The mordantly mundane reality is that people who jump off bridges or fall from boats or otherwise end up in the region’s rivers flow to the sea just like the trees that turn into the driftwood piled high on Northwest beaches. Hands and feet, like smaller branches on a floating tree, eventually come loose and the feet—usually shod in buoyant sneakers—sail off on their own journeys, eventually stepping back ashore to freak out beachcombers.

Our most recent headline-making incident occurred in March 2008, when we were treated to the electrifying work of a performance artist/eco-avenger named Gabriel Mondragon, who pulled on Playtex kitchen gloves and tried to cut one of Orcas’s power lines with a metal pole saw. His stated goal had been to wreak revenge on “rich white people” because a young orca whale had swum into a tugboat’s propeller 170 miles away in Canada. When the first lineman arrived, the anarchist’s pants were still smoking. He lost an arm, but survived.

While the occasional titillating crime or wayward body part added to island lore, the core belief on Orcas was that our wide moat of chilly Salish seawater stocked with giant Pacific octopuses and killer whales protected us from the horrifyingly random rapes, home invasions, and murders of the mainland. Bad guys knew it’d be stupid to commit a serious crime on a small island with very limited means of escape. Orcas residents enjoyed such a low crime rate and had such a comforting sense of security ingrained into their island identity that most of us never locked our doors—not cars, not homes, often not even businesses. When local sheriff’s deputies did shop-by-shop checks in Eastsound, our one little town, they regularly found open doors and windows.

A deputy once asked a young woman whose car had been taken (and quickly recovered) whether she’d left the keys inside. She replied, “Of course I did: I’m an island girl.”