Rural island draws many who love water and the simple life

By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

The 400 fleecy alpacas are relative newcomers to Camano Island. But they look right at home grazing and craning their pipe-cleaner necks to gape at visitors.

Farm owner Hugo Ulloa decided Camano Island was the country's best spot when he searched for a place to expand his alpaca wool business from Chile to the United States two years ago.

"We fell in love with the place," he says.

He isn't the only one. The island's population has doubled over the past 20 years, to an estimated 12,800 year-round residents.

"The growth -- the only word for it is unbelievable," says 89-year-old Ole Eide. "When we moved here 60 years ago, there were three houses. Now there are 50 or 60 on the same road."

Residents worry the island is being eaten up and say the growth has been especially bad the past few years.

But the island has absorbed its new residents with more grace than most areas in the fast-growing region, keeping both its beauty and the community's friendly, civic-minded nature.

Alpaca farmer Ulloa fit in from the start, keeping his acreage as open land rather than building a housing development or new mansion, which his neighbors had feared.

And throughout the island, thickets of trees still stretch back for undeveloped acres, housing deer and raccoons rather than masking back yards. Eagles soar off the shoreline.

Waitresses at the family-owned Elger Bay Cafe still greet customers by name and scoop enormous ice cream cones for the children. And the annual Ladies Aid Society potluck draws a crowd, with granddaughters of the founding members helping out.

"It's so beautiful," says Sandi Swanson, who moved to the island with her family two years ago from Lake Goodwin. "It's not as crowded. There's not as much crime. And everybody waves at you."

The 17-mile-long island, shaped like a straight-tailed seahorse, is 55 miles north of Seattle, across the Saratoga Passage from Whidbey Island. It was founded as a logging town in the 1850s, with its cedar and Douglas fir shipments once rivaling those from the Seattle ports.

Grace Cornwell, 92, remembers her family sailing to the island, where her grandfather had a shingle mill, from her then-home in Stanwood in the early 1900s. The island had few roads and fewer cars, and children loved playing on the sandy beaches.

"It was a very safe beach to play on and be on," says Cornwell. "And, of course, there were berries to pick and clams to dig -- and still are."

Today, the once-bustling logging community has changed into an almost indefinable mix. The island is part retirement community, part summer-home getaway, part artist colony, and, increasingly, part bedroom community of commuters who work in Everett, Marysville and even Seattle.

"You know what draws us together? The water," says retiree Dale Tyler, gazing out his living room window at Skagit Bay.

Every house on the island's 52 miles of shoreline seems to hold a breathtaking view, and sailers and windsurfers are a constant sight off the public and private beaches.

"There's nothing better than to go sit on a beach for six hours and enjoy the sun," says 24-year-old Brice Melum, one of the only commercial fishermen still working on the island.

Melum fishes the same way he learned as a child from his father: Standing on the shore watching a piece of tin in the water, rowing out and casting his nets when he sees the telltale shadows of a school of smelt swimming over the tin.

Most modern fishermen use motorboats to look for smelt, but Melum sticks to his quieter method.

"They do it their way," he says comfortably, "and I'll do it mine."

Camano Island is one of those places that people don't want to leave. Of the five surviving members of Eide's 1926 Stanwood High School class, three still live there.

But the older residents -- senior citizens make up a good 30 percent of the island -- are also moving into smaller homes or passing away, with For Sale signs sprouting in lines along the main road.

Island land is still inexpensive enough for grown children to buy land near their parents' homes, and many do, say Howard and Helyne Simmons, whose children and grandchildren live nearby.

For 20-year-old Amanda McDaniel, home for the summer from the University of Nebraska, there's no question she'll return for good after graduation.

"It was nice to be in a small town. I knew everyone in school," she says. "I want to live in a place like this so my kids can be safe."

Home prices ranged from a low of $20,000 to a high of $1.7 million last year, according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

A mix of housing still exists on the island, from run-down trailers to remodeled cottages to million-dollar estates. But prices are rising fast, says island realtor Dan Lien, with the average jumping $30,000 to $202,000 last year.

"I would fight to stay," says Carolin Barnum Dilorenzo, who camped on the island as a child in her father's orchard at Barnum Point. Dilorenzo returned to build a bed-and-breakfast by the orchard, at the end of a long dirt road that also bears her family's name.

"It's just a great life," she says.

"People have said 'Why don't you sell it and have an easy life?' because my property's so valuable. I wouldn't want to leave.

"What else could I do that would make life as good as it is?"