Humboldt (8 page)

After a few minutes, Bob started his car back up and continued on his journey to the coast. He passed by the roadside memorial for Sean Akselsen. Seven years after his murder, it was still well tended with fake flowers and mementos spilling out from a mosaic altar. The falling rain splattered noisily on Bob's windshield as he drove by Whitethorn Construction, a lumber and building supply company run by a tall octogenarian with a bushy beard named Bob McKee. In the 1960s and '70s, McKee became famous in the area for subdividing old ranches and selling parcels to the new settlers. Many members of the counterculture considered him the father of their community.

“I was looking to sell the land to people who really wanted it,” McKee explained to local journalist Mary Siler Anderson in her book
Whatever Happened to the Hippies?
McKee didn't care if someone had driven the two hundred miles from San Francisco on a Vespa or if they had arrived in a converted potato chip truck. If they loved the place and wanted to live there, he was willing to sell them land.

As for the cash crop that so many people eventually planted on land he sold them, at first, McKee said he had no idea marijuana could even grow in Humboldt; he thought it came from India or some other exotic place. He didn't seem to care much about it as a moral issue, but he had the foresight to worry when pot became valuable.

It was the start of what McKee called a “false economy.”

“I guess my concern was what people were going to do when it was gone,” he said, decades before community members would gather at the Mateel to discuss that very issue. “I knew the money was going to go away. Either it was going to get wiped out or it was going to be legalized, but one way or the other it was going away.”

For Bob Hamilton, it couldn't go away soon enough.

Past Whitethorn Construction, the trees were barely visible through the mist as Bob entered the King Range National Conservation Area. At the top of the peak, his radio crackled. He eased the cruiser over to the side of the road and called in to dispatch.

Someone had just reported that a man armed with two AR-15 assault rifles was going to be doing a series of armed robberies of indoor marijuana grows in the town of Fortuna. Bob was instructed to be on the lookout for the guy's vehicle.

“This should be interesting,” Bob said to dispatch. Then he plunged down the steep, windy road that led to Shelter Cove.

The Cove, as it is known to locals, is situated on the Lost Coast, a place that frontier writer Bret Harte called “America's uttermost west.” It earned its name back in the 1930s, when engineers building the Pacific Coast Highway were forced to turn inland and bypass the area because of its steep, rugged terrain. That decision helped create the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in California. It is now a popular three-day hike for backpackers, and a place where the mountains of the King Range drop dramatically into the ocean. At Cape Mendocino the land juts out at the state's westernmost point. Offshore, three fault lines, including the infamous San Andreas, meet and rub shoulders.

Shelter Cove, the only town on the Lost Coast, was established as a resort in 1964. Developers envisioned four thousand homes overlooking the sea there. Lots were sold, sight unseen, but many were so steep that it was impossible to build on them, and Shelter Cove became a land swindle. Today the Cove is a small village of some seven hundred residents who must drive an hour of windy road to cover the twenty miles to the nearest grocery store. Bob estimated that about half of these residents were pot growers who had turned their homes into indoor gardens.

On this wet and rainy Sunday, he drove past houses with uninspiring architecture and tiny blue street signs warning that the area was in a tsunami zone. Bob cruised by the golf course, and the Cape Mendocino Tea House, and pulled around Wedding Point, where surfers check the waves with binoculars and paragliders set sail. He eased to a stop in front of a sporty blue Subaru that was parked next to a row of houses. The car's owner had done seven years in federal prison for marijuana cultivation. He was also Bob's friend.

The two men rode motorcycles together. Like many Southern Humboldt men, Bob's friend was a member of a local volunteer fire department. Bob's theory was that many growers became members of local fire departments out of guilt over how they earn their money. Another, more dire reason was that there was nobody else to provide emergency services in the hills of Humboldt, where it could take an ambulance well over an hour to reach the scene of an accident. Neighbors literally had to save each other's lives.

It was an uneventful morning at the Cove, and after Bob finished driving through town, he headed up the mountain and back toward Redway. On his way, he pulled into the Shelter Cove General Store to refuel. The general store was the kind of place where the wooden floors creaked underfoot and gas was sold at inflated prices, even by Humboldt standards. You could buy a bottle of soda and a bag of chips there, or, in Bob's case, Milk Duds and a V-8.

On his way back from the bathroom, something caught Bob's eye that made him bound through the store's double doors in a fit of laughter.

“What's with that sign ‘Robert's in Jail'?” he asked the clerk behind the register, a woman whose husband he had once arrested for growing pot.

“I had to think for a minute who Robert was,” Bob continued before she could answer. “It's Buddha. I forget that's his name.”

“Yeah, that's Buddha,” the woman said quietly.

Robert Juan, more commonly known in the community as Buddha, was the man Emma and her stepbrother Mike had once worked for. In 2003, Buddha met an old logger with a thousand acres of land for sale. Buddha then formed the Lost Paradise Land Corp., and began offering people a chance to buy into the corporation with a hefty down payment. They could then live on the land and make small monthly payments. Around forty people purchased a stake in the place. Many, if not all, did what they do in Humboldt, and grew pot there. They called the settlement Buddhaville, after its founder.

The Feds called it a criminal conspiracy.

On June 24, 2008, an army of 450 federal and law enforcement agents raided Buddhaville. People would remember that each agent seemed to have his own unmarked SUV or sedan, for the convoy of vehicles that passed along the Briceland–Shelter Cove Road on the way to the bust seemed endless. Authorities hauled off ten thousand marijuana plants, $160,000 in cash, and thirty guns. Buddha was eventually given a five-year sentence. All those who invested in the land lost their money. During the backlash following the bust, someone burnt down Buddha's house.

“Robert's in Jail,” the piece of binder paper tacked to the bulletin board in front of the store read. “For four plus years.”

In looping, feminine cursive, the sign instructed anyone who wanted to write Buddha to put their name on a list, and Buddha would send a note initiating correspondence. It was signed by a woman named Holly, with that morning's date.

Bob was still chuckling as he started up the cruiser and pointed it back up the mountain. Twenty miles or so down the road, just past the turnout to Seeley Creek, a muddy track marked by a row of mailboxes, Bob saw something that he had never noticed before, something that made him gasp, and temporarily forget about marijuana and all his other frustrations.

He flipped the cruiser around and doubled back. About a hundred feet away, on the other side of the creek, a clear stream of rainwater cascaded down a stone cliff. Trees growing at the top of the fall looked as though they might tumble off. The scene was so lush and green it looked like it belonged on a postcard from Kauai. Bob sat there in silence and took in the beauty of the place, and just for a moment he was reminded why he'd come home.

T
he day of the first rain, Crockett Randall was sitting on a couch next to his truck in a field filled with thousands of revelers when he noticed the storm clouds moving dark and heavy across the mid-September sky. It was six weeks before the vote, and the second day of Earthdance, a three-day music festival headlined by Michael Franti at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville. The northern Mendocino County town was another Emerald Triangle institution and a throwback to the 1960s. It was home to a store dedicated entirely to tie-dye and to Wavy Gravy's Hog Farm, which claimed to be the longest-running hippie commune in America.

Crockett had taken a couple of days off to attend the festival. Frankie wasn't too happy about it, but Crockett needed a break from playing guard dog at the cabin, and he intended to make the two-hour return trip every day to check on the plants. So far, he had avoided getting busted or robbed. But now, as the raindrops began to fall, at first in a sprinkle, then in a full downpour, there was Mother Nature to contend with, and it was about to get ugly.

Crockett left Earthdance early the next morning and drove back to the garden at his usual breakneck speed. He immediately began his rounds. Even though the plants were supposedly protected from the elements by the white plastic sheeting that enveloped the greenhouses, in reality, the stuff was flimsy. Crockett called it toilet paper. It was so permeable that when he shook the branches of the plants after that first rain, water leapt off in heavy droplets. He called Frankie immediately to report what he was seeing.

“It's not good, man,” he said.

As harvest approached, Crockett had been hypervigilant about mold. It could destroy an entire crop. He checked for it daily. The signs were subtle, barely discernable to the untrained eye. Sometimes, something as simple as a leaf that was starting to curl on a stacked flower cluster was enough to indicate that, inside, thousands of dollars' worth of bud was turning to rotten mush.

Crockett liked to joke that plants were ready to harvest when the money guy was in town, but in reality, he'd examine the buds with a magnifying glass, like the most exacting of growers, to determine if the trichomes—the microscopic, crystalline resin droplets on the flower's surface—had turned a milky white and if the resinous, hairlike parts called pistils had turned red and brown. When this happened, the plants were ready to be cut. But sometimes, you had to speed up the process. When, two days after the rains began, the sun broke through the clouds and cast its warm rays once again on the hills of Humboldt, Crockett and Zavie scrambled to begin harvest. Otherwise, the heat, combined with the dampness from the recent rain, would turn all the thick, heavy flower clusters into perfect petri dishes for mold.

Normally, a marijuana harvest follows a straightforward, relatively simple, if not strenuous process. Whether the plants are grown indoors or out, when the trichomes and resin glands indicate they are ready, the branches bearing the heavy flower clusters, or “colas,” are lopped off and hung upside down to dry. Waterleaves, those trademark five-​f
ingered
leaves, grow and fan out from the colas, giving them a fuzzy look. Some growers prefer to pull these larger outer leaves off before the drying process begins; others leave them for trimmers to sift through later.

Over the course of a few days, as the hanging buds dry in barns, sheds, and backrooms, they shrink to about 50 percent of their original size. The dried buds are then placed in paper bags, and as with tobacco, a curing process begins. When the buds reach the right consistency—which varies according to each grower but is usually some level of crispy on the outside and slightly moist on the inside—they are ready to be processed, or trimmed.

Many things can and do go wrong along the way during harvest, and things took a wrong turn for Crockett and his crew almost immediately. On the day that the sun broke through the clouds after the first rain, Crockett and Zavie started cutting down the plants because mold had started popping like a virus they couldn't control. They began by chopping off all the top branches on the plants, and bringing in the largest, most valuable colas. By the time they were ready for a second round, though, the mold had spread fast.

Then the bottleneck began.

In preparation for harvest, Frankie had helped Crockett construct a temporary drying shed next to the cabin. They filled it with white clothes hangers from which they planned to hang the pot. The cabin itself was also turned into a drying room. The bed where Crockett slept and stored his gun was pushed against the wall to make room for the weed, and he took to sleeping in the loft. Wire was strung back and forth across the cabin ceiling like an Italian clothesline, and they hung pot branches from it. But there still wasn't enough room. The mold was coming so quickly they had to cut all the plants and bring them in at once. Even with the extra drying shed, there just didn't seem to be enough room.

At one point, they filled the beds of both Crockett's and Frankie's trucks with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of plants, which they then dumped on the cabin floor. Green, fragrant branches covered the entire room. Crockett was literally up to his shins in it. They were working fifteen-hour days, and he was exhausted. There was no escape. Even when Crockett slept, he was surrounded by weed. Then, some of the people Frankie had hired to help with the harvest hung the colas together too tightly in the shed, and mold began to spread there, too. Crockett was pissed.

“Nobody's allowed to pack this weed but me,” he told Frankie.

Despite Crockett's best efforts, the cabin floor was soon littered with paper grocery bags full of gray, hairy, rotten buds that looked like something that could grow inside a cottage cheese container forgotten in the back of the fridge. The year 2010 would go down as one of epic mold in Humboldt County. Maybe it was nature's revenge for the greed and panic that had prompted so many people to plant more than they ever had before, because of the threat of legalization. Whatever the reason, when all was said and done, Crockett, Frankie, and Zavie lost around a quarter of their crop—the equivalent of about $250,000 in cash.

Just as the Napa Valley, a few hours south, fills with the smell of fermenting grapes during harvest season, the skunky forbidden odor of marijuana hangs over the hills of Humboldt every fall. But whereas in Napa, tourists can line up to see the grapes brought into the crush pad to begin their journey to the bottle, in Humboldt, the marijuana harvest goes on behind high fences and locked gates, and up dusty roads.

The harvest of America's favorite illegal drug is a private affair.

In Crockett's cabin, the trimmers sat in a circle around the table and hunched over trays that contained their scissors, cleaning solution, and crispy little piles of marijuana buds. It was hot, so the door was left open and fans whirled day and night to cool off the workers and help dry the buds that hung in clumps from the wires above like mutant mistletoe. The trimmers were women for the most part, in keeping with the industry practice. A typical trim scene usually consists of a group of women, with the occasional man thrown in, listening to music, sharing stories, and clipping marijuana. There was something almost traditional about it, like a quilting circle of older times. Throughout Humboldt, grandmothers, students, service industry workers, and teenagers such as Emma Worldpeace supplemented their income with trim work every year or did it full time. These particular women were friends of Frankie and his girlfriend from the Bay Area, and people whom the couple had met while traveling in Costa Rica.

As far as under-the-table manual labor was concerned, trimming was a lucrative gig. Marijuana trimmers were usually paid for the amount of product they cleaned. The going rate for trimmers in the fall of 2010 was $200 a pound. Cash. Which meant that relatively fast trimmers, who averaged a pound a day, could earn at least $25 an hour. Tax-free, of course. Seasoned pros could trim double or sometimes even triple that. It all depended on the weight and quality of the pot. Given the private, homebound nature of the business, many trimmers were also housed and fed by their employers. Frankie's trimmers stayed on couches at his place near Garberville, on air mattresses on the floor, and in the RV out front. One slept outside in a tent. There was a festive, slumber-party feel to it all, at least for the first few days, until the novelty wore off and the sheer drudgery of the work set in.

To clean, trim, clip, manicure, or process pot for sale, a trimmer begins by cutting off any protruding leaves with sewing scissors. Then she trims around the dried flower bud to make it look like a tidy round hedge. Itchy green flakes fly off in the process and stick to clothing, become lodged in hair, and slip down bras. Most trimmers wear aprons. Some wear gloves to prevent their fingers from becoming coated in sticky brown residue. When the bud is uniform and neat, the trimmer drops it in a container next to her, cleans off her scissors if they have become unwieldy due to the resin, and then starts all over again. And again. And again.

It is painfully tedious work, but because of the relatively high wages, there is never a shortage of people willing to do it. Every fall, the streets and businesses of Humboldt see an influx of new faces. Along with the transients who drive Bob crazy, many of these faces belong to people who already have jobs lined up and places to stay. Because of the fear of rip-offs and the general illegality of the business, most Humboldt growers don't hire trimmers off the street. Some import their labor. Trimmers come from all over: ski bums from Utah, carpenters from Vermont, teachers from Hawaii, people met while traveling in Costa Rica. Like the growers who employ them, they are predominately white.

In a way, they are California's last white migrant farm workers.

Clear plastic turkey-roasting bags are the industry standard for packaging marijuana. They are cheap and they nicely hold a pound. When the turkey bags full of freshly trimmed pot that escaped the mold began to pile up, Crockett began moving them south, out of the county. The idea was to sell as much as possible as quickly as possible, before the glut began and prices dropped, like they did every year after harvest. That wasn't taking into account whatever was going to happen with the vote in November. A connection in Sonoma County was buying at $3,400 a pound, which was high for marijuana grown outdoors in a greenhouse. Crockett figured the guy would probably sell it as indoor pot on the black market. He had no idea where it would end up, but guessed it would be some state back east, where pot was still illegal. A lot of what Crockett used to sell would go to Colorado, but then voters there approved a medical marijuana law of their own, and that place, as he put it, blew up.

Crockett packed fifteen to twenty pounds of pot in a waterproof bag that the man who sold it to him said was popularized by Navy SEALs. It wasn't the water he worried about so much as the smell. The waterproof bag wouldn't stand up to a drug-detection dog, but it should fool a cop. A few weeks earlier, Crockett had been pulled over again for speeding, near Myers Flat. He was in full harvest mode, and his clothes reeked of pot.

“Where is it?” the highway patrol officer demanded after Crockett rolled down his window and hit him with the smell.

The officer handcuffed Crockett and put him in the backseat of his car while he searched the vehicle. Fortunately, Crockett didn't have anything on him, and he eventually drove away a free man.

Crockett deposited the bag in his trunk and started up his car. His first stop would be the car wash in Redway, where he would blast the layer of fine, pale dirt off his Mitsubishi with a high-powered hose. He had heard that police looked for dirty cars to pull over on the gauntlet south, the dust a telltale sign of a journey up unpaved roads to places where pot plants grow. The medical marijuana card in Crockett's pocket wouldn't cover what he was about to do. The transportation of marijuana was a gray area in the state's medical marijuana law, and was basically illegal. Crockett slammed his trunk shut, cranked up his stereo, and headed south on the Redwood Highway, for once driving the speed limit.

Around the same time that Crockett began hauling the first of the year's harvest south, an unusual meeting was being held on Marina Way in Eureka. The Medical Cannabis Ordinance Workshop was cohosted by a newly founded group called the Humboldt Growers Association and by county supervisor Bonnie Neely. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss how Humboldt County might finally begin to regulate its infamous clandestine industry. Panelists included the Humboldt district attorney; two members of the board of supervisors; Joey Burger, the president of the Growers Association; and a lobbyist the association had hired who looked eerily like Clark Kent.

During part of the meeting, Bob Hamilton's boss, Sheriff Gary Philp, sat in the audience.

The Humboldt County D.A., Paul Gallegos, was the only prosecutor in the entire state to come out publicly in favor of Prop 19. The way Gallegos saw it, the federal government was on the right side of history with abolishing slavery, and on the wrong side when it came to marijuana. If Prop 19 passed the following month, the law would leave it up to cities and counties to tax and regulate the marijuana industry how they saw fit. At the meeting, Gallegos welcomed the beginning of what he saw as a long-overdue discussion on how that regulation should look.

“We're a decade late,” he said that day. “We spent a long time addressing this as an illegitimate industry.”

The Bay Area city of Oakland was ahead of the curve and had recently approved plans to permit large-scale marijuana-growing operations within city limits. In Humboldt, the answer wasn't “pot factories,” as people were calling the Oakland model, but pot farms. At the meeting, the Humboldt Growers Association passed out copies of its proposed ordinance, which would license and tax outdoor grows, from $20,000 for a quarter acre to $80,000 for an acre.