I continued traveling frequently for assignments, but now I never worried about Sandi. She was perfectly safe at home, and if she broke down on the road, the next person along would stop and either fix her car or drive her to town. Teenage girls hitchhike around the San Juan Islands without a worry, and getting a ride is so easy that longtime residents think nothing of even counting on their thumbs to get them to the ferry on time.
So we settled in happily, having only the same great concern as every other working person on Orcas: Now that we found this wonderful place, how the hell do we afford to stay here? A good number of wealthy people live on the island, and many more have summer homes. The guy in front of you in line at the hardware store may be the ex-CEO of a huge multinational, a Hollywood producer, or a sickeningly young Internet retiree who optioned out of lastbubble.com just in time. At the other end of the scale, nearly 9 percent of San Juan County residents lived below the poverty line in 2008. There are people who are homeless and there are people who squat in illegal campsites, jetsam shacks, and barely floating boats. There are tarp-topped trailers and threadbare yurts, and a number of people you regularly see around the island look like they’ve escaped from somewhere.
In between the lost souls and CEOs lay the rest of us: retirees getting by and a working middle class of small-business owners, organic farmers, county workers, carpenters and other tradesfolk, plus an eclectic mix of sculptors, potters, painters, musicians, and writers—many of whom wish they knew carpentry or some other skill that might earn them a steadier income.
The island has no industries other than real estate, construction, and seasonal tourism, so there are very few jobs that pay enough to keep you alive in a place where the price of necessities like groceries and gas are 30 percent higher than the mainland. San Juan County has the second-highest income per capita in Washington State, but its average wage is ranked thirty-fifth out of thirty-nine counties. This means that while there’s a lot of money floating around the islands, very little of it is being made by residents who have to work for a living. Most of it comes via investment income of the rich and retired (one-fifth of Orcas’s population is over sixty-five). Property costs—which are bid up by the wealthy from all over the world who discover Orcas and want to own a piece as a part-time getaway—coupled with the few jobs and low wages make it especially hard for kids born here. They grow up in this fabulous, desirable place, but then many of them find they can’t afford to stay if they ever want to own a home of their own.
While I took on every assignment I could wrangle, Sandi went to work in real estate, because if there’s one thing in this world you can count on, it’s the real estate market.
As the crash began, Sandi picked up a second and then a third job, becoming one of many, many Orcas residents who work multiple jobs in order to help their family cling to what they think is the most wonderful rock on the planet. Orcas or bust.
Chapter 5
I was drinking a late-morning cup of tea when the news reached me about Bob Rivers’s plane.
With some 230,000 general aviation aircraft based in the United States, there have been, on average, only eight stolen each year of the last decade. Nearly all of those thefts happen near or across the Mexican border, especially in Baja, where authorities say cartel lookouts keep watch for the right kinds of planes—primarily Cessnas—then call in trained air pirates to fly them off to join drug-carrying fleets. American private pilots even refer to certain antitheft devices that fit over throttles and props as “Mexican locks.”
Of course there’s another border to the north. Ever since it became part of the United States, Orcas Island, with its scalloped shoreline, deep fjords, and dark, secluded coves, has enjoyed a storied history as a transshipment point for whatever products the era’s taxes and laws made profitable to move from Canada into the lower forty- eight. Silk, wool clothing, Chinese laborers, opium for the Chinese laborers, Prohibition whiskey, and so on came through with a wink and a nod. At its closest point, the Canadian border lies less than a five-mile boat run from Orcas’s northwest tip. The beach at the top of the island isn’t called Smuggler’s for nothing.
Today, the most popular hooch flowing south from Canada is the mind-bendingly potent wacky weed called BC Bud that, according to our local Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, trades pound for pound with the cocaine headed north. The vast majority of drugs drive across the line hidden in trucks, but CBP has found weed, coke, and hockey bags filled with cash aboard boats crossing the 165-mile-long watery border that runs a zigzag course from the shore of the mainland, around the San Juan Islands, and out the Juan de Fuca Strait to the Pacific Ocean. The CBP’s Air and Marine base in Bellingham, just thirteen miles from Orcas, operates blistering-fast nine- hundred-horsepower patrol boats along with a Black Hawk helicopter loaded with all the high-tech surveillance goodies to keep watch on the sea border. Still, it’s the thinnest of thin blue lines.
Orcas residents who live near the airport have grown accustomed to hearing planes taking off and landing at all hours of the night. “There are a lot of legitimate reasons for planes to be operating then, especially medical evacuations,” says Bea Von Tobel, the airport manager. “But it’s also not too hard to imagine a plane coming in to drop off a bag of something and then taking off again.”
Once a bale, bag, or bad guy smuggled out of Canada made it onto Orcas Island, it or he would be close to home free. The San Juans may mentally, culturally, and psychically feel like its own independent, far-out archipelago, but it’s part of the United States. Orcas is one of four islands in the group served by Washington State Ferries, the largest ferry system in the country, third largest in the world. There are no passport checks, no Customs, and no security screenings to walk or drive onto a ferry at Orcas, and there’d only recently been some random stops at Anacortes on the mainland, where cars rolled off to drive to Anywhere, U.S.A.
“My first thought, after checking to make sure any of my pilot friends who might have borrowed the plane were okay, was that it obviously had to be taken for a drug run,” says Bob Rivers. “Everything fit. The random stops were happening. Somebody must have had a load they needed to get off Orcas, so they brought in a pilot to fly it out. Where does the plane end up? The Yakama reservation, where they have plenty of problems with drugs and gangs. Even the spot my plane landed was at the top of a road where they could have had an SUV waiting. And they weren’t worried about getting the plane out, just transporting the load. It all made sense; it had to be drugs. My plane stolen to take a joyride? Never. Especially not on a day like that!”
Rivers’s insurance agent had other ideas. “I started feeling like a suspect because all the insurance guy ever said was, ‘We’re sure it was someone you know. Who do you know who could have done this?’”
In one of many fateful connections and coincidences to emerge as Colton Harris-Moore stole his way around the Northwest, his theft of Bob Rivers’s plane actually saved a life. One of Rivers’s pilot friends had been suffering through devastating health and work problems. Things looked hopeless, so he came up with a plot to kill himself by flying a small plane up into the Cascades until the wings iced over and it fell out of the sky. When he heard about Rivers’s plane, though, he had to cancel his suicide because he knew the insurance company would never believe the coincidence of two aircraft connected to two friends going down in the same mountains, both under suspicious circumstances. He feared that his family would never collect the life insurance. So he kept living, and things ultimately turned around and got better for him.
While the insurance company grilled Bob Rivers over his crashed Cessna, the residents of Orcas went back to their lives, the theft just another twisted footnote to add to local history.
Chapter 6
The fire blazing in their outdoor woodstove made it feel like our friends Jay Fowler and Teri Williams were telling ghost stories that cool summer evening in 2008, several months before Bob Rivers’s plane was stolen. Teri, a real estate and building permit pro, had found our home for us. Jay works as a lineman for OPALCO, which is officially called Orcas Power and Light Cooperative when things are operating okay, but is locally known as Occasional Power and Light because the electricity goes out whenever a seal farts near the underwater cable that feeds the island.
Between the two of them, they knew the island, its people, and its goings-on as well as anybody. They’d been instrumental in helping us rush our plans to move to Orcas full-time, and now, when the wine and beer were flowing after we’d just finished off a wonderful Northwest potluck of fresh-caught salmon and Dungeness crab, they
