Bob Friel - The Barefoot Bandit

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 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang –style child catcher. They developed a number of sports, activities, and mentoring programs to give the kids something constructive to do. “These were things that should have been here for them in the first place,” says Stolmeier. “It worked for the kids who hadn’t already gotten in trouble, and things got a lot better for everybody.”

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, “ Brady Bunch –style.” She worked at Rosario Resort back then, as did her daughter, Marion Rathbone, who also started in the food and beverage business at fourteen. Vern was a mason by trade, but ran a little café at the time and always wanted something bigger. A deal came up for what you’d think would be an ideal location for a restaurant: central waterfront, spectacular view, upstairs casual dining room, downstairs bar with space for a couple of pool tables, and a sunny patio just above the lapping waters of East Sound.

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 open year-round, and Vern thought that was the secret. They opened in 1993. It was never a gold mine, but they made a go of it.

Vern died in January 2006. Then when Rosario closed in 2008 they lost a lot of regulars who’d clock out of their resort jobs and head to town for drinks. Real estate and construction evaporated in the housing bust, forcing a lot of tradesmen off the island. As the U.S. economy further tanked, everyone—locals and tourists alike—spent less. Belinda had two neck surgeries, two back surgeries, and one on her arm, but she still worked full shifts cooking, waiting tables, and tending bar, trying to keep the business alive. Her daughter, Marion, served as general manager and tried to pull in trade by playing karaoke queen down in the bar.

On August 26, 2008, a package came to Vern’s addressed to Belinda. Marion took one look and called up the vendor. Despite their guarantee that her mom would pass all FAA tests or they’d refund her money, Marion told them Belinda was not interested in Sporty’s Complete Recreational Pilot Flight Training Course. Her mom was not, at the moment, tempted to go Top Gun .

Sporty’s informed Marion that they’d received a valid online order for the six-DVD set from Belinda’s credit card. She replied that her mom didn’t know how to use a “friggin’ computer let alone order something online.” Sporty’s said they’d be happy to give her a refund.

Marion resealed the package and set it on the desk below the window unit air conditioner that cooled her small, cluttered office adjacent to the restaurant’s kitchen. She then went back to handling the hundreds of daily details it takes to keep a restaurant running.

The following morning when Marion arrived at work, her office door was already open. Everything seemed okay at first glance, but then she stepped inside and peeked around the dividing wall that formed a little storage space for office supplies and the restaurant’s safe.

“It looked like a bomb had gone off,” she says. Powder from the cement used to fill the walls of the metal safe was everywhere. A hammer from Vern’s old toolbox lay broken on the floor. Someone had used it and a crowbar to peel back the steel of the safe until the lock gave way. It’d been a major demolition job, very noisy and done on exactly the right night.

Marion felt sick to her stomach. With the rumors of break-ins happening around the island, she’d just convinced her mom to move her personal cash into the office safe instead of keeping it at home. That money was gone, as were two credit cards, Belinda’s birth certificate and social security card, and her late husband’s passport. To make matters worse, the first thing Marion had planned to do that morning was go to the bank and make her weekly deposit of cash emptied from the bar’s pull tab gambling machine. In all, more than $10,000 of uninsurable cash was missing.