Friday Harbor is as beautiful as you might imagine - a small, saltwater town on San Juan Island on the north west edge of Washington State. For fortunate weekenders who head there - north from Seattle to the ferry out of Anacortes - it's a safe haven from the week just gone by. Some folks think it's a bit too cutesy, a chocolate box version of a Pacific NorthWest town - and truth be told it does have a bit of that about it. It's well kept, tidy, there's a little picture house and the timber buildings are all neat and painted. You can buy hemp products and souvernirs and paintings by local artists; small batch ales with names like Weed Whacker that smell of pine and coffee; you can get timber from the hardware store and boating shoes and life vests; and you can fuel up your outboard at the depot a little bit out of town. Out off the high west side of the island you can watch the orcas pass as the lights from BC flicker across the water; even in such a comfortable and cosy place there's a sense of a bigger world beyond. And even in such a comfortable and cosy place you know that out in the wooded gullies and crannies there are some folks doing it hard. 'The Colonel' in his airstream up on bricks, fifteen years sober, getting ready for the collapse of the government, or invasion by it, drinking his coffee from a Seahawks mug in the morning mist. There are blackberry pickers and weed growers, attornies, ancient hippies, hand-to-mouth authors. Soft drink millionaires who fly in by private jet. And the rest of us who fly in on a Washington State ferry.