Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

When I arrived in town on a brilliantly sunny Thursday, August 6, 2009, the news was that a boat had been found that morning mysteriously abandoned off Eastsound’s Waterfront Park. Boats sometimes pull their anchors or slip their knots. They’ve also been found adrift after their owners leaned across the gunwale to take a leak and disappeared overboard. But not this boat.

The sheriff quickly connected it to the report of a boat stolen from La Conner, a touristy little harbor town on the mainland about nine miles from Camano Island. The trip north to Orcas covered between thirty and thirty-five miles, depending on whether the thief took the protected Swinomish Channel up and around Anacortes, or navigated the wild waters of Deception Pass.

It wasn’t quite a forty-foot war canoe, but for the residents of Orcas Island, it was still an ominous sign.

WITHIN DAYS, KYLE ATER, owner of Orcas Homegrown Market and Gourmet Delicatessen, discovered that someone had tried to break into his organic grocery on North Beach Road. The burglar climbed to the second floor, where Ater keeps an office adjacent to a long dining room lined with windows that provide a nearly 360-degree view of downtown. He reported it to the police and asked if it might be related to the previous year’s unsolved thefts or the recent stolen boat. The deputy, he says, assured him it was just an isolated incident.

“People had been stealing stuff from Homegrown for years before I bought it,” says Ater. “Kids just walking out with beer from the cooler… and the police never did anything about it because this was just the stinky barefoot hippie place.”

Ater, who’d been on the island for eleven years, sank everything he had into buying Homegrown in 2006. He’d been burglarized shortly after taking over the grocery, and he was determined not to let anyone rip him off again. Like nearly every other Eastsound business after all the mysterious summer of ’08 troubles, Homegrown had a security and surveillance system. Ater, though, decided to take it all the way. Each evening after they closed up, he and his girlfriend, Cedra, took their two dogs, Pumpkin and Skyla, plus a loaner Rottweiler named Mattie, and camped out on the floor of the office upstairs. Kyle also bought himself a .44 Magnum revolver.

Serene Orcas Island at the height of its summer season, with tourists in killer whale T-shirts strolling the quaint downtown eating ice cream cones, now had its slender, bespectacled purveyor of natural foods and holistic health supplements patrolling the ramparts packing Dirty Harry heat.

ON AUGUST 18, MEMBERS of a prayer group noticed a short-haired young man acting oddly inside St. Francis Catholic Church, which sits kitty-corner to the airport. The guy awkwardly knelt down at the votive candles and then looked up. He wasn’t gazing as far as heaven, though. He had more secular concerns. When he spotted the surveillance cameras, he flipped a hoodie up over his head and left. He unnerved the parishioners enough that one asked for an escort to the parking lot. Two days later, someone broke into the church through a back window, busted open the sacrament room with a hammer and screwdriver, and then climbed up into the ceiling to take four of the security cameras along with the attached DVR. No money or other items were stolen, just the surveillance system. The thief left behind two cameras, but poked them toward the ceiling so they couldn’t watch him.

Somebody messing with the church went beyond the pale, and Eastsounders held their breath, wondering if St. Francis was just the beginning of another crime spree. The recession was in full swing, tourism down, and local businesses needed to squirrel away every summer dollar to get them through what could be another tough winter.

The previous year’s “plague” had briefly reminded residents that, as San Juan County sheriff Bill Cumming told me, “The San Juans do have a dark side.” A look through back issues of the Islands’ Sounder showed occasional flare-ups, with a spate of burglaries occurring every few years on Orcas, San Juan, or Lopez Island. These were almost always attributed to local meth heads.

Learning that there was even such a thing as a local meth head on Orcas rocked my idyllic-island construct. On reflection, though, it made sense. We were a rural, overwhelmingly white community in western Washington State: the perfect formula for growing tweakers. Police officers from the TV shows Cops and Washington’s Most Wanted told speed-fiend stories on Bob Rivers’s radio show, saying they’d actually responded to “meth-induced chainsaw fights” in the rustic communities not far from cosmopolitan Seattle. As one officer said: “The reason why Cops likes us so much is because we have a lot of crazy white people up here. And crazy white people make for good TV.”

Of course, like all the other crime issues, the meth problem on Orcas was at a relatively low level.

Reality took a bit of the bloom off the idyllic Orcas rose, but Sandi and I still weren’t locking our doors. We had a big dog, Murphy, a six-foot-from-nose-to-tail Leonberger, which I believe is a cross between a bouncy Tigger and a grizzly bear—at least in Murphy’s case. Once we moved to this eminently dog-friendly island, Murphy became a permanent fixture in my pickup truck, going everywhere I went with his massive head hanging out the cab’s back window like a trophy mount. With so little crime, we never felt the need to have him stay home to watch over the property. As it was, Murphy’s concept of guard-dogging wasn’t to prevent anyone from entering the house—leaving, yes, but not entering. Whenever he sensed someone outside our little cabin, instead of barking to warn them off, he silently stalked them, moving from door to door, hackles up, muscles tensed. No amount of prodding could get him to change his strategy. He’d raise a hellhound yowl if someone actually knocked, but if they were just lurking around out there, he waited with a distinct “I’m finally gonna get to eat somebody” excitement.

August 27, 2009, around 3 a.m., Murphy padded heavily into the bedroom, snuffed at the window screen, and raised his hackles. I already had my eyes half open as I’d been lying there with that strange feeling that something had woken me but I didn’t know what. The clouded moon bathed the room in just enough dim blue light to see the dog at the window. Then my eyes suddenly opened wider. All manner of deer, raccoons, mink, and other critters rustle around our cabin at night, but none of them had ever moved lumber. Murphy and I both heard the clack of wood against wood in the crawlspace.

The dirt-floor area under the cabin lies open on one end and anything could have wandered in there. It must have been a deer, I thought, because nothing else would be big enough to knock around the 2 × 4s. We listened for a while but nothing else happened. Yep, had to be a deer stumbling around, maybe drunk on huckleberries. My last thought as I rolled over and went back to sleep was, I hope it didn’t knock loose any of the plumbing.

The following night, again around 3 a.m., I woke to the sensation of someone watching me in the darkness. This would have been terrifying if I wasn’t used to living with a pony-size dog who thinks he has mind-control powers. Murphy believes if he stares down at me long and hard enough I’ll get up and do his bidding—mainly his feeding. He usually waits until after sunrise, though, so this was unusual. When he knew I was awake, he went to the window, again snuffle-snorting like a bear and raising his hackles. I sat up and listened, but couldn’t hear anything except a rare summer sprinkling of rain against the metal roof. The thought of pulling on shoes and a rain shell, finding a flashlight, stumbling around under the cabin, and then having to dry off a half acre of wet dog was too much just to chase away some dilettante critter trying to shelter from a shower. The cabin perches atop a hundred-foot cliff, which means there’s also no option of simply loosing the hound. In the past, several Orcas dogs tailing hard after deer have Thelma-and-Louised themselves off cliffs.