Humboldt (19 page)

In her hand Caroline held a clear plastic turkey bag full of trimmed green buds of a strain called Boggle Gum. It was an example of what she was looking for.

“It smells really good and shiny and beautiful,” she said, before passing the bag around so everyone could take a closer look.

“Patients can't touch it,” she said, “so it's gotta smell good.”

The pot also had to be trimmed tightly, and all small buds had to be removed from the bags.

“If it can fit up your nose,” she said, “take it out.”

Then it was show-and-tell time, and from out of the backpacks and purses and, in Mare's case, paper bags, everyone pulled out their plastic turkey bags of pot or lumps of hash.

When it was Mare's turn, Caroline opened the bag, thrust her face inside, and inhaled.

“I call it Bubble Bath,” Mare told her. “It's a mix of Stinky Pinky and Bubble Gum.”

“Where did you get the Stinky Pinky?” Caroline asked.

“I'm from Humboldt County, and we have it there.”

Caroline asked Mare to stay after; while one by one she rejected all the other pot that had been brought in that day.

“This is so nice,” Caroline said, as she smelled Mare's pot again. “You grew this outdoors?”

She then picked up individual buds, prying the little flowers apart, inspecting the orange resiny hairs, and looking for mold.

“I did, and I call it Bubble Bath,” Mare said, “because it's not like it puts you to sleep; it just relaxes you.”

“Well, how much do you want for it?”

“Oh, I want top dollar, of course.”

“Well, throw out a number.”

“We lost our market to you guys. I saw Steve at the Cannabis Cup and I told him that.”

“I think I could do twenty-one hundred. What do you think?”

“Oh, I don't know,” Mare hemmed and hawed a little.

“I could go as high as twenty-two hundred.”

“Okay, I'll get you higher next time,” Mare said. “Come on, we started all of this. We know how to grow. We're the marijuana moonshiners.”

And so Mare left her pot and was handed a slip of paper. The dispensary would run some lab tests, to check its THC levels and ensure it didn't contain any mold. Then, if all went well, in a week's time Mare would have an envelope with $2,200 cash waiting for her.

When she was back outside, a few minutes later, Mare clapped her hands with glee.

“Oh, I'm so happy!” she cried out. “That's exactly how I wanted it to go!”

A week later, she knelt down by the waters of Lake Michigan and scattered some of her sister Ellen's ashes.

The first rain came in early September out at the coast. Mare's neighbors called it the year of the perfect storm because everyone had such big beautiful crops but then had to throw half of it away because of the mold. Mare lost a lot of her crop to mold, too. It came sneaking into her drying room when she wasn't looking and rotted the hanging buds from the inside out. The mold was unlike any she had ever seen before: it was gray and kind of cobwebby. Mare found it kind of pretty, even though she'd swear whenever she found it and had to discard an entire cola.

The crop that survived had pink hairs and smelled like cherries and Bazooka bubble gum. Mare and one of the guys at the Tea House Collective decided to call it Sour Pink, because it sounded like a cocktail. Mare sold a pound or two of it to Harborside Health Center and spent a day at the dispensary talking to patients on behalf of her collective. She felt a bit like a unicorn there; so many people told her that they had heard of the old marijuana moonshiners up in Humboldt but had never actually met one. Mare saw healthy young guys coming in looking for heavy-THC pot, and she saw the medical patients: the Iraqi vet who used marijuana to help with the phantom pains he'd have in his missing limb, and the woman with the scar down her face who said it helped with the headaches she had had ever since she was in a bad car accident. Mare wasn't sure what the future of pot growing held, but figured she'd just carve out her niche growing a small amount of
sativa
in the sun. She had also been reading about a nonpsychoactive molecule found in pot called cannabidiol, or CBD, which was shown to have strong anti-inflammatory qualities. She was going to try to breed more of this into her crop, and hoped that everyone would eventually catch up.

Meanwhile, she began to think about growing older. After Ellen died, Mare had to have her knee replaced, and there were a few uncomfortable weeks where she couldn't drive. When she had first moved to the Southern Humboldt community, Mare and her friends used to lament the fact that they didn't have any elders among them. Now they were the elders. William, the younger man who lived on her property and helped her with chores, joked that he was going to get a van and name it Daisy and he'd drive Mare and all her old friends around in it.

Late one afternoon, William came over and got Mare stoned on some of the Sour Pink. After he left, she lay down on her bed and gazed out the window above her kitchen sink, which looked out on the tree line. Just beyond it, the continent came to an end and the ocean and the sky stretched into the horizon. Mare lay there and watched the sun set for what felt like hours. She realized that her knees weren't hurting her anymore, and she felt relaxed and happy. They'd really nailed it with the crop this year. Mare felt great, and when she fell asleep that night, she would sleep soundly for the first time in a long while. Outside, the sky burned orange and then a brilliant pink, and the dark silhouette of the trees out the window were backlit shadows, like a Magritte painting. The sun slowly slipped behind the ocean, and everything faded gently into night.

I was born and raised in Northern California just south of the region known as the Emerald Triangle. In Napa and Sonoma, where I grew up, wine grapes are the cash crop, but marijuana is still part of the local culture and economy. My parents weren't growers, but they were members of the counterculture, and when I was little they would take me to parties that in my memory were a blur of laughter, long skirts, scratchy beards, and the sweet, heady scent of marijuana. Since childhood, it is a smell I have associated with adults having a good time.

As I grew older, I became aware of the gamble people took to work in the lucrative underground economy. When I was fourteen, my best friend's father went to prison for growing marijuana. Her sense of secrecy and shame was so strong that I didn't learn until the last minute that the FBI had seized her family's home and that her father was going away for five years. I happened to be sleeping over that night. In the morning, I stood awkwardly in the hallway as my friend's father hugged her good-bye. She walked into her bedroom and quietly shut the door. At the other end of the hallway, her little brother sobbed.

That was in 1990. In 2010, when I moved home after five years in New York, I discovered that growers weren't going to jail like before, and their underground economy was speedily going mainstream, complete with marijuana trade shows and city permits for pot delivery services. Now that seemingly anyone could grow pot under the medical marijuana law, I wondered what all this meant for the notorious pot towns I'd heard about up north, like Laytonville in Mendocino and Garberville in Humboldt. What was a pot town? How does a place become one? And how were all these changes to the industry affecting them?

I decided to see if I could answer some of these questions. Originally, I thought I was doing research for a book on how California legalized marijuana, and I figured whatever was happening up north would be part of that story. I had been to the area before to see the big trees, but I knew nothing of the culture. When I crossed the redwood curtain and arrived in Humboldt that summer, I had no idea I was entering another world and that what I found there would become the story. I quickly realized that the only way to understand this world and earn the trust of the people who lived there was to become part of it. I originally went to Humboldt for a week. I left more than a year later.

The entire time I lived in southern Humboldt County, I was always open about who I was: a journalist at work on a book about the community. Despite the ominous reputation of Humboldt growers in the mass media—the armed and dangerous renegade ready to shoot anyone who ventures on their property—I never really felt unsafe. Granted, I was asked three times if I was law enforcement by younger, paranoid types, but I saw only one gun. In general, I was welcomed with incredible warmth and acceptance. After years of living in secrecy, many elder members of the community were especially eager to share their stories.

And what stories they shared: how they discovered their cash crop by accident, hid from helicopters, and built a community with their bare hands. In an era when small farming had all but disappeared, Humboldt pot growers earned a decent and sometimes great living working the land in a breathtakingly beautiful place. It was an American Dream of sorts. There were often moments when life there reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting, with a big, leafy marijuana plant towering in the background, like the time I attended a school fund-raiser where pot smoke hung in the air, and a man auctioned off nylon bags for making hashish alongside baskets of homegrown tomatoes and hand-knit scarves.

Early on, I realized that I couldn't tell the story of the place through just one person, so I focused on four people who represent different aspects of marijuana culture: Crockett represented the younger, business-minded grower who had come to Humboldt to make money. Mare was the woman who'd planted the seeds that helped start the industry and who never gave up on her hippie ideals. Emma had been raised in the community and decided early on it wasn't worth the risk to grow. And like someone out of an old Western, Bob was a deputy sheriff in a town of outlaws.

I witnessed many of the events described in this book. Some scenes were recounted to me during interviews and supplemented with court documents, news reports, and second-source interviews. Many of the spoken words were uttered in my presence. Other quotes were confirmed when­ever possible. The statements of Mikal Wilde, whose lawyers declined to let him speak with me due to his ongoing legal case, are paraphrased based on a reliable source.

The majority of my reporting took place while spending open-ended days and nights with my subjects. We went to the grocery store, cooked dinner, went to parties, worked in the garden, and, in the case of Bob, patrolled the area. In addition to my main characters, to have a deeper understanding of the area and culture I conducted interviews with dozens of other community members. Sometimes it felt as though I had interviewed the whole town.

During my time in the community, I straddled the role of outsider and insider. To make ends meet, I found a job serving wine and crepes at a local jazz club and café. Even though I didn't work directly in the industry, I understood that marijuana money indirectly paid my salary too.

While I lived in Southern Humboldt, I got lost on dirt roads, cooled off in the Eel River on summer days, hunted for mushrooms, fell under the spell of the redwoods, and made wonderful friends with people who, of course, grew pot. I saw how this income enabled them to pursue their dreams, but I came to believe that their economy is built upon something that is wrong—not the marijuana itself, but the fact that medical laws aside, it is still fundamentally illegal. For the readers who wonder about my stance on the issue, here it is: I believe that marijuana should be legal and regulated, for the economy, for the environment, for civil rights, for Mexico, and to end the violence associated with its illegality. No one should ever die over a plant that doesn't kill people.

With the passing of the recent recreational use laws in Colorado and Washington, and as more states approve medical marijuana, it looks like the long, slow march toward legalization will continue. If that happens, someday the story of the people whom Mare calls the marijuana moonshiners will be just a footnote in history, and this book will ultimately be just a snapshot in time of a place called
Humboldt
.

Writing a book is an enormous leap of faith, and many times, when mine felt close to running out, I drew on the support of a large community of friends and my family to keep me going. My gratitude goes out to everyone who helped me along the way. First, to the friends who gave me shelter. I owe endless thanks to Somer Huntley and Andy Solomon for use of the house in Whitethorn at the start of the journey. Alicia Skuce generously lent me her apartment in Oakland one summer. For many years, Claudia Schuster's backroom has been my refuge in San Francisco, and I am eternally grateful for that space and her friendship. Ferren Knickerbocker hosted me in Eureka, and Allison Scott in the East Village. Heather Sarantis and Robert Collier supplied me with a Berkeley office, and their amazing son, Dylan, brightened my writing breaks. Susan Mazur graciously let me write in her Redway yurt. Marcia provided me with the most amazing gift of a house on the beach in Mexico. And heartfelt thanks to Doreen Puentes in Garberville, for the room to rent, and the occasional glass of wine, and encouraging pat on the back.

Jenny Hole, whom I have known for so long, provided constant laughter and pep talks, and made me an honorary aunt to beautiful Stella Lou. I don't know what I would have done without Brooke Bundgard, who welcomed me to Oakland with love and light, and cheered me on as I raced towards the finish line. Jordan Rosenfeld has followed my path from our walks along I Street, to New York, and back. She graciously read several drafts, encouraged me every step of the way, and sent a writer's first-aid kit to help me through the final hour. Anya Roberts-Toney also read multiple drafts, cheered me on, and has an eye for detail for which I am incredibly grateful. Jennifer Bleyer was there to talk things through and offered feedback that helped make this a better book. Megan Feldman supported me with her humor, encouragement, and last-minute edits. I look forward to returning the favor.

Thank you to my dad and stepmom, Paul and Kathleen Brady, for use of the Subaru during those rainy winter months, and for carving out a space for me in St. Helena one last time. Thanks to my mom and stepdad, Elizabeth and Greg Schimpf, for their love and support, and for coming north to see the trees with me.

I am infinitely grateful to my agent, Larry Weissman, and his wife, Sascha Alper, for guiding me through this process, and for pushing me to follow the story further than I was comfortable with in the beginning, which helped me discover something all the richer. Immense gratitude to my editor Ben Greenberg, for betting on me in the first place, for suggesting I step out of the story, and for his patience with my over-reporting. Enormous thanks as well to the entire team at Grand Central who helped usher this book into the world: Liz Connor, Erica Warren, Peggy Holm, Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, and Jenna Dolan, whose sharp eye helped save me from my mistakes.

In Mexico,
muchísimas gracias
to the people of Troncones, Guerrero, where the first draft of this book was written. Suzanne and Bob French provided me with many lovely dinners there, and hosted Christmas at their home in Tamasopo. Thank you to the
maripositas
at the school for sweetening my afternoons, and to Beto for the surf and life lessons.

Of all the people I am indebted to for helping making this book possible, the people of southern Humboldt County are at the top of the list. Many of them graciously invited me into their gardens and lives. Thank you to everyone who took the time to share their stories with me, even if they didn't end up in these pages. I am grateful to Liz and Charley for the hospitality and kindness when I first arrived. Mikal Jakubal put up with my city-girl ways, endlessly tried to pin the Jell-O to the wall with me, and brought snacks on our bike rides along the Avenue. Marcia was always there to listen and lend support. Susan became like family. Rick and Peter helped me understand the history of the Back-to-the-Land movement. Jeff Hedin taught me to tell the difference between redwood trees and Douglas firs from a distance. Kym Kemp is one of the busiest women I know, but was always graciously willing to take a moment to help me understand the community and place that she holds so dear.

I thank Sergeant Kenny Swithenbank and Sheriff Michael Downey of the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department. I am also incredibly grateful for the magical Holly Sweet, who provided me with a job when I was in need of one, and became my teacher along the way. Thanks to Prescott for the fresh flowers, for the CSA deliveries, and for being such a skillful chauffeur along those treacherous Mexican highways.

And last, but certainly not least, I owe my deepest gratitude to Mare, Emma, Bob, and Crockett. Without their willingness to allow me into their lives, this book would have never been possible. I am grateful to Mare Abidon for her unfaltering optimism and for being willing to stand up for her beliefs. Emma Worldpeace inspired me with her integrity. Bob Hamilton taught me about resilience, and reminded me of the importance of being able to laugh in the face of adversity. I owe a huge debt to Crockett for his openness. The commercial growers were the hardest to access, and without his participation, a crucial part of this tale would have been left untold. While the telling of this story is my own, I hope it honors all of their honesty and trust.