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.