Humboldt (13 page)

Members of the collective underwent a quality control to make sure they grew outdoors without chemicals, helped preserve the fish populations by not pumping water from local rivers during the summer months, and kept their processing facilities clean. It was an attempt to self-regulate a still-unregulated industry. A man came around to inspect Mare's scene, to make sure she met the standards of her collective. When he saw all the untreated wood on the walls, ceiling, and floor of her loft, he told her she would have to sand and seal it. Then he called her back later and suggested that maybe she should rent a special drying shed in town. It felt so complicated that Mare called one of the founders in tears and offered to drop out of the collective, but the founder came up with the compromise of sealing off the space with sheets to create a sterile area, and that seemed to satisfy everyone.

So much had changed since the old days. Back then, all sizes of buds went in the same bag; now they were sorted according to size and grade. When Mare used to find mold on a bud, she'd take it out, but what was next to it—which probably had mold spores on it, too—would be sold. Now, with most dispensaries requiring lab testing for mold, Mare realized it wasn't good for people with compromised immune systems who smoked pot as their medicine. The industry was changing fast.

Then there was the difference between indoor- and outdoor-grown pot. Over the years, Mare had somehow been oblivious to the rising popularity of marijuana grown inside under high-intensity lights. During the heavy and hard years of CAMP, some growers had moved indoors to avoid detection, but Mare didn't realize how prolific indoor growing had become, or how valuable, until she took a trip to Harbin Hot Springs with a few of her girlfriends. Harbin was a clothing-optional New Age retreat in nearby Lake County. While Mare and her friends were in the area, they decided to pay a visit to the nearby pot dispensary. Most of the ladies had been growing pot for decades but had never visited an actual pot store before. Though there were already more dispensaries in California than there were Starbucks or McDonald's, there wasn't yet a single one in Southern Humboldt.

The women were in for an awful shock.

At the Lake County dispensary, as at those throughout the state, the kind of organic, sun-grown marijuana they grew was considered bottom of the market. The dispensary was selling it for thirty dollars for an eighth of an ounce. The kind of pot Crockett grew—outside, in a greenhouse—was going for sixty dollars an eighth, and pot grown inside was selling for ninety dollars an eighth. The women were appalled. It was as if organic heirloom tomatoes or free-range eggs were worth less than some mass-produced factory version.

One of Mare's friends asked the reason behind the pricing. She was told it was because wind could blow debris on marijuana grown outdoors and it was considered kind of dirty. It was also less expensive to grow in the sun, they were told, and the pot it produced tended to be less potent than the average indoor crop, which was untrue.

The women left feeling dejected.

In the past seven months since her official coming-out as a pot grower, things hadn't turned out well for Mare. She had never expected pot would be illegal for so long, but now that it was almost legal, she felt invisible. It reminded her of that interaction she had at the seed bank in Amsterdam. She had recently come across a glossy magazine called
Rosebud
, which billed itself as a “hydroponics lifestyle” publication. Celebrities graced its cover, and inside were ads for $24,000 computerized hydroponic systems. There was no mention of outdoor growing anywhere in the magazine. It was starting to seem like only old hippies grew pot under the sun. Indoors was slick, young, and lucrative. It was dismaying to Mare that marijuana had become such a commodity. She felt like something important was being forgotten.

Mare hung the last of her buds to dry and prepared to make another trip to the greenhouse. She thought again that if legalization didn't happen, and the Tea House Collective didn't work, it might just be time to think about retirement.

Elsewhere in Humboldt, a grower sitting in jail faced an even bigger problem.

A
week after learning about the shooting Mike was allegedly involved in, Emma Worldpeace started up her black Subaru Impreza and began the four-hour drive from Chico back to Humboldt. She drove down a busy I-5, the interstate that bisects California, and then through oak forest and farmland on a tiny state route, before connecting with Highway 101 in Mendocino County, and pushing north, back behind the redwood curtain. Emma was on her way to meet both of her sisters at Aia's house in Eureka. The girls were going to get together and talk about what had happened with Mike, who was sitting downtown in the Humboldt County jail charged with murder, attempted murder, and marijuana cultivation.

The weekend after she learned about the shooting, Emma and her boyfriend, Ethan, had been riding through Chico on their bikes when a friend drove by them and stopped to say hello.

“Hey, did you hear about that shooting that went on in Humboldt?” the friend asked. They knew that Emma was originally from there.

Emma got a huge lump in her throat and wanted to tear up. She was unable to say, “Yes, that was my brother.”

Emma hadn't seen much of Mike in recent years, and when she did, it was painfully obvious that they inhabited different worlds. When Emma was at Berkeley, Mike used to tease her about how broke she was, and how spending thousands of dollars on her education was a major waste of money. Here he was, she remembered him telling her, making $100,000 a year growing pot. He had just bought his own home, and he hadn't even graduated from high school.

During her junior year at Berkeley, Emma went up to visit Mike and her older sister, Aia, who was living with him at the time. It was Halloween, and as the girls were putting the finishing touches on their costumes and preparing to go out for the evening, Emma started talking about a class she was taking that she was excited about. She expected Mike to shoot it down as usual, but instead, he listened and looked thoughtful. It was as though something inside him had changed. At twenty-six, he was now struggling to make his loan payments on his house. He'd never had a legal job and didn't really have anything to show for all his hard work that wasn't fake or made up in some way.

Following Mike's arrest, Aia took in his pit bulls, Alou and Lola. Emma always found them to be sweet, nice dogs, but they had been pepper-sprayed by the authorities, and for six days after Aia picked them up, they were unable to eat and were edgy and would bark aggressively at anyone who came to the door. Lisa knew the dogs well; she had lived with Mike most recently, and knew what food to buy for them and how to get them to eat again.

The sisters gathered around a laptop in Aia's living room and pored over the coverage of the shooting. In the days following Mike's arrest, more news had come out about the incident. In a bizarre coincidence, it turned out that Humboldt County sheriff's deputies had already been investigating Mike and were in the process of preparing a warrant to search his property on the morning of the shooting. His garden was big enough to attract attention during a sheriff's helicopter flyover.

The sisters clicked through the news coverage and were shocked by some of the readers' comments. Some made fun of the hippie spelling of Mike's name. Others called for his blood. “He deserves nothing more than a bullet in the back of his head, and to be hung from a tree for vultures to eat,” wrote one reader on a Mendocino news site.

Most sickening to Emma was the racism toward the
Guat
e­malan men who had been shot.

“How come no one's saying anything about these guys being illegal immigrants?” asked a commenter at
The
North Coast Journal
, as if the men's immigration status had anything to do with their being shot.

“What were these men doing in Humboldt County?” asked another.

Eventually the sisters just had to stop reading. It was too upsetting.

Sometimes Emma would go back and forth between calling Mike her stepbrother or her brother, but the truth was that she loved and cared about him as a brother. She didn't want him to rot in jail, but if he did shoot those men in cold blood, she knew that justice needed to be served.

On her long drive back to Chico a few days later, Emma reflected on everything that had happened. She thought about the legalization measure, and how excited she had been when she first heard about it. She always thought that pot should be legal, especially when compared with alcohol. It just made sense. If pot were legal, sure, there would be less money in the black market, but the region would adjust eventually and then there would be less fear and shame in the community, and greater tax revenue for the schools. Not to mention that business-related violence would come to an end, just like it had at the end of alcohol prohibition.

Emma was still living in Humboldt when the news broke about the upcoming legalization vote, and she heard the undercurrent of opposition in the community from people who were scared it would threaten their economic security. She also knew people who were preparing to adapt, like her best friend's mother, whom she rented a room from at the time. The woman grew a few plants in a spare room to supplement her full-time work at the local health food store. She told Emma that she thought maybe she'd rent out the room to make up for the loss in income after legalization. Throughout the summer, the measure was ahead in the polls, and looked pretty inevitable.

After a yearlong courtship, Emma had moved to Chico that spring to live with Ethan. The couple had met through the cycling community, and shared a mutual love of the sport. Emma hoped to get into graduate school in Chico and study social work, but in the meantime, she found a job at the bike shop.

The couple thought about maybe returning to Humboldt together someday. Ethan loved the natural beauty of the area and would move there in a heartbeat if he could find a decent job that wasn't in the marijuana industry. Emma had her doubts. She so loved the place and thought about how fulfilling it would be to be a counselor at her old high school, to be able to talk to kids about their situations, and to have her own children attend the same sweet hippie schools she once did. But then she'd return home over the summer to visit, and she'd see all these strange, shady people in town, people drawn to the area not for the community, but to grow and make money and live as outlaws. She'd read about all the spooky crimes in the local paper, and she'd recall all the sad-ass stories of her youth and she'd have second thoughts about moving back. Maybe it wouldn't be such a great place to start a family. Or maybe if pot did become legal, it would even the playing field, and the people who lived in Humboldt would be there because they loved the place and wanted to participate in the community, and not just because they wanted to benefit from the pot economy.

Then this thing with Mike happened, and Emma was reminded once again that people were killed over pot. She was just so ready for the drama, and the violence, and the excessiveness to end. If she held out any hope for the situation, it was that others would learn from Mike's story, that he would serve as a kind of cautionary tale. So many of the boys she grew up with had just stayed and grown pot, and seemed headed in the same direction as Mike. Emma had heard so many people say that if someone stepped on their property and tried to steal their shit, they would shoot the person. Emma thought that kind of behavior needed to be condemned. She didn't think that was what her parents and the hippie settlers who stumbled across pot as a way to make money and support their families would have wanted. The hope for most people was that it never got to the point where they had to pull a trigger, but maybe if Mike were found guilty, his story would serve as a reminder that if you took someone else's life, you were taking your own life in a way, too.

The men who were shot in Mike's garden were people with families who loved them, people who had had hopes and dreams of their own. It was Emma's wish that the fact the men were undocumented immigrants from another country wouldn't lessen Mike's punishment if he were found guilty, because that would be valuing one type of human life over another, and that, she thought, would be disgusting.

Little did she know that the vote and what happened afterward would delay the justice process in Mike's case for a long time to come.

J
ust past ten o'clock one fall morning, when the leaves on the alder trees had started to turn yellow and shadows had begun to fall longer on the ground, Bob Hamilton rocketed down the Avenue of the Giants. The trees and river passed by in a foggy green blur. He hung a hard left onto Phillipsville Road, the same road he had raced down a few months earlier in search of the fugitive Keith Conn. This time he shot past the beat-up Airstream where he once thought Conn was hiding out and swung a right, toward a house filled with sadness.

A woman had died. She'd had lupus, Bob was told, and was under a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order so she could die from natural causes. Normally, Bob wouldn't have responded to a call about someone under such an order, but the deceased woman's daughter had called him on his cell phone a few minutes earlier and told him she suspected that drugs might be involved. Not only was Humboldt County home to nearly half of the planet's remaining old-growth redwoods and the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in California, but in 2010, Humboldt also had the distinction of having the state's highest drug-induced death rate. Of course none of these deaths was due to marijuana, which no one has ever died from overdosing on. But like many poor, rural counties, Humboldt had a high rate of death from methadone, methamphetamine, and prescription drugs such as Vicodin and Oxycontin.

Bob pulled to a stop in front of a two-story house with a sagging front porch. The young woman who had called him was waiting by the side of the road. She had long brown hair and was dressed in the kind of clothes you throw on when you're awoken by a phone call with bad news: a hoodie, sweat pants, and Ugg boots. In her arms she held a small blond boy in Space Invader pajamas. A man in a baseball cap hovered protectively nearby. The woman's face was tearstained, and her voice cracked as she greeted Bob.

“I want to know if drugs were involved and if she OD'd on something,” she said. “I want to know if she did it herself or not…”

The woman's voice trailed off and she began to weep. The man standing next to her wrapped his arm around her shoulder, and an older woman appeared out of nowhere to scoop the child out of her arms.

Bob had met the couple once before, in an enormous greenhouse full of pot. The little boy was just a baby then. They didn't have a 215, so it was an illegal grow. The couple told Bob that they were trying to get money to build a house. He arrested the man, but only cited the woman because of the baby in her arms. Even though they had been busted, something about Bob's interaction with the couple must have earned him their respect, because when the woman learned her mother had died, she called Bob almost immediately.

Bob pulled a small notebook and a pen out of his front pocket and began his police work. The young woman was named Kayla. She was twenty-two. Her mother, the deceased, was Christina. She was born in December 1964, and had died that morning in the room she rented in a house a few feet from where they were standing. For much of her life, Christina had battled heroin addiction.

Bob turned toward the house. It was large and rambling, and overlooked the South Fork of the Eel River in the back. Like most places in Phillipsville, it looked as though its heyday had been back around the time of the logging boom. Bob stepped into the front yard and realized that he had been there before. He had once kicked down the front gate while chasing a suspect.

In the hallway inside, a skinny woman with blond hair and the raspy voice of someone who smoked too many cigarettes was speaking to a woman who turned out to be the deceased's sister. The blonde's name was Cinderella, but everybody called her Cindra.

Bob glanced around the corner to the kitchen and an enormous living room beyond. Oriental carpets covered the floors, along with four overstuffed couches and a pool table. The place smelled musty, as if no one had opened the windows in a very long time.

“How long has she lived here?” he asked.

“I'm guessing six months,” said Cindra. “Some days she was pretty decent; other days she was in so much pain she couldn't move.”

A man with long white hair and a white beard, who looked a little bit like Gandalf the Grey, passed by. His name was Steven and he owned the house. Steven was barefoot, and seemed oblivious to the chill in the air in shorts and a T-shirt. He appeared disturbed by the morning's events and unable to stop pacing. Bob had heard of Steven before but couldn't remember why. It wouldn't be long before he heard about Steven again. In retrospect, all Steven's pacing that morning might have been simple discomfort at having Bob poking about his house.

In the kitchen, next to a garbage can full of empty liquor bottles and a sliding glass door that looked out onto the swollen river outside, Bob learned the story of Christina's death from the man who had found her. Ron rented the bedroom across the hall. He had buzzed white hair, and his eyes were wet with tears.

As Bob scribbled the story in his tiny notebook, Ron explained that the previous day had been a bad one for Christina. The chronic inflammation associated with lupus had made her hands ache, and her caregiver had tried to soothe the pain with an injection in her back.

At around 8:30 that morning, Ron went to check on Christina and was greeted by an eerie stillness.

“I could tell from the second I opened the door she was gone,” Ron said.

Out on the front porch, Kayla, Christina's daughter, was crying.

“I'm sorry for overreacting,” she said as Bob walked up to her. He gently wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

“You're not overreacting,” he told her. “Your mom passed away.”

After interviewing Cindra, the only person left to see was Christina herself. Her bedroom was located in an alcove at the top of the stairs. She was lying on a double bed that was pushed up against the window. Bob peeled back the red-and-white-check afghan that covered her. Christina had dark hair and pale, waxy skin. She looked gaunt, and her jaw was frozen open. As he peered down at her, Bob realized that, like the house and so many of the people in it, he had history with Christina, too. She had sold heroin out of a place she used to rent in Redway. Bob quietly pulled the afghan back over her head.

The night table next to her was littered with prescription pill bottles. Bob glanced at their labels. There were enough little orange bottles to fill a paper grocery bag. On the windowsill above the bed was a framed photograph of an attractive young woman in her thirties, with a young girl seated next to her. It was Christina and Kayla in happier times.

Downstairs, on one of the overstuffed couches in the living room, Bob delivered his findings to Kayla.

“There's no reason for me to believe there was any foul play,” he told her. “I just wanted you to know what I came up with and that I'm really sorry for your loss.”

Upstairs, Bob gathered up a box of jewelry, Christina's purse, cell phone, and a few other personal effects for Kayla. Kayla's husband grabbed the framed portrait above the bed.

“One of the saddest things when my mom died is that I had nothing of hers,” Bob said as he handed the things over, and remembered the death of his own mother in a fire all those years ago.

“If you need me, call me,” he told Kayla as he walked out the door. Employees from a funeral home in Fortuna were on their way to collect the body.

“Thanks, Hamilton.”

Bob rubbed sanitizer over his hands as he drove away. Deathwise, it was all very short and sweet. On the drive back toward 101, yellow alder leaves were scattered across the roadway in front of him. Later on during his patrol that day, Bob's mind would wander to the less sweet stories from his years in law enforcement and the things he'd seen that would forever haunt him, like the five-year-old boy who was accidentally shot and killed by his father on a hunting trip. Bob had had to scoop the lifeless child out of the car that day, and he would never forget how his tiny body felt like a bag of chicken bones and Jell-O in his arms.

Then there was the nine-year-old girl he hit after she Rollerbladed out in front of his squad car one evening in Fresno. After a brief hospital stay, she ended up being fine, but Bob was so distraught by the guilt and the memory of the girl crumpling to the ground in front of his car that he had to take time off from work.

More recently, a Humboldt woman out in Whitethorn had tried to take her life in a particularly horrific way. She was wielding a butcher knife when Bob arrived at her house. Her response to his command to drop it was to race into a bedroom and lock the door. After hearing strange gurgling sounds coming from the other side of the door, Bob kicked the door down and discovered the woman had slit her throat. She then tried to fight him off as Bob applied pressure to her wounds with his bare hands. There was so much blood his sleeves were soaked up to his elbows. Bob later received life-saving awards from both the Red Cross and the Sheriff's Department for his actions. The woman lived, thanks to him, but would go on to attempt suicide again.

After all he had seen, it was no wonder to Bob that police officers had such a high rate of suicide, almost twice that of the general population. He kept his spirits up with high-adrenaline hobbies, like flying tiny planes, riding motorcycles, and skydiving.

Not long after his visit to the house in Phillipsville, Bob heard that Steven, the sixty-four-year-old homeowner, had been arrested. His wizard-like mug shot even made the front page of the local paper. It turned out that a concealed trap door in the house led to a basement where, under blazing lights, Steven and a couple of partners grew more than 3,300 marijuana plants, most of which were tiny clones.

Bob wasn't even that surprised when he heard the news. He figured the guy would get off on probation. It just seemed to Bob like everyone got off on probation these days. To him, there was just no accountability and no incentive not to grow pot in Humboldt County. The district attorney, Paul Gallegos, had even attended a fund-raiser sponsored by the Humboldt Growers Association. If that wasn't condoning pot growing, Bob didn't know what was. He felt like he was pointlessly fighting the tide. The way he saw it, as long as there was a black market somewhere, the issues of criminality associated with the marijuana industry would continue. The only way it was ever going to change was to legalize it. The laws were already in place, he figured; just treat it like alcohol. You aren't allowed to come to work drunk, so you aren't allowed to come to work stoned. You don't drive drunk, you don't drive stoned. Legalize pot, tax it, and enforce laws pertaining to it. To Bob, it seemed like the only answer.