Humboldt (18 page)

The guilt never made him stop, though. For Crockett, the government was corrupt and the system was broken. Whenever his money from Frankie did come through, he planned to spend it building that cabin on the commune. It was nothing more than a foundation now, but Crockett pictured a simple little place where he could retreat and grow vegetables when everything fell apart. It was his own spin on the Back-to-the-Land dream, a remembrance of his childhood.

Soon, Crockett was back on a country road again. The sun was starting to set, and the sky was streaked with orange. It looked like he was driving into a watercolor.

When he pulled up in front of his house, he revved his engine, gunned the car forward, and jerked up the emergency brake. The car spun around 180 degrees,
Dukes of Hazzard
style, coming to a sudden stop next to a white fence and a grassy pasture.

Later, between bong hits, Crockett would weigh the cash, divide it, and vacuum-seal it in plastic bags, before heading out on the last mission of the day: to deliver it to the growers. But first, he would take a long, hot shower and let the dirt wash off him, swirling brown around the drain.

The life of the outlaw remained pretty much the same after the vote, just as it did for the deputy sheriff responsible for enforcing the laws. A year later, voters in Colorado and Washington approved marijuana legalization for recreational use in their states. It wasn't immediately obvious how that would work, or what the reaction from the Obama administration would be as this issue of states' rights continued to play out, but one thing was sure: as long as marijuana remained illegal in some states and unregulated on a national level, the black market would live on, and the Crocketts of the world would continue to work in it. In California, it would turn out, life changed most of all for an old-time grower who had hoped to step out into the light and become a legitimate member of society.

L
ate one April morning, when the cherry trees around Mare's deck were covered in pale pink blossoms, and it seemed that, after endless months of rain and snow, spring had finally arrived for good, Len came for coffee. He was the same Len whom Mare had first laid eyes on back at the Haight-Ashbury Post Office all those decades ago, the man with whom she had moved to this place in a truck called Beast, though time had left its mark on him, too. His beard was more salt than pepper now, but he was still the love of Mare's life, even though she knew they could never live together.

Len had stayed in the area, too. He lived just down the road, and he had become like family to Mare over the years. Like all older people, sometimes they'd get together and talk about how much things had changed. Len's young neighbors, for instance, had never heard of the 1960s radical revolutionary group known as the Weather Underground. On this day, however, Len had come to check on Mare and see how she was adjusting to her recent loss, one that would affect every aspect of her life moving forward. They sat and drank coffee, and looked out on the butter-yellow daffodils that were blooming in buckets on Mare's deck and talked about how her younger sister, Ellen, had died that past month.

The sisters were close. Ellen never was a hippie, even though Mare and all her friends were. Mare liked to tell the story about how the only time Ellen ever smoked pot, she rear-ended a Volkswagen. Ellen had lived down in Berkeley, and worked as a flight attendant for decades. She'd also owned a house near Mare on the Mattole River. Since neither sister had children or a husband, they had planned to live together and take care of each other during their Golden Years.

In February, Ellen had called Mare and asked what she wanted for her seventy-first birthday, which was coming up later that month.

“For you to come up and visit,” Mare told her.

A few days later, Ellen called back and said she had been overcome by a strange fatigue and wouldn't be able to make it after all. At the end of that week, Ellen asked Mare to come down and stay with her while doctors ran some tests. It took them a while to find the cancer in her pancreas. They offered Ellen chemo, but when she found out it wouldn't save her life, only prolong it for a bit, she told them to cut the bracelets off her wrists and take the needles out of her arm. She was going home. The doctors gave her four days to two months.

She had four days.

They set up a bed for her in the living room. Like at Mare's cabin, Ellen's home in the Berkeley Hills had a wall of windows that filled the space with light, but her view was decidedly different. It looked out onto the gray-blue San Francisco Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge that stretched above the water in the distance.

Mare went through the house and collected photographs of the people whom Ellen loved and had passed before her, like the old guy with the cigar who had been a union rep at the airline. Mare placed the photos around the foot of Ellen's bed. She told Ellen that the people in the photos were waiting for her.

“I don't want to go to heaven,” Ellen said.

“What?!” Mare shrieked.

“Because I'll have to be with all those idiot Tea Party people.”

Both sisters laughed.

“If you can,” Mare asked her, “when you get to wherever you go, will you try to send us a message?”

Ellen said she would try.

The night Ellen died, Mare and the three others who were taking turns as round-the-clock caregivers threw a party and invited all of Ellen's friends who lived nearby. Ellen couldn't talk that day, but everyone gathered around and traded stories about her. A few hours after the party ended, the caregiver who was also a trained nurse noticed that Ellen's breaths were coming slower and further apart. Mare and others gathered at her bedside, sang to her, and took turns saying their good-byes. Ellen's eyes were open, and she looked at them as they sang, “Fly away little bird, fly high, fly free.”

Mare didn't realize that Ellen had taken her last breath until there wasn't another one.

And then grief came like a dark wave and pulled Mare out to sea.

A few hours later, a floor lamp with a pink shade that Ellen had made flickered on in the living room. It stayed on for four days before it shut off for good. Mare took it as a sign from Ellen that she got where she was going.

In those first surreal days following her sister's death, Mare learned that Ellen had managed to become a millionaire on her flight attendant's salary, and she had left it all to Mare. When they were growing up, Ellen used to sit with their father and play stocks, whereas when Mare learned about numbers, her eyes would glaze over. Mare inherited four houses: two in Berkeley, one in Humboldt, and the family cabin back on Beaver Island, in Michigan. There were also bank accounts, stocks, and money Ellen had loaned friends.

All in all, the whole thing felt entirely overwhelming, and Mare wasn't sure how to deal with it. Suddenly she found herself spending all her time toting an attaché case around to law and investment offices in Berkeley. She was also unsure of her feelings about this newfound wealth. The life she had carved out for herself in Humboldt was a simple one. She had her little annuity, and her Social Security from teaching sculpture classes. She had just enough. It wasn't cushy, but Mare was proud that she wasn't one of those people who kept wanting more. In a way, she'd never outgrown the sixties. She wanted a simple, happy life. She'd never developed the “greed gene,” as she called it. She was comfortable, and that was that.

Now, suddenly, she was an heiress.

One thing was clear: Mare certainly didn't need to grow pot anymore to supplement her income. She could retire from growing for good. But she decided to do just the opposite. Not only did she decide to keep growing, but in the wake of her sister's death, she decided to throw herself into getting out the word about the importance of marijuana grown sustainably in the sun. The plant had been so good to Mare, and had helped provide her with a life she loved. She sort of worshipped it when it was grown outdoors, and thought it was just sad for people to put it under lights and treat it with pesticides. She thought it somehow stunted their appreciation of the plant and their own literal growth.

After the vote, Mare read a cover story in
Mother Jones
magazine that solidified her opinion. The article focused on two young entrepreneurs who were attempting to build a marijuana supply store franchise that they wanted to become the “Walmart of Weed.” One was a Morgan Stanley investment banker, the other a twenty-six-year-old Lamborghini-driving son of a taxi tycoon. They wore suits and spoke of IPOs and reality TV shows. They did not seem to be in the business for the love of the plant. In the article, the twenty-six-year-old said that the older generation were brilliant scientists, but they weren't such brilliant businessmen. After reading the
Mother Jones
article, Mare didn't know if it was just plain ignorance or if there was an actual conspiracy, but she wasn't about to let young men like this, who were still in diapers back when she was running from the helicopters, co-opt this industry. She decided then and there to invest her time and money into getting the word out about sun-grown marijuana, for the sake of the environment and her community.

She began by passing out flyers at the Berkeley Farmers' Market that carried messages such as “How Green is
Your
Green?”

The flyers came from a Humboldt group called Grow It in the Sun. The group of environmentally conscious growers had formed in the Salmon Creek community in 2008, running ads on local radio stations and in local papers to raise awareness about the environmental dangers of indoor marijuana grows, including the off-the-grid kind that were powered by diesel generators and had become widespread in the Humboldt Hills during the CAMP years. The generators were noisy and hungry, and emitted carbon dioxide into the air. Sometimes the fuel used to power them leaked into local creeks. Now that there was a medical law providing growers with a cloak of protection, the folks at Grow It in the Sun encouraged people to move their plants back outside, “as nature intended.”

In April 2011, a study was released that gave Grow It in the Sun some serious credibility. Dr. Evan Mills is a government scientist, and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the international body of scientists who would share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. One day, Mills began to notice all the indoor gardening stores popping up everywhere, and when he took a look inside, he saw that they were selling more fans, lights, and other devices than soil and fertilizer. On his own time, Mills decided to look a little closer at how much energy all that equipment was consuming, and discovered in the process that indoor pot growing sucks up a lot of
electricit
y—​9 percent of all household use in California, to be precise, and 2 percent of household use nationally.

Those impossibly bright lights used to grow plants inside were the same intensity as the lights in an operating room, Mills found. That is five hundred times more powerful than a reading lamp. His study, “Energy Up in Smoke: The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production,” found that the amount of energy used to grow pot indoors nationwide created the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as three million cars. Mills's study blew up online, and received attention in the national and international press.

Mare already knew that growing plants under lights was wasteful and wrong, but now that the media were paying some attention to the matter, thanks to Mills's report, she wondered if the dispensaries that sold this indoor marijuana might also begin to look at things a little differently. Mare had met Stephen DeAngelo recently, at the
High Times
–sponsored Cannabis Cup in San Francisco. With his skinny long braids and bowler hats, DeAngelo looked something like a hippie leprechaun. He also happened to be one of the owners of Harborside Health Center in Oakland, which billed itself as the world's largest medical marijuana dispensary. At the Cannabis Cup, Mare told DeAngelo that he cut into her market and that he needed to focus more on outdoor pot. He seemed sympathetic, and Mare got the impression that she could e-mail him and stop by sometime. It sounded great, except that he didn't return any of her e-mails. So Mare decided to go down and check out Harborside in person.

Harborside Health Center is located in a nondescript business park on the Oakland waterfront, just down the freeway from the port where shipping containers are stacked like LEGOs and the giant cranes used to unload them define the city's skyline. There's no sign out front advertising the dispensary. There is only the address: 1840, painted in big black letters on the side of the building.

On the warm summer day when Mare visited, she wore flip-flops and a long pink sundress, and she hobbled toward the entrance carrying a paper bag filled with a pound of pot from her past harvest, which she hoped to sell after attending a new vendor orientation. A beefy but gentle security guard told her that she wasn't allowed to consume any medicine on site, and to please be respectful of the neighbors in nearby offices as she passed through a metal detector and entered the dispensary.

To the right was the sales area, which was centered on a long counter where samples of various marijuana strains were displayed in glass cases. Friendly salespeople attended to the dispensary's customers—ringing up $22 million in annual sales. Mare loved the look of the place. She found it clean, modern, and colorful, with just a touch of hippie.

She had already come the day before to fill out the necessary paperwork and show her doctor's recommendation, so she was led straight through to the vendors' waiting room. Mare had also inspected the competition that previous day and was unimpressed. Of the twenty-five varieties of marijuana for sale at the dispensary when she visited, only one was grown outside. Of course it went for about half of what the stuff grown indoors was going for, but it didn't even smell good. Mare had turned up her nose after giving it a sniff.

The waiting room was empty. Mare hobbled around and took in her surroundings. She stopped to admire a peace sign that was made out of bent twigs. Upon closer inspection, she was pleased to realize it was made out of hemp stalks. On a table in the corner was a little wooden sculpture of a woman doing a backbend.

“Ah, Balinese art!” she cooed, before plunking herself down in a leather chair underneath a wall of framed articles about Harborside, many of which featured the face of DeAngelo. There were articles from
The
New York Times
, and a framed cover of
Fortune
magazine with Mary-Louise Parker from
Weeds
on the cover. “Is Pot Already Legal?” it asked.

At Harborside it definitely felt like it.

As Mare looked around and waited, more people trickled in, including a clean-cut young couple who looked like they'd just strolled off the Berkeley campus. A few minutes later, a portly fortysomething man carrying a duffel bag plunked himself down in a chair near the door. Then came a young man with saggy pants and a messy Afro, and a twentysomething earthy-crunchy girl. Of the eight vendors who eventually showed up for the orientation about selling their marijuana to the dispensary, Mare was the only senior citizen.

Eventually a door swung open and a woman who appeared to be in her late thirties, with flowing red hair and black knee boots, strolled into the room. In a soft, velvety voice, she introduced herself as Caroline and explained that she worked in purchasing. Then she began a spiel that she must have given hundreds of times before, about what they were looking to buy at Harborside. The dispensary purchased top-shelf pot for $3,600 a pound. Mid-grade to lower-grade marijuana, which included anything grown in the sun, was worth less, around $2,000 a pound. Not that sun-grown isn't good, Caroline said, it's just that customers weren't willing to pay more than $30 an eighth for it.