Humboldt

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This book is narrative nonfiction. The characters are real and the events happened. Passages expressing a person's thoughts or feelings have been fact-checked. Because the cultivation of marijuana remains a federal felony, despite state law, punishable by a sentence of up to life in prison, the names and certain identifying characteristics of some of the people in this book have been changed.

F
ollow the same path as the youth who once fled the city. From San Francisco, cross the Golden Gate and head north through the rolling hills of Marin, and then Sonoma County. Keep going. In the summertime, the landscape is a sun-scorched ocher. After the rains have begun, it is an Irish shade of green. Continue through the vineyards to Mendocino. Hours will pass. The grassy hills give way to ragged mountains, and the trees grow pointy and thick. On foggy days, the treetops catch the mist that billows in off the Pacific, and clumps of it hang there like fallen clouds.

Past the South Fork of the Eel River the road winds through a patch of ancient redwood forest called Richardson Grove State Park. These trees, the coast redwoods, are the tallest living things on earth. They come from another time; their ancestors provided shade for dinosaurs. California's redwood forest once stretched from the Oregon border south to Big Sur. Then, in the 1850s, men who came west seeking adventure and riches discovered the beauty and durability of the wood. They called it red gold. Trees were leveled. Fortunes were made. Today, only 4 percent of California's old-growth redwood forest remains, like a magnificent cathedral that has been knocked to the ground, with only its gilded altar left standing.

In Richardson Grove, the redwoods loom mere inches from the roadway, and the trunks of the larger ones may be wider than your car. The oldest tree in the grove is called the Grandfather. Shaped like a giant slingshot, with two trees sprouting from his base, the Grandfather is about twenty-four stories high and has stood for more than 1,800 years. His rings tell the story. Just beneath the fibrous bark, man landed on the moon. Deeper inside, Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. Toward the core, Mayans were beginning to carve their language into temple walls.

Inside the grove, even on a warm summer day, it is dark and cool. Most of the sunlight is caught in the branches of the giants high above, but in places, it filters down, leaving delicate lacelike patterns on the road.

Keep driving. You're almost there. Richardson Grove marks the unofficial entrance to Humboldt County. Pass through it and you'll begin to understand the local saying about living in a world that exists behind the redwood
curtain.

L
ate one Tuesday afternoon in March of 2010, in a disorderly cabin located on the edge of the North American continent, in a place bypassed by highways and the electrical grid, Mary Em Abidon reached deep into her freezer, plucked out a small white marrowbone, and tossed it onto her pantry floor. Her dog, Lucky, was nearly deaf, but the unmistakable
thunk
of bone hitting wood could still roust him from his slumber. It was a familiar routine between Mare, as she was known to most everyone, and the border collie/cocker spaniel mutt she found abandoned on the road to Shelter Cove fourteen years earlier.

As Mare bent down to scratch behind Lucky's floppy black ears and pat his head, the little dog peered up at her with pleading eyes.

“Lucky, stay and guard,” she instructed him, as she always did before she left for town.

Lucky picked up his treat and headed for the front deck to curl up under the cherry trees that were just beginning to bud, while Mare gathered up her coat and purse and pulled the cabin door shut behind her. She was excited, giddy even, as she started up her battered Volvo station wagon and eased it down her driveway and toward town. It was the same fluttery feeling she had long ago when she first moved to this place. It felt like the start of something new.

Mare had first heard about the event while listening to KMUD-FM, the community radio station. A local talk show host named Anna “Banana” Hamilton was organizing it. The flyers she posted around town advertised the event two ways: “The Post-Marijuana Prohibition Economy Forum,” and the shorthand version, which rolled off the tongue much easier: “What's After Pot?” The accompanying art featured a pot leaf, two nude female figures wearing baseball caps, clumps of trimmed marijuana buds, and what appeared to be dollar bills with wings fluttering away. Smaller print near the bottom of the flyer advised attendees to bring their own snacks.

On her way to town, Mare caught slivers of the steel-blue Pacific Ocean through the trees, but mostly all she could see were the trees themselves. On her right, madrones and Douglas firs plunged down the canyon. On her left, they furrowed their roots deep into the hillside. The Volvo rattled past a row of brightly painted mailboxes and the dirt road that led to the meadow where the annual Easter egg hunt and the May and October trade fairs were held. Farther ahead was the tiny community school where years earlier Mare had volunteered as an art teacher, teaching the children how to make paper and pinch clay into faces that they would stick to trees until the rain washed them away.

At the intersection called Four Corners, where a hand-painted blue sign cautioned drivers to be on the lookout for bicycles, motorcycles, a donkey, and children, Mare guided the Volvo past the entrance to Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, and onto a road that straddled the Mendocino and Humboldt county line. Deep inside the state park was a seventy-five-acre patch of ancient redwoods that Mare had once fought to save from the roar of a lumber company's saw. Looking back on her life, Mare considered it the most important thing she'd ever done.

That was nearly thirty years ago. On this March day, Mare was a month into her seventieth year. Her once-blond hair had long since turned silvery white, and her handsome face carried the lines of a life fully lived. Her blue eyes still twinkled with unfaltering optimism, and she continued to marvel at the details, like the cherry-red paint on a passing motorcycle, which could make her exclaim in childlike delight. But her body had begun to betray her. Her right knee caused her to hobble, and she had had to have a hip replaced a few years back. “Becoming bionic,” she called it. Her sturdy, creative hands, which once made a thousand ceramic pots a year, were now racked with arthritis. They gripped the Volvo's steering wheel and propelled her toward town.

The meeting was taking place at the Mateel Community Center in Southern Humboldt, an area of 1,200 square miles of sprawling wilderness in the far reaches of Northern California. The area used to be known as the Mateel, after the Mattole and Eel rivers that flow through it, but now, as if it were some Manhattan neighborhood, many people called it by the abbreviated term SoHum.

Over the years, SoHum, the rest of Humboldt, and neighboring Mendocino and Trinity counties had become known around the country as the Emerald Triangle, after the region's brilliant green clandestine marijuana crop. Since the mid-1970s, outlaw farmers throughout the Triangle had been supplying America with its favorite illegal drug. What had started as a lark nearly forty years earlier had become the backbone to the county's economy. Throughout the region, and particularly in SoHum, marijuana farming had become a way of life, one that transcended class and generations. “It's what we do here,” people would say.

Mare herself had grown a half-dozen plants every year for decades.

But the code of silence surrounding the marijuana industry was such that, until one March evening in 2010, there had never been a public gathering in Southern Humboldt where what people did there was openly discussed.

Sure, for twenty years there was an annual hemp festival, where pot-related books and paraphernalia were sold, and for decades there had been meetings to discuss the actions of law enforcement in the community, but a public discussion about the dependence of the local economy on the black market marijuana crop had never happened before. Up until this moment, it was even considered bad form to ask what someone did for a living in the community. It was just understood.

As she approached the town of Redway, Mare hung a right. She passed the grocery store that most old-timers still called Murrish's, eased the Volvo into a parking spot, and began to shuffle toward the boxy beige building on the hill.

She passed through the front doors of the Mateel Community Center and a giant wooden sculpture of an open hand. Inside, the stage where musicians from around the world came to play shows was empty, but the entire oak floor below was filled with a dozen long banquet tables and an army of folding chairs. On each table were handwritten place cards indicating who should sit there. There were tables for landowners, local government, medical marijuana patients, the press, “Growers,” and “Just Curious.” There was even a gray metal chair labeled “FBI.”

It was a large crowd for Southern Humboldt. Nearly two hundred people were milling about. Instead of picking a table, Mare headed for the fireplace in the back corner that was sculpted to resemble a giant redwood tree trunk and looked as though it should have a cauldron bubbling away inside it. Across the room she spotted her cousin Jewel, who shared her silver hair and warm smile. There were other familiar faces in the crowd—neighbors and friends—and the unfamiliar. Seated at the landowners' table was a woman with long, coppery red hair named Kym Kemp. A third-generation Humboldter, Kemp had been blogging about local marijuana culture since 2007, under the name Redheaded Blackbelt. Her blog posts ranged from photos of local wildflowers and quilts she helped stitch to links to stories about the marijuana industry and flyers of the occasional missing person. Sitting nearby was a man Mare knew named Charley Custer, who was dressed in his trademark Stetson hat and Jesus sandals. Custer had moved to Humboldt from Chicago in 1980 to write a book that he referred to as his “opus dopus.” It was, as of yet, incomplete.

Engrossed in a conversation over by the stage was the event's mastermind, Anna “Banana” Hamilton. Hamilton was an outspoken folksinger in her sixties who hosted a monthly talk show on KMUD called
Rant and Rave
. She normally tooled around town in jeans and a baseball cap, but on this evening, she was dressed up, in a lavender velvet top and pearls.

Mare glanced around the room and realized that regardless of where people were sitting, the majority were what she called marijuana moonshiners, just like her.

The irony was that every table was now full except for the growers' table, where only two brave souls had claimed a seat. One of them was Mare's neighbor Syreeta Lux, a sturdy blonde who wore an enormous grin. Lux had lived in the community for decades and figured it was impossible to have a conversation about the future of the marijuana industry if growers were still invisible. It's now or never, she figured, as she pulled her chair up to the empty table. Lux quickly waved over a friend, and wrote “medical” above the word
growers
, to try to get people to feel more at ease. Like Mare, Syreeta Lux recognized many faces of friends, neighbors, and other community members in the crowd who were also growers, but still no one else joined her.

It may have seemed strange that fourteen years after California passed the nation's first medical marijuana law, which allowed people to grow pot legally with a doctor's recommendation, America's most infamous marijuana growers might be hesitant to claim their heritage, but this was a community that had paid a price for its decades-long rebellion. It had endured annual government raids, and the army itself had once invaded. Then there was the lawless side of the business, the home-invasion rip-offs, and the occasional murder. For decades, to announce oneself as a grower would have been like painting a big target on one's back. The times were indeed changing, but they didn't change quickly in Humboldt.

The event was about to begin, and Syreeta Lux decided to take things a step further. She stood up, held the “Growers” sign high above her head, and commanded the room's attention.

“If anyone is looking for a place to sit, there's lots of room at our table to grow,” she announced in a loud, booming voice.

And then she grinned even wider.

From her spot by the fireplace, Mare figured she would let Syreeta represent the female growers. After years of living in the shadows, Mare had no intention of claiming a seat at that table. But when Syreeta stood up and encouraged others to join her, it was as if Mare's feet had a mind of their own, and just like that, she found herself stepping forward. In front of her family, friends, community, elected officials, local and national media, and maybe even the FBI, Mare Abidon shuffled toward the growers' table.

And she wasn't the only one.

“Come on!” Syreeta Lux shouted for others to join them, and they did.

Like some kind of illicit farming coming-out ceremony, more growers stepped into the light. Eventually their numbers swelled to a few dozen, and later they had to retreat to the outdoor patio to have enough space to talk among themselves. But first, from her perch near the stage, Anna Hamilton spoke the words that everyone knew, but no one had yet dared to declare publicly.

“The legalization of marijuana will be the single most devastating economic bust in the long boom-and-bust history of Northern California, impacting local businesses, nonprofit organizations, the workforce, and county tax revenue,” she said, pausing for dramatic effect to peer at the crowd over the top of her reading glasses.

As Hamilton and everyone else knew, pot farming was not only a way of life in the region; it was the foundation of the entire economy. People had grown so dependent on the lucrative black market prices that some locals referred to marijuana's illegality as the best government price support program in U.S. history. Prohibition and suppression create risk for growers and artificial scarcity on the market, sending prices and profit margins through the roof.

But that price support system was now at risk.

The U.S. government effectively outlawed marijuana in 1937. Though it is nontoxic and there are no recorded cases in history of anyone ever dying from overdosing on the drug, since the creation of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970 the federal government has classified marijuana as a Schedule I substance. This means the government considers pot more dangerous than cocaine or methamphetamine, with no medical value whatsoever. Many American people are of a different mind. In the late 1990s, starting with California in 1996, states began adopting medical marijuana laws. By the spring of 2010, fourteen states and Washington, D.C., had passed such laws.

These new laws, coupled with a cultural shift toward the acceptance of marijuana on a national level, brought more people into the industry and caused the price of pot on the black market gradually to decline. Marijuana was now a multi-billion-dollar industry in the Golden State, and a measure to legalize and tax it for adult recreational use had just gathered enough signatures to appear on the November ballot.

As Anna Hamilton pointed out that evening, if the measure passed, it could change everything in Humboldt.

“Every member of our society holds a stake in the consequences of legalization,” she said, as she began to point to the various tables—to the landowners, educators, members of the business community, and pot growers.

“Did I skip anyone who wants to be recognized tonight?” she asked. “Any representatives from the federal government? I see someone's sitting in that fed chair over there. Is that just a joke?!”

Apparently it was, so Hamilton continued.

If the legalization measure passed, she predicted that the price of marijuana grown outdoors in the sun, the traditional Humboldt way, could drop from its current rate of around $2,000 a pound to as low as $500. If that happened, the effects would be catastrophic. The market would bottom out, affecting growers and everyone who worked for them, which Hamilton estimated to be between fifteen and thirty thousand people in Humboldt County alone.

In a few months' time, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, would release a study with a similar prediction. It estimated that the legalization of the production and distribution of marijuana in California could cause prices to drop up to 80 percent.

There was reason to worry in the room, and it wasn't just about economic self-interest. Proceeds from marijuana had not only supported and sustained individuals in the community, but had also helped build local institutions, including a health clinic, the radio station KMUD, and the Mateel Community Center, where the evening's conversation was taking place. Donating earnings from a plant or a pound to these nonprofits, and to the community schools and volunteer fire departments, was how for years many locals paid their “taxes.”