flying with the kamano kid one last time
Most of you folks I talk to refuse to buy Bob Friel’s hot-off-the-press book The Barefoot Bandit. He spent over a year hunkered down in a bluff cabin on Orcas fighting editors’ deadlines and rat-nibble poverty in order to get the details dead on right. You think maybe you know the whole saga after years of gossiping down at the Diner or endless speculation at Jolene’s Spa or over the neighbor’s truck hood, forget it —- you don’t. Bob’s dug up more facts, details, interviews and in-depth reportage than all the skeletons you got hidden in your shed closet. He knows where the bodies got buried, who helped who, what so and so said to the cops and what they said back and all the minutiae of how the Kid managed to stay fugitive for years. And he tells the saga with an unblinking eye and a style as feisty as a sucker punch.
Some of us don’t like hearing it, but Bob’s got it right: the Barefoot Bandit is the first genuine, certifiable, authentic, bona-fide, bigger than life 21st century folk hero. Sure he terrorized us on the South End and then terrorized Bob and his neighbors up on Orcas. Whaddaya want – an apology?? The Kid’s serving serious time. For serious crimes. You don’t have to feel sorry for him. You don’t have to be some bleeding heart and blame society or his mom or even yourself. But trust me, you’ll get to know Colton as well as your own brother when you finish this book. He was your neighbor. He was maybe your kid’s friend. He was a helluva crook, as you’ll see reading the details of how he operated. And he had nerves of steel, as you’ll see when Bob Friel takes you up on his plane rides, sets you in the cockpit and flies into the cloud covered Cascades and lands in deadly stumped clearcuts and finally into Legend.
But most of all he’s part of the Lore of the South End now. Our folk heroes can’t all be Jesus Christ or Charlie Manson either. Sometimes they’re just the person down the street, the one with a torqued sense of adventure keeping time to a demented drummer with not as many options in life as we ‘normal’ folks got.
Read the book! You won’t get anything better until the next legend comes down the pike. And she won’t be from around here. And a writer fine as Bob Friel won’t be capturing the essence in as entertaining and comprehensive a chronicle. Billy the Kid’s neighbors might not have wanted to encourage the mythologizing either, but trust me, it’s too late. Read this book — it’s part of your lore now. Give you some ammo down at the Diner too next blue plate special…..
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