Orcas Island’s Dark Underbelly, If You Could Call It That

If I were the superstitious type, I might see this past week’s happenings as omens. My husband has recounted the last several nights as he was sitting in bed. One jerked with a quick, jarring earthquake – a little 3.1 whose epicenter was 10 miles away. Another night the lights clicked off; the power was out. Another night, we found out a woman had driven off a ferry landing to her death. The stock market tanked the next. Last night, as he and I were talking in bed, we heard a CRASH with an ensuing griiiiiind. I ran up to the main road to find an inebriated, bleeding man who had crashed his truck into a boulder in our neighbor’s driveway. Had anyone else been in his path, they would not be here today.

I walk the roads of Orcas Island each day reading about the realities of life around the world. A woman set on fire while living in the squalor of an Indian slum in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. The rescuing of trafficked children forced into prostitution in Svay Pak, Cambodia, in Terrify No More. The invisible horror millions of North Koreans are forced to live with in Escape from Camp 14 and Without You, There Is No Us. (Someday I hope to be a very intentional part of the solution to some of these horrible things.)

While the harshnesses of life are usually lighter and a bit more spread out here on the island, we see them more closely in this small community. We all come into the three-block town to get mail, buy groceries, go to school, rent a video, visit the library, and go to the bank. We know each other’s names and see each other’s lives. We know whose kids have meth-addicted parents. We know of the abuse that happened to so-and-so. We see who is walking from the liquor store with bag-covered purchases in the mornings before school. We watch a marijuana-growing facility being built in a family kind of neighborhood.

When we first moved here, I went off onto all the off-trails I could find to photograph the beauty and came back with a camera chip full of ugliness. The bathtub in the forest wasn’t so bad. Someone was apparently avoiding having to pay to dispose of the behemoth, but I could think of lots of interesting photoshoots that could incorporate its eccentric location. The plastic bits covering – I mean covering – Eastsound Beach were more alarming, which I later learned were called “nurdles.” The camp I found nestled by a stream with a living-room-size area of strewn, rain-soaked clothes over the grass was sad.

But the darkest thing I happened upon was deep in the middle of a forest right next to the fire department in town. The trees are so close together that no light penetrates them; they all look dead except for the greenery at their very tops. Inside this forest, it is dark even on the brightest of days. There’s a haunting feeling just walking into it, even though it’s probably no bigger than half a football field, because you don’t know what’s in there; you just know there has to be something. There is. Or at least there was; I was told by the fire department that they have removed it all before, only to have it proliferate again there or somewhere else. “It” being a small little camp area with a few chairs, old food containers, a few garments hanging on branches, and dozens of condoms. If you understood how small our community was and how acquainted we are with each other, at least in passing, you’d understand the concern. Who is this? Is it consensual or forced? Even if it is consensual, is it the same rotating people every time or is there some undercurrent we Orcas folk know little of? I had a hard time thinking those thoughts that day, and especially a few years later when we heard rumors of a young student at school who was supposedly repeatedly abused. I still don’t know much about all of this, thankfully.

Enough darkness for now. The sun is finally shining, the heavy gray has lifted, even if for a day or so, and I must get back to my book now that the roads are crystal-bright.