The spark that eventually brought Colton Harris-Moore into the world struck when his mother chose “Crazy.”
She was Pam Harris back then, and had gone to a restaurant/cocktail lounge in Lynnwood, Washington, to wait for her oldest sister. After ordering a beer, she punched up the Patsy Cline classic on the jukebox.
There were few patrons in the lounge, but two guys sitting at the bar were talking and laughing so loudly that Pam could barely hear her song. She got up from her table, fed more money into the jukebox, and played it again. The boys kept up the rough chatter, though. Pam drank her beer, lit a cigarette, and did a slow burn. When the song ended, she got up and went for “Crazy” one more time. On the way back to her table, she screeched, “Be quiet so I can hear it this time!”
That got their attention.
“One of them turned around, got up, and came across the room,” she says. “He was a big guy, muscular, and I thought, Oh God, I’m going to get hit.”
Pam tells the story without any hint that it strikes her as anything but normal that a guy would give a gal a smack in the kisser.
Born Pamela Ann Coaker in the spring of 1951, Pam was the youngest of four—three girls and a boy—spread over nine years. Her father was big in road construction in Kittitas County, Washington, just east of the Cascades, where his family had a sheep farm. According to his oldest grandchild, he was also a big drinker, afflicted with what she calls “the Coaker curse.” Pam’s mother grew up in the Dakotas as the oldest of fifteen kids in a family with a dash of Sioux blood in their veins—something the entire clan cites to explain their fondness for running around barefoot.
Pam’s mom suffered through a couple of bad marriages, lost her voicebox to cancer, and, according to family, used alcohol to help deal with the pain. Both of Pam’s parents died in their early sixties.
Pam grew up loving the outdoors, and some of her favorite early memories involve listening to her father play guitar around campfires. She also enjoyed clamming, crabbing, and fishing, even though she’s never gotten over a fear of the water. As a teen in the sixties, Pam got into the Beatles and organic gardening, dressed hippie, and wore headbands over long hair that she straightened on an ironing board.
At seventeen, she married an air force mechanic named Harry and moved to San Bernardino, California, where she gave birth to her first son, Paul. Pam loved life in California, but moved back to Washington State and then east to Missouri as Harry followed work. When Chrysler laid him off, the family returned to Washington and settled in for a few happy years. The marriage ended, according to Paul, when Harry left Pam because of her drinking.
Paul, who plans to write a book about his difficult childhood, grew up a latchkey kid, often left alone while Pam worked during the day or was out at night. From the age of six, he’d come home from school to an empty apartment, call one of his cousins, and stay on the phone until his aunt could get there to pick him up. During those years, Pam worked at a dry cleaner and then in Seattle at a series of government jobs in the accounts payable sections of the Department of the Interior, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Navy.
The oldest of her batch of nieces and nephews remembers Pam as more of a sibling than as an adult figure. She was the “cool aunt,” with a great record collection and even a blurry picture she’d taken of the Beatles running onstage.
“We’d listen to music and go to concerts,” her niece says. “We were holding tickets to go see Lynyrd Skynyrd when they died in the plane crash.” The niece also remembers Pam telling her who her real father was and helping her get in touch with him—something that pissed off her mother, Pam’s oldest sister, to no end. “Pam always did her own thing,” she says. “She didn’t care what anybody thought about her, what they thought about the men in her life, about her drinking, or smoking ‘her weed.’ Her attitude was ‘I do what I want, when I want, how I want.’ ”
Another of Pam’s notable qualities was her thriftiness. “Tightwad,” says her niece. “Her apartment was always freezing in the winter because she refused to turn on the heat and pay for the electric bill.” Pam’s alcohol budget back then went to a generic econo-brew in a stark white can plainly and boldly labeled BEER.
In June 1985, Pam remarried, this time to Jerry Harris, a guy who’d dated her older sister Sandy for a couple of years. That union didn’t last long, though, and soon after it spoiled, Pam found herself in that cocktail lounge faced with the imposing six-foot figure of Gordon “Gordy” Moore bearing down on her while Patsy Cline wondered why she let herself worry.
“He walked over to my table and just said, ‘What?’ So I said, ‘I’ve been trying to listen to this song three times! Will you shut up?’ He laughed, thank God. And then he invited me up to the bar to sit with him and his friend. We had a few drinks—whiskey for him, beer on my side—and then he said, ‘Hey, you want to go to the beach tomorrow?’ I gave him my phone number and said, ‘Call me—at noon.’ ”
Though she doubted he would, Gordy called—at 11:59. He picked her up and, after a nice day at the beach, said he wanted to introduce her to his folks. “I thought, Well, that’s a little quick,” says Pam. “My hair was all windblown and I didn’t bring a brush, so on the way to his parents’ place he stopped and bought me one. I thought that was pretty cool.”
Gordy worked as a concrete finisher with full journeyman status and made a good hourly wage. He filled Pam’s kitchen with food every time he came over, putting so many cans on her shelves that she couldn’t shut the cupboard doors. “He met my son, Paul, and everything was cool there, too,” she says.
Gordy liked to smoke turkeys and shared Pam’s love of the outdoors, taking her, Paul, and one of Paul’s cousins camping several times.
Pam yearned to live someplace more rural than Lynnwood, a Seattle satellite primarily known for its shopping centers and convenient highway access. She was also tired of the long commute to her government job, though she made the best of it. Once during a heavy snowstorm, her bus got stuck in a drift coming home. “I told the driver she should get off and get us all pizza and beer,” says Pam. The driver refused, so Pam led a mutiny among the passengers, piloting them to a local Black Angus, where they spent the next few hours warm and toasting.
According to Pam, Gordy worked hard and when the whistle blew he enjoyed the bars. His concept of the ideal home had a pub within walking distance. Pam’s woodsy dreams, though, finally persuaded him to pool his money with what she’d raised by cashing in her retirement funds so they could buy a couple of lots on the skinny tail end of an island called Camano.
Shaped like the Pink Panther bound in a straitjacket, forty-square-mile Camano is technically an island, though it’s a drive-to. The mainland gateway is the little city of Stanwood, where a conglomeration of superstores and strip malls overwhelms the remnants of a traditional town plopped in the middle of redolently fertilized farmland watered by the Stillaguamish River. A bridge crosses the Stilly just as it deltas into the Salish Sea and offers Camano residents a twenty-four-hour umbilical to civilization—which is good and bad. The good is that people are able to live on a Pacific Northwest island with all its evergreen and coastal beauty, yet still drive to whatever they need instead of being held hostage to a ferry schedule. The bad is that because its residents have relatively easy access to other communities and services, Camano hasn’t developed its own resources like Orcas Island has been forced to, with its own kids’ programs, performing arts centers, library, museums, and high school.
In many ways, Camano sits in limbo between being a true island community and simply a suburb surrounded by water. About a third of the 13,400 Camano Islanders are retired, and many of the rest roll across the bridge twice a day as they head to and from jobs at Boeing, or in Stanwood or Seattle, or somewhere else along the I-5 corridor. Its accessibility also makes Camano a popular vacation-home market. On summer Fridays, it seems every third car crammed onto the causeway has kayaks on top or a boat on a trailer as weekenders flood the island.
Wherever you are on the island, you’re a single turn from one of the four Camano Drives: East, West, North, and South. East Camano heads down island, offering sharp views of the Cascades across Port Susan Bay. Traffic and commercial buildings peter out to nothing as you pass the Camano Plaza’s big IGA. A utilitarian stretch on the west side of East Camano Drive houses a sparse collection of county offices. Island County once encompassed a big chunk of western Washington State but was chipped away over time so that it’s now made up of just Camano and Whidbey plus a smattering of smaller islands. Whidbey, with four times the acreage and three times the population of Camano—along with the county seat, Coupeville, and a big military base—overshadows its little sister, which even geologically seems to curl defensively inside the larger island. Camano residents talk of living in Island County’s forgotten hinterlands, and since county money follows population and pull, they’re right.
It takes ninety minutes to drive the circuitous route from Camano to Coupeville. That’s about twenty minutes longer than it takes Camano residents to get to downtown Seattle. It takes that same ninety minutes for Island County police to get from their Whidbey Island headquarters to the dinky prefab that serves as base for Camano’s small group of sheriff’s deputies.
Around 70 percent of Camano remains forested with thick second-growth. Drooping cedars, showy big-leaf maples, and stately Douglas fir crowd together so tightly along some sections of road that you can’t see past the first line into the woods. Outside about a dozen small subdivisions, many of the island’s homes are hidden down long tree-lined drives. Houses run the gamut from tarped single-wides to opulent log cabins fit for gentrified Jeremiah Johnsons to modern high-windowed manses facing sweeping ocean views. As you’d expect, plots along the coastline are pricey, with values dropping dramatically as you move inland. Rough-hewn fishing and crab shacks dotted the waterfront back in the day, but most have been torn down over the last few decades, replaced with large homes. As on Orcas, many of Camano’s finest homes are seconds—occupied only on weekends or for a couple of weeks each summer.
As you continue south on the island, the houses spread out and the view is mostly wooded acreage—private property along with public land and parks—with plenty of room to roam, or hide.
Mountain View Road, near the top of Elger Bay, serves as Camano’s Mason-Dixon Line. Above the line is the bedroom community section of the island where people think nothing of making a daily trip across the causeway to civilization and its jobs. South of Mountain View, though, you hear tell of blue tarps and rednecks, primitive artists and wild-eyed ex-hippies, the cries of coyotes and the strum of banjos. And it’s all true. Sort of.
The south end of Camano is more islandy than the north part due to its distance from the bridge. It’s about a half-hour drive from the southern tip just out to Stanwood, and there aren’t many people willing to make that extra commute. That’s left the south less populated and developed. Much of the island’s long tail is only a mile wide, and you can walk that in most parts without leaving the woods except to cross the loop road. Other than retirees, many of the full-timers down here tend to be artists and survivors from the back-to-the-land movement of the late sixties and seventies. Like Orcas full-timers, South Enders cobble together a living by doing two or three different jobs. Also similar to Orcas, the south end of Camano illustrates extreme disparity in income and wealth within a remarkably small area.
“The place where time stands still and the stills still stand,” says Jack Archibald, the person most responsible for putting the capital letters on the South End. “This is hell and gone. Nobody comes down here for a Sunday drive, and we like it that way.”
Archibald moved to Camano in the seventies, “looking to get back to the land.” He drove out on a drizzly dark night and told a Realtor he had a life savings of $25,000 and wanted a roof over his head and at least five acres. “He took me to this little cabin surrounded by tall trees, lights on inside so it was glowing, chimney puffing smoke . . . I said, ‘I’ll take it!’ ”
Daylight revealed the dream cabin to be just a rickety shack complete with Visqueen windows that did nothing to keep out the winter’s cold. Replacing those sheets of plastic turned out to be an act of fate for Archibald, who’d been working as a school bus driver. “I wanted something more interesting than just plain windows, so I took a night class on how to do stained glass.” He found he had an affinity for breaking and patching glass back together. Creating spectacular installations for schools, hospitals, libraries, and public buildings became his career.
Archibald and his fellow escapees looked around their section of Camano and decided to embrace the backwoods reputation. Jack created an alter ego, Skeeter Daddle, a rural raconteur, banjo picker, and gentleman nettle farmer who, along with his South End String Band mates, branded the South End as a place frozen in time.
“One of us called the South End ‘a poor man’s paradise’ and that was dead-on because when a lot of us moved in, land was very cheap,” says Archibald. “You couldn’t believe that you didn’t have any money but still got to live in a place like this. Wow, man—utopia!”
That didn’t last. “It’s harder and harder to live on this island if you’re poor, even down here. A lot of struggling folks are kinda grandfathered in, but there are less of them all of the time. More are losing their places now because of the economy hurting real estate, which means the itinerant construction jobs go away and they can’t pay their mortgages.”
Archibald describes the South End as a mini version of Florida. “It’s rich retirees on the coast and rednecky in the middle . . . different worlds within a very short distance. You won’t see it on a casual drive, but in the center of the island you find some fairly impoverished people . . . Garbage hasn’t been picked up forever, lawn’s up, house is falling down.”
IN DECEMBER 1985, PAM and Gordy moved out of their mainland apartment and into a twenty-three-year-old, six-hundred-square-foot single-wide trailer set on five inland acres of Camano’s South End. The area remained so undeveloped back then that their dirt road didn’t even have a name, just a number, 25’55, corresponding to its longitude.
Surrounded by good clamming and crabbing waters but also within easy reach of the Cascade mountains for camping, Camano fit Pam’s dream. So did the property, with plenty of room for a big garden, chicken coop, and pigpen. Except for the clearing around the trailer, the acreage remained thickly forested, making it feel like you were in the middle of nowhere with no one else around. To Pam—never one to associate with neighbors or much of anyone else—that was perfect.
Standing at the barbecue with a beer in her hand, screened off from the rest of the world by towering walls of Douglas fir and cedar, Pam was in paradise. Gordy, without a bar within walking distance, was okay—for a while.
“Gordy was a great guy, a lot of fun,” remembers Pam’s niece, “as long as he wasn’t drinking.” With a long history of DUIs, Gordy had to pass urine tests to keep his driver’s license and get to job sites. “I got pregnant around this time, when Gordy was sober,” she says. “Pam was really doting on me, and one day Gordy says to her, ‘I don’t have any kids—why don’t we have a baby?’ and Pam said, ‘Yeah! I want another one.’ ”
Pam says she and Gordy tried for about five years to become pregnant, and she had to go in for some plumbing work before finally conceiving in June 1990. “When I finally did get pregnant, Gordy goes, ‘I suppose you want to get married now, don’t ya?’ ” she says. “I said, ‘No, Gordy, I wouldn’t do that to you.’ He didn’t really want to get married—he liked messing around too much. Gordy does what Gordy wants to do.”
Pam, at thirty-nine, became pregnant just as her twenty-year-old first son and his wife, Jacquie, had their own baby girl, Christina. Around the same time, Pam’s oldest sister—who’d also moved out to Camano and lived at the end of Road 25’55—was in the terminal stages of emphysema. In January 1991, Pam’s granddaughter died of SIDS, which, the family says, had a big effect on her. That March, Pam’s oldest sister died.
Pam skipped her sister’s funeral because, as she told her niece, she felt she was too close to term. Three weeks later, at 8:38 a.m. on March 22, 1991, at Affiliated Health Services in Mount Vernon, Skagit County, Washington, Pam gave birth to her second son.
“Paul called me and said, ‘Oh God, my mother wants to name the baby Colt, after the beer and the gun,’ ” says Pam’s niece. “It was Paul and Jacquie who convinced her to officially make it Colton, since at least that was a real name.”
Pam had kept Jerry Harris’s surname, and she and Gordy decided to hyphenate. The baby boy became Colton Harris-Moore.
PAM WANTED TO CELEBRATE Colt’s birth as an extra special event. “I was working for the navy back then and had a good paycheck,” she says. “And Gordy was working steady and everything was cool, so I said, ‘We’ve waited for this baby for five years, how about let’s bring him home from the hospital in a white limo?’ ”
Pam says she’ll never forget the limousine driver’s name: Dexter. “We had him stop at a little store on the way home. I laid the baby in the backseat and both Gordy and I went inside. When we came back, Dexter was standing outside that limo like a guard. It was cool.”
They’d rented the limo for a couple of hours, so little Colt’s next stop was the feed store. “We were raising pigs and we had to get our feed,” says Pam. “When the owner saw the limo he went in and washed his hands and put on an apron because he wanted to see the baby. He met Colt and then we loaded a couple of bags of pig feed into the trunk of the limo.”
After that, they stopped at the market on Camano to show Colt off to some of the cashiers they knew. “God, we had a lineup! People I didn’t even know lined up to see that baby,” remembers Pam. Pam and Gordy then took Colt home to the little trailer tucked out of sight among the cedar trees.
A Camano resident who was at the market that day when the limo showed up remembers turning to a friend and saying, “That kid doesn’t have a chance.”
COLT, PAM SAYS, WAS a fat, happy baby. She nicknamed him Tubby and says that from the beginning he always loved to be outside and was fascinated with anything “up.” She remembers Colt staring into the night sky as she rocked him, and says that one of his first words was “moon.”
Pam went back to work after Colt was born, dropping him off at either her sister Sandy’s or her daughter-in-law Jacquie’s before heading off for the ninety-minute commute to her job with the navy. (The women in her office had thrown her a baby shower and had given her a novelty frame that said “Time’s Baby of the Year,” a somewhat prescient gift since eighteen years later, Time would name Colt “America’s Most Wanted Teen.”) Sandy’s eighteen-acre spread on the mainland came complete with horses, dogs, cats, and chickens, and Colt showed an immediate affection for animals.
According to Pam, Gordy was “an excellent father for about the first two years. We’d even argue over who got to change the diaper.” Then Gordy started to get itchy. “He wanted a bar out his front door,” says Pam. “So I said, ‘Okay, let’s make one. We’ll open up all the windows and put a couple of kegs in here.’ ” That didn’t work. Gordy started stepping out on her, which led to increasingly hostile confrontations at home.
“Once he started drinking? Whoa!” says Pam’s niece. “Sloppy and mean. He turned evil . . . Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
According to court records, the first report to Child Protective Services regarding Colton Harris-Moore’s welfare occurred before he turned one.
When he was about eighteen months old, Pam says she began to find Colt sitting on the floor of the trailer banging his head against the wall. Relatives remember him, as an infant, acting out of control, scrambling atop the kitchen counters in the trailer. A former neighbor reported that more than once he saw toddler-aged, diapered Colton wandering down 25’55 alone, “like a wild child.”
Before Colt turned three, Gordy was “in and out” of the home. In April 1994, Pam filed a protection order against him.
Colt was enrolled in special education preschool classes at the age of three because testing indicated he’d failed to reach normal developmental milestones. Colt’s IEP (Individualized Education Plan) concentrated on helping him with speech and articulation.
Pam also headed to school. She’d been the first in her family to attend college when she took courses in Seattle and St. Louis, and now she enrolled in Skagit Valley College. “I was planning on getting my criminal justice degree,” she says. From there she wanted to work toward her law degree and ultimately become a practicing attorney. “I know that at least I’d be an honest one.”
When Pam took a psychology class, she suddenly had an insight into what she calls Colt’s mental problems. She says that from an early age he never thought through the consequences of his actions. “We learned about brain synapses, and I said, ‘That’s it! Colt has a broken synapse.’ ”
With Pam out of work, though, money got tight and she quit school. “Crap just started happening, trucks breaking down, nobody to help me . . . so bag it.” Pam and Colt went on welfare. Gordy was supposed to pay child support, and when he didn’t, the state’s Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS) went after him. Gordy, though, had a way to get around them.
“He knew to work less than a full quarter, which is what it takes for them to find you and take your money,” says Pam. “So he just kept moving to another job.”
Gordy didn’t totally disappear, though, stopping back at the trailer every once in a while over the ensuing years. If he was flush, he’d hand Pam some cash.
Around this time Pam had a falling out with her remaining sister, Sandy, in a continuing round of family feuds. Colton would later remember that event (“when Mom alienated them”) as being painful because he was close to Aunt Sandy and loved visiting the animals. According to family members, the feuds were usually about money.
On December 4, 1994, with her sons Paul and Colt in attendance, Pam got married again, this time to forty-one-year-old Seattle native William Kohler. Bill loved fishing, heroin, and raising homing pigeons. He’d served in the army, based overseas in Germany during the sixties, and then, according to Pam, worked as a milker at dairy farms when he came back to Washington. While Colt had already begun to detest Gordy, his biological father, he warmed to Bill. The two, Pam says, did everything together, and especially bonded over taking care of the animals they kept. Colt would later say that one of his best memories of Bill was how he’d walk like a chicken when they went out in the mornings to collect eggs.
Once again, though, his mother’s choice of men left Colt with little stability at home. Pam told a counselor that Bill “was not really here much . . . He was a heroin addict, so he was out a lot . . . Colton couldn’t count on [him].”
PAM SAYS YOUNG COLT was always more than a handful. “I don’t recall ever being able to control him, ever.” She found it impossible to discipline him. “I was spanked and I’m okay,” she says, though even corporal punishment had little effect on Colt. “He was always so big and strong, even when he was little, that it took more out of me to spank him than what the spanking did to him . . . He just always did what he wanted.”
When Colton was four, a witness filed a complaint with Child Protective Services after seeing “a woman” grab Colt “by the hair and beat his head severely.” By this time, concerns about Colton Harris-Moore’s mental health, education, nutrition, and physical safety had been entered into every part of “the system” possible, with reports to county, state, and federal agencies tasked with child welfare.
Colton continued special ed classes until age six, when he was reassessed and determined eligible for regular grade school. He was an inquisitive kid who could laser focus on things he was interested in—like nature and airplanes—but he never clicked with school. Pam remembers only one teacher who seemed to get through to him, and she moved to another school district after Colton finished second grade. His marks were never good, and they deteriorated as he advanced until at one point he failed every class. Pam says she insisted that the school hold him back, but the controversial policy of “social promotion” kept graduating Colton to the next grade along with his age group.
Outside of school, Colton joined a youth soccer team. Pam drove him to a couple of practices and he got his picture taken with the team. The photo shows an athletic six-year-old—certainly no longer tubby—with a bright, enthusiastic smile. After the team picture and before the first game, though, Colton stopped showing up. Pam said it was because her eyes gave her trouble and she couldn’t drive him at night.
With Colton’s speed and agility, he likely would have been a star on the playing field. Parents of another boy on the soccer team who also went to grade school with Colton say that Pam never reached out about the transportation problem. “One of the other parents would have been happy to pick him up for practice. That happens all the time with kids’ sports and events off the island—people help each other out. We’re all in the same boat.”
Other than the short stint with soccer, Pam says Colt was never interested in sports. “He’d rather be out playing in the woods.”
Colton’s main playmate early on was Anne Pitser. Anne’s mom worked at the Tyee Grocery, a little market near the very bottom of Camano where Pam bought her cigarettes and beer in those days. She and Pam had babies the same year and lived close, so they brought the kids together at an early age. “I still have a book that Colt and his mom gave me for my second birthday,” says Anne. “I just always knew him.”
Anne says that all the other kids just wanted to sit around and watch TV. “I thought they were boring. I didn’t have TV, so I always had to make my own fun, and Colt was into that.”
Every day after school starting in kindergarten, Anne says she and Colt would head to one or the other’s home. At Anne’s house, they’d play board games or race on her dad’s electric slot car track. Over at Colt’s, they primarily played outside.
“Inside his house was pretty much trashed . . . You were wading through mountains of things to get anywhere,” she says. Instead, they’d spend their time running around with the dogs and playing in the woods. “We used to just love climbing trees. We’d find anything that had a low branch and climb on each other’s backs to get to it. We’d climb up to the very top and then be like, ‘Oh no, how do we get down?’ ”
Back then, Camano didn’t have its own elementary school and island kids were bused across the bridge to Stanwood. “We were the outcasts there,” says Anne. “I was the fat girl with buck teeth, and everyone hated Colt. They made fun of him, they’d throw things at him. They’d pick on him because he dressed different and maybe he didn’t bathe regularly . . . He was just a boy. They were mean kids.”
Tough times in school brought her and Colt even closer. “We were inseparable. He never wanted to go home when he was at my house, and when I was over there he was like, ‘No! You can’t go home yet, don’t leave!’ By the time we were in the third grade, his mom was convinced that we were going to grow up and get married.”
Anne says Colt craved attention. “He wanted to be recognized. He wanted people to look at him and say, ‘Hey, he’s the one who did that!’ If he started a science project, he wanted it to be really good so that people would praise him. But I don’t think people ever really cared.” Anne says Colton once built an elaborate treehouse in the woods by his trailer. “I was like, ‘Dude, I can’t believe you built this! It’s the coolest thing in the world!’ That made him feel really good.”
The cool fort came down, though, when Pam found out Colton had built it with lumber she’d bought for another project.
“Every once in a while at school he’d be upset,” says Anne. “I’d ask him what’s wrong and he’d be like, ‘Oh, my mom’s just stupid.’ ”
Colt had a really cool dad, though—or so Anne thought. “Colt was always telling me that his dad was a pilot and that there was nothing he wanted more than to grow up and fly planes like him. But I never met the dad that he talked about. I knew his mom had boyfriends, but it didn’t sound like Colt liked any of them much.”
PAM FILED FOR DIVORCE from Bill Kohler in 1998, though it was never finalized. Bill left the family several times, and before Pam would let him come back, she’d search his bags for drugs. Even when she let him stay, he’d eventually leave again. After Bill came Van Jacobsen, a man described in Child Protective Services referrals as “an alcohol or drug abuser,” and another questionable role model for Colt. Van drifted in and out of the trailer over many years. Camano locals who know him say Van is “a nice, gentle guy” whose hard living has taken its toll. Pam herself described him as “not playing with a full deck.” Neighbors say it sounded like Pam always yelled more than talked to him, but Van kept coming back.
Gordy would also occasionally show up back at the trailer, and Pam says Colt didn’t like that. “He was a drunk, and Colt wanted him to leave. They did battle around here almost every day.” Colt even argued that Gordy was not his father, insisting to Pam that it was Bill. She says she understood his feelings. “I guess if you have a shitty father you choose the next best thing.”
With a growing resentment toward Gordy—and denied Bill, who he did feel close to—Colt clung to a fantasy father, the famous flier.
Other than his lifelong fascination with “up,” Pam says she doesn’t have a clue where Colton’s love of planes originated. None of the men Colt had seen with his mom was an actual pilot. She indulged his interest, though, by buying him balsawood fliers, those featherweight model planes that American boys have been zooming around their yards since World War I. The wafer-thin wings don’t stand up to much abuse, and after a few of his rough landings splintered the wood, Pam says Colt would go into meltdown mode. When he kept crashing and breaking every plane he got his hands on, Pam decided that instead of continually buying him new ones, it was smarter to get Colt a big sheet of balsa and let him start designing and building his own aircraft.
Pam says she also took Colton across Saratoga Passage to watch the planes taking off and landing at Whidbey Naval Air Station. Twenty-one active squadrons (the Zappers, Scorpions, Grey Wolves, Fighting Marlins, Black Ravens, and others) are based at Whidbey, with more than enough thundering warbirds in the air to rattle the bedroom windows and fuel flights of fancy for all the kids in Island County.
According to what Colton later told counselors, his relationship with his mom began to deteriorate by the time he started grade school. However, they still shared a love of the outdoors. They bonded over camping trips (“Maybe I shouldn’t have taught him all that survival stuff!”) and visits to Camano’s beaches. One day Pam drove him to the top of the island and dropped him off at Utsalady Beach. “I didn’t stay because I had a headache,” she says. “When I went back to pick him up at the end of the day, Colt had built hisself a really cool Robinson Crusoe camp using sticks and towels.”
He’d also captured what Pam remembers as forty Dungeness crabs (more than six times the legal limit) and had them piled on the beach. “He had a crowd of people watching, so I told him to pick the five biggest to bring home for dinner and let the rest go.”
Colton loved Dungeness crab, Cancer magister, the Salish Sea’s most delicious bottom feeder. These muscle-bound crustaceans make East Coast blue claws look like daddy longlegs, and fresh Dungeness meat comes out in big sweet chunks. Most folks fish Dungeness using pots and traps, with only the hardiest climbing into chest waders and plodding through the frigid shallows armed with dip nets. Young Colt, however, devised a way to catch the big crabs without nets or traps. He used only his bare feet.
Impervious to the cold water as only a true Northwest island boy could be, Colt would splash into the 50-degree sea wearing just his baggies. He’d stalk or swim over the sand and swaying eel grass until he spotted the broad purplish back of a Dungeness, then maneuver behind it. The predatory crabs earn their place in the food chain by cracking rock-hard clam shells with a pair of serrated claws that can also put a serious hurtin’ on any errant finger or pinkie toe. Colt, though, would fearlessly poke his toes beneath the crab’s belly then quickly flip it up. As the crab frantically flailed the water and snapped its claws, Colt’s hand would dart in to snatch it behind the last of its ten legs, safely out of pinching range.
Colt seemed a natural for the Cub Scouts. He joined up and began working his way through the ratings. Pam says he once even won the rain-gutter regatta, a race where the scouts blow through straws to propel little wooden sailboats down water-filled rain gutters. Unfortunately, she didn’t make it there to see him win because she says she’d gone back to work and had a night shift. She says Colton ultimately had to quit the scouts because she couldn’t take him to the meetings in the winter when it was too dark for her to drive.
Before he left the Cub Scouts, Colton advanced from Bobcat to Wolf Scout. In a childhood recorded by remarkably few photos, Colt’s Wolf certificate became one of his few treasured mementos.