Today, the most popular hooch flowing south from Canada is the mind-bendingly potent wacky weed called BC Bud that, according to our local Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers, trades pound for pound with the cocaine headed north. The vast majority of drugs drive across the line hidden in trucks, but CBP has found weed, coke, and hockey bags filled with cash aboard boats crossing the 165-mile-long watery border that runs a zigzag course from the shore of the mainland, around the San Juan Islands, and out the Juan de Fuca Strait to the Pacific Ocean. The CBP’s Air and Marine base in Bellingham, just thirteen miles from Orcas, operates blistering-fast nine-hundred-horsepower patrol boats along with a Black Hawk helicopter loaded with all the high-tech surveillance goodies to keep watch on the sea border. Still, it’s the thinnest of thin blue lines.

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.