Colton to the next grade along with his age group.
Outside of school, Colton joined a youth soccer team. Pam drove him to a couple of practices and he got his picture taken with the team. The photo shows an athletic six-year-old—certainly no longer tubby—with a bright, enthusiastic smile. After the team picture and before the first game, though, Colton stopped showing up. Pam said it was because her eyes gave her trouble and she couldn’t drive him at night.
With Colton’s speed and agility, he likely would have been a star on the playing field. Parents of another boy on the soccer team who also went to grade school with Colton say that Pam never reached out about the transportation problem. “One of the other parents would have been happy to pick him up for practice. That happens all the time with kids’ sports and events off the island—people help each other out. We’re all in the same boat.”
Other than the short stint with soccer, Pam says Colt was never interested in sports. “He’d rather be out playing in the woods.”
Colton’s main playmate early on was Anne Pitser. Anne’s mom worked at the Tyee Grocery, a little market near the very bottom of Camano where Pam bought her cigarettes and beer in those days. She and Pam had babies the same year and lived close, so they brought the kids together at an early age. “I still have a book that Colt and his mom gave me for my second birthday,” says Anne. “I just always knew him.”
Anne says that all the other kids just wanted to sit around and watch TV. “I thought they were boring. I didn’t have TV, so I always had to make my own fun, and Colt was into that.”
Every day after school starting in kindergarten, Anne says she and Colt would head to one or the other’s home. At Anne’s house, they’d play board games or race on her dad’s electric slot car track. Over at Colt’s, they primarily played outside.
“Inside his house was pretty much trashed… You were wading through mountains of things to get anywhere,” she says. Instead, they’d spend their time running around with the dogs and playing in the woods. “We used to just love climbing trees. We’d find anything that had a low branch and climb on each other’s backs to get to it. We’d climb up to the very top and then be like, ‘Oh no, how do we get down?’”
Back then, Camano didn’t have its own elementary school and island kids were bused across the bridge to Stanwood. “We were the outcasts there,” says Anne. “I was the fat girl with buck teeth, and everyone hated Colt. They made fun of him, they’d throw things at him. They’d pick on him because he dressed different and maybe he didn’t bathe regularly… He was just a boy. They were mean kids.”
Tough times in school brought her and Colt even closer. “We were inseparable. He never wanted to go home when he was at my house, and when I was over there he was like, ‘No! You can’t go home yet, don’t leave!’ By the time we were in the third grade, his mom was convinced that we were going to grow up and get married.”
Anne says Colt craved attention. “He wanted to be recognized. He wanted people to look at him and say, ‘Hey, he’s the one who did that!’ If he started a science project, he wanted it to be really good so that people would praise him. But I don’t think people ever really cared.” Anne says Colton once built an elaborate treehouse in the woods by his trailer. “I was like, ‘Dude, I can’t believe you built this! It’s the coolest thing in the world!’ That made him feel really good.”
The cool fort came down, though, when Pam found out Colton had built it with lumber she’d bought for another project.
“Every once in a while at school he’d be upset,” says Anne. “I’d ask him what’s wrong and he’d be like, ‘Oh, my mom’s just stupid.’”
Colt had a really cool dad, though—or so Anne thought. “Colt was always telling me that his dad was a pilot and that there was nothing he wanted more than to grow up and fly planes like him. But I never met the dad that he talked about. I knew his mom had boyfriends, but it didn’t sound like Colt liked any of them much.”
PAM FILED FOR DIVORCE from Bill Kohler in 1998, though it was never finalized. Bill left the family several times, and before Pam would let him come back, she’d search his bags for drugs. Even when she let him stay, he’d eventually leave again. After Bill came Van Jacobsen, a man described in Child Protective Services referrals as “an alcohol or drug abuser,” and another questionable role model for Colt. Van drifted in and out of the trailer over many years. Camano locals who know him say Van is “a nice, gentle guy” whose hard living has taken its toll. Pam herself described him as “not playing with a full deck.” Neighbors say it sounded like Pam always yelled more than talked to him, but Van kept coming back.
Gordy would also occasionally show up back at the trailer, and Pam says Colt didn’t like that. “He was a drunk, and Colt wanted him to leave. They did battle around here almost every day.” Colt even argued that Gordy was not his father, insisting to Pam that it was Bill. She says she understood his feelings. “I guess if you have a shitty father you choose the next best thing.”
With a growing resentment toward Gordy—and denied Bill, who he did feel close to—Colt clung to a fantasy father, the famous flier.
Other than his lifelong fascination with “up,” Pam says she doesn’t have a clue where Colton’s love of planes originated. None of the men Colt had seen with his mom was an actual pilot. She indulged his interest, though, by buying him balsawood fliers, those featherweight model planes that American boys have been zooming around their yards since World War I. The wafer-thin wings don’t stand up to much abuse, and after a few of his rough landings splintered the wood, Pam says Colt would go into meltdown mode. When he kept crashing and breaking every plane he got his hands on, Pam decided that instead of continually buying him new ones, it was smarter to get Colt a big sheet of balsa and let him start designing and building his own aircraft.
Pam says she also took Colton across Saratoga Passage to watch the planes taking off and landing at Whidbey Naval Air Station. Twenty-one active squadrons (the Zappers, Scorpions, Grey Wolves, Fighting Marlins, Black Ravens, and others) are based at Whidbey, with more than enough thundering warbirds in the air to rattle the bedroom windows and fuel flights of fancy for all the kids in Island County.
According to what Colton later told counselors, his relationship with his mom began to deteriorate by the time he started grade school. However, they still shared a love of the outdoors. They bonded over camping trips (“Maybe I shouldn’t have taught him all that survival stuff!”) and visits to Camano’s beaches. One day Pam drove him to the top of the island and dropped him off at Utsalady Beach. “I didn’t stay because I had a headache,” she says. “When I went back to pick him up at the end of the day, Colt had built hisself a really cool Robinson Crusoe camp using sticks and towels.”
He’d also captured what Pam remembers as forty Dungeness crabs (more than six times the legal limit) and had them piled on the beach. “He had a crowd of people watching, so I told him to pick the five biggest to bring home for dinner and let the rest go.”
Colton loved Dungeness crab,
Impervious to the cold water as only a true Northwest island boy could be, Colt would splash into the 50- degree sea wearing just his baggies. He’d stalk or swim over the sand and swaying eel grass until he spotted the broad purplish back of a Dungeness, then maneuver behind it. The predatory crabs earn their place in the food chain by cracking rock-hard clam shells with a pair of serrated claws that can also put a serious hurtin’ on any errant finger or pinkie toe. Colt, though, would fearlessly poke his toes beneath the crab’s belly then quickly flip it up. As the crab frantically flailed the water and snapped its claws, Colt’s hand would dart in to snatch it behind the last of its ten legs, safely out of pinching range.
Colt seemed a natural for the Cub Scouts. He joined up and began working his way through the ratings. Pam says he once even won the rain-gutter regatta, a race where the scouts blow through straws to propel little wooden sailboats down water-filled rain gutters. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it there to see him win because she says she’d gone back to work and had a night shift. She says Colton ultimately had to quit the scouts because she couldn’t take him to the meetings in the winter when it was too dark for her to drive.
Before he left the Cub Scouts, Colton advanced from Bobcat to Wolf Scout. In a childhood recorded by remarkably few photos, Colt’s Wolf certificate became one of his few treasured mementos.
