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.