Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

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.

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 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.