were telling us there might be a crime problem.
Teri said that the top cop on Orcas had passed along a private warning about a series of strange break-ins on the island. “He said, ‘If you knew the shit that I did, you’d start locking your doors.’”
I was incredulous. We’d been living on the island full-time for over a year and a half and nothing had occurred that might cloud the idyllic image of our new home. Sandi and I discussed it on the way home and weren’t concerned enough to change anything. Besides, neither of us had even seen a house key since Christmas.
The details were sketchy anyway—just jungle-drum rumors. I figured I’d check out some of the stories floating around to see if there was anything to them. Little did I realize that what we didn’t know—including some unnerving incidents that our sheriff’s office was trying hard to keep quiet—was enough to fill a book. Our untouchable little island had already become the happy hunting ground of the twenty-first century’s first outlaw legend.
THOUGH JUST A BIT over thirteen miles wide, it can take an hour to drive from one side of Orcas to the other, as roads skirt mountains and coast around the three inlets that cut deeply into the island from the south. A seven-mile-long fjord, East Sound, nearly cuts Orcas Island in two. At the top of the waterway lies the island’s only town, creatively named Eastsound.
The town wanders back from its waterfront Main Street and climbs a slight rise. On the other side of the hill, which runs down to the ocean, lies a pocket of schools and churches and the small airport. From shore to shore— fjord to sea—Orcas is barely 1.3 miles wide at Eastsound, with the great bulk of the island hanging down to either side of town. A big-idea guy once tried to dig a canal across that narrow span so trading ships wouldn’t have to sail clear around the island and up the long sound. Fortunately he gave up after dredging only about four hundred yards, leaving what’s known as the Ditch, now used as a marina, between the airport runway and Smuggler’s Villa Resort.
Behind town on Mount Baker Road—named for its spectacular view of the closest snow-capped volcano on the mainland—lies Orcas Center, the cultural core of an island that hosts a tremendous amount of artistic and musical talent in relation to its size.
From Main, Eastsound’s shopping district runs up two streets: North Beach Road and Prune Alley, which contrary to popular belief was not named by the island’s retirees in homage to their favorite fiber. It got its name because, along with apples, pears, and strawberries, Orcas farmers once grew and exported large harvests of Italian plums.
There are no stoplights in Eastsound—or anywhere else on the island. It’s a one-horse town, though instead of a horse, there’s a cow. Her name is April, she’s twenty-three, lovably homely, and lives in a field at the end of Enchanted Forest Road. April the cow is also a perennial candidate for mayor. Since the town remains unincorporated, it has no actual government. Each year we elect an animal as honorary mayor. It costs $1 a vote, and all proceeds go to support Orcas Island Children’s House, a facility that helps local working-class families with educational day care and preschool. The fund-raising pitch for Children’s House reads in part: “money not invested in a child during this early phase may cost the emerging community member, and society, enormously in the form of a socially disruptive adulthood.”
From an adult’s perspective, the island seems an idyllic place to grow up. For some tweens and teens, though, once their hormones tell them that climbing trees and catching fish can’t possibly be the end-alls of excitement, the island becomes a big ball of boring. With nothing much to do—not to mention a very limited dating pool—kids begin looking for trouble. Some manage to limit themselves to high jinks such as Yogi Bearing picnic baskets and beer from tourists in Moran State Park. Others go further, venturing into more felonious behavior. No matter what they do, though, there’s a good chance they’ll get caught. Kids call the island Orcatraz because everywhere they turn there’s a prison guard in the form of someone who knows their parents and won’t hesitate to call them.
In the early nineties, there suddenly seemed to be a flood of serious trouble with local island kids. Orcas residents looked around and realized they had a big problem.
The single mother of one troublemaker asked Mike Stolmeier, manager of Smuggler’s Villa Resort, to accompany her son to the courthouse in Friday Harbor, the county seat, over on San Juan Island.
“There was a dozen other Orcas kids on that ferry, eighth and ninth graders, all going over to get felony charges put on them, and not one parent or even a lawyer with them,” says Stolmeier. “I thought, What a bunch of idiot parents we got around here.”
Stolmeier had been on Orcas since 1985, was raising his own teen, and saw the storm developing. “Yeah, the kids were screwed up and behaving badly, but it was as if we were eating our young. The community was after them, the cops were after them, and the prosecutor we had at the time was trying to make a reputation so he could move on to someplace else. The community overreacted and really ruined some lives—there was no way those kids would ever get a chance to try and fit back into our society. As a sociological event, it was horrible.”
Level heads in the community came up with an alternative to hiring a
According to stats put together by one of those nonprofit programs, the Orcas Funhouse, over the last decade Orcas kids have grown significantly less drunk, stoned, and pregnant. They’ve also consistently graded above state average in testing across all subjects. And the latest numbers show that between 2000 and 2006, overall arrests of ten- to fourteen-year-olds fell 63 percent, and property crime arrests of ten- to seventeen-year- olds in San Juan County fell 83 percent.
AS FAR AS SPORTS and activities for those over twenty-one, Eastsound has the Lower Tavern. There used to be an Upper Tavern, too, which lives on in stories told whenever visitors ask what the Lower is lower than. Almost all of the stores, restaurants, and inns around Eastsound are mom-and-pops—and many just mom’s, as more than a third of all the businesses in the county are owned by women. The largest anything on Orcas is a regulation-size supermarket owned by a longtime island family. Everything else is scaled down. You won’t find superstores or fast-food drive-throughs, but you can walk from Darvill’s Books to Pawki’s for Pets to Rose’s Bakery.
Any island business that can’t cover its yearly nut by selling essentials to locals has basically a two-month window of heavy tourist traffic in July and August to keep itself afloat. In 2008, every Eastsound business suffered when Orcas’s lone large resort, Rosario, shut down for two years, eliminating nearly one hundred jobs from an island with very few to start with. One of the hardest hit was Vern’s Bayside Restaurant and Lounge.
THE FRINGE ON FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Belinda Landon’s groovy suede boots rarely hangs limp. She could pour drinks behind the bar, take an order from an inside table, check on the action in the little billiards room, then service the tables on the waterfront patio where Vern’s patrons soak up the sun—all in the space of about four minutes.
Landon has worked bars and restaurants since she was fourteen, and from her hard-won look and throaty voice, there’s no mistaking that she’s inhaled some smoky scenes and spent some happy hours in her forty-three years of slinging hash and pulling taps. Plainspoken Belinda is, as they say, one gal who’ll tell you whose cow ate the barley. She made her way to Orcas from Idaho twenty-five years ago with two kids and a husband. He left her and she met Vern, who had his own four kids and whose wife left him. There’s an old Orcas adage that says, “On this island, you don’t lose your spouse, you just lose your turn.”
Belinda and Vern and their collective kids hooked up, as she says, “
The space had a checkered history. “It had dozens of owners over the years and it always went broke,” says Belinda. “We were the only ones left stupid enough to take it.” No one, however, had tried to keep the restaurant
