on Orcas, Grant, is a great model for someone like Colt. Grant grew up obsessed with planes and flying. So he worked at a gas station every day after school. Every time he got enough cash together, he’d pay for another hour of flight instruction. He slowly earned his way through his ratings and now he’s a top pilot for Alaska Airlines. Of course he also had to make his way through college: commercial pilots without bachelor’s degrees are almost nonexistent, another big hurdle for Colt.
“This kid could have been Top Gun if he’d gone the right way,” says Grant. “Out of the people like me, those totally into flying all their lives and who actually became airline pilots, probably 90 percent would have killed ourselves attempting to do what he did—flying without instruction and landing off-field three times. It’s a huge waste of talent.”
A WONDERFUL SIDE BENEFIT of what I do is that over the years I’ve been able to bring family members on some of my travels, particularly my father. Together, we’ve snorkeled with humpback whales, rappelled into caves filled with the skeletons of human sacrifices, hiked among grizzly bears, and had many other adventures—including several in the Bahamas. Seeing the blue-on-blue water again prompted memories of those trips and even much earlier times, like my dad teaching me to fish and squeezing us into a tiny, inflatable Kmart raft—basically a pool toy because that’s all the boat he could afford at the time—for a trip down the Delaware, our first great adventure.
Somewhere down there was a teenage boy who never had that. A kid with a lot of the same interests but no steady male role model to share the fun and teach him the life lessons that go along with learning how to handle boats as well as bullies. What would I have done if I didn’t have that man who came home from work every night to do what good fathers do, however imperfectly? My parents didn’t have a dime to spare for a lot of years, but they were always there, unconditionally. To grow up without them modeling responsible behavior and the rewards of hard work, I can’t imagine how I would have ended up. My own strong tendency toward risk taking got me into enough trouble coming from a good, stable home.
I felt a sudden pang of… embarrassment, maybe guilt. My blog that Colt had been reading linked to collections of my stories, including at least a couple of those father-son Bahamas-bonding trips. I wondered if Colt read them and, if so, how they made him feel.
THE PILOT REDUCING POWER to start our descent brought me back to the present. Another threatening cloud dominated the view out my window, dropping a curtain of rain across the north end of Eleuthera and its satellite islands: Spanish Wells, Royal, Russell, and Harbour Island. Suddenly a rainbow arced out of the thunderhead. I took a picture just to prove it wasn’t a sleep-deprived hallucination. It had to be a good omen for somebody.
By the time we touched down, the shower had scrubbed the air fresh and moved on, but it was still hot enough—about 90 degrees—that wisps of steam rose saunalike from the tarmac. It was 6:30, p.m., July 10, Bahamas Independence Day.
There’s a tiny police substation at the North Eleuthera Airport. Inside the dim room semi-cooled by a rattling air conditioner, a female officer sat behind a desk while a male cop sat opposite, fussing over an imaginary spot on the shiniest shoes I’d ever seen. A wanted poster with Colt’s picture hung on the wall. I pointed to it and asked if they had any evidence that he was on the island. I got a couple of noncommittal grunts until I pressed the question. Officer Shiny Shoes looked me up and down, then shared a nod with the other cop. “All inquiries as to current investigations should be made through the public affairs office in Nassau.” I asked about the boat at Preacher’s. “All inquiries as to… ”
I walked back outside. Mine had been the last flight in and all the other passengers were gone. Two taxi drivers who hadn’t snagged fares sat on a bench solving the world’s problems. I went over to get the skinny.
While I was talking to the taxi guys, Kenny Strachan was speaking to God.
“I PRAYED THAT DAY, talkin’ to the Lord, and He told me that the Barefoot Bandit was coming here to me,” says fifty-three-year-old Strachan. Born in Nassau, Kenny lived in New York for fifteen years, where he learned to install kitchen equipment. He came back to the Bahamas in the late eighties and worked at the Atlantis resort on Paradise Island, but eventually decided to try the slower pace of the Out Islands. In 2005, he moved to Harbour Island, the toniest of the Bahamas, famed for its pink sand beach and the fashion models and celebrities who pose and repose on it.
Harbour Island (shortened to “Briland” by locals) lies just a five-minute taxi-boat ride across a shallow bay from Eleuthera (likewise shortened to “ ’Lutra”). Kenny worked as head of security for Romora Bay, a marina resort on Briland’s harbor side.
Over the previous couple of days, the police had been handing out flyers about Colt all over North Eleuthera. There’d been no recent sightings and there hadn’t been any at all on Harbour Island, but on Saturday, a power even higher than the Royal Bahamian Police Force sent a definitive heads-up to Kenny that today was the day.
“When He told me the Bandit was comin’, I was axin’ the Lord what should I do when he gets here?” God wasn’t too specific with His answer, so just to cover his bases, Kenny also texted a message to RBPF detective Sergeant Hart at the Briland station: “When the Barefoot Bandit come, what should I do?”
Hart didn’t answer right away, but as Kenny pulled on his black SECURITY T-shirt to start his twelve-hour night shift, he made a fateful decision. “I have three licensed guns and I usually carry a shotgun when I’m on duty.”
Kenny packs a gun for its deterrent effect against what he calls the “little lootin’” that goes on. “This island is so calm and so lovely, people leave their doors open… and the looters look for that.”
There wouldn’t be any looting on Briland, Kenny says, if only the Bahamians would stop using the “old England–style, the old Angelo-Saxon–style” of policing where they don’t offer rewards. “It’s a very small community,” he says. “People know who is the culprits, but they just hush hush. If there was a little reward, oh my God, the police start nabbing, back after back.”
Kenny says the looters “look to see if you don’t have a camera or manpower security. And manpower is best to keep them away.”
Strachan’s manpower strategy is ninja. “I wear a black hooded jacket and stay in the dark bush, low, like a cat, and you don’t see me.” The potential thieves never know where Kenny is, and he’s also let word spread around that he brings along his little friend when he patrols. “Like hogs in a pen, looters know where it’s safe to rub they skins. So when they hear you have guns, they stay away.”
There hasn’t been a theft at Romora Bay since Kenny took on the job.
Saturday evening, though, Kenny decided to leave the shotgun in his room. “After the Lord showed me His plan that this boy was comin’ to me, I said, ‘I ain’t gonna have no gun when he come.’”
The Bahamian police and FBI were warning everyone that Colt was armed and dangerous, but that didn’t worry Kenny. “I wasn’t scared,” he says with a big gap-toothed smile. He had faith that the Barefoot Bandit was coming, and his plan was still to stop him, but he didn’t want to hurt him.
An unmarried father of three (“That’s the way it is here in the Bahamas, with a lot of no-wedlock children”), Kenny keeps himself in great shape. Broad-shouldered, six-one, 212 pounds, he cuts an imposing figure in his tight black shirt. “I’m really strong, and if he didn’t stop when I asked him to, then my plan was I would toss him and wrassle him.”
At 7:38 p.m., Kenny’s phone buzzed with an answer from Sergeant Hart: “Bust his ass and hold him until I come.”
AT THE AIRPORT, I’D gotten the expected stew of rumors and wild speculation from the taxi drivers. The only concrete info was that the big party tonight was at the Bluff, a small North Eleutheran settlement that hosts a yearly homecoming that draws Bahamian diaspora living in Nassau, Miami, and even farther afield for a major fish fry and bashment. This was one of the years when it fell on Independence Day, which made it even bigger and better.
A black SUV pulled up and out jumped a petite powerhouse, Petagay Hollinsed-Hartman. Born in Jamaica, Petagay came to the Bahamas via Key West when she and her former husband, Mike Hartman, created a ground- breaking eco resort named Tiamo on Andros Island. Petagay now lived on Eleuthera, raising her daughter, Bella, and running a small guesthouse, BellaMango, along with the Laughing Lizard Cafe. The Lizard (motto: “No Haters”)
