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.

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.”