Humboldt (2 page)

All this was poised to change.

“If the value of marijuana drops below a certain level,” Hamilton warned, “the state will be faced with the collapse of its rural economies. Businesses will be shuttered, the nonprofit community will be unable to provide services to suddenly displaced peoples, and the golden goose will be dead.”

She looked up at the crowd.

“We will all face this economic decline together. For the sake of our region, it is time to begin planning for this upheaval now, together.

“What will we do?” she asked.

There was dead silence.

“We have all the talent and all the answers we need right here in this room.”

Among the ideas that bubbled up that evening was an advisory panel of pot growers that would meet with local elected officials to discuss how to regulate their industry. One couple came away from the meeting inspired to form the area's first collective to try to sell organic, artisanal Humboldt pot legally under the state's medical model. Some audience members expressed the long-held fear that legalization would bring the corporatization of the industry and that the market would be flooded with cheap, mass-​p
roduced
weed, and they wouldn't be able to compete. Others, including a local government official, saw it as an opportunity to take advantage of Humboldt's legendary brand. Across the country and beyond, the Humboldt County name had become deeply linked with pot.

“We've had this name association for thirty or forty years now,” County Supervisor Mark Lovelace remarked. “If this is a newly legitimized industry, shouldn't we be looking at capitalizing on that?”

There was talk of creating an appellation, modeled after the world's great wine-growing regions, to designate that local pot was Humboldt homegrown. The way Hamilton saw it, the future of the area was either “appellation or Appalachia.” Should marijuana become legal, Humboldt County could become the Napa Valley of Pot, complete with “marijuanaries,” where tourists could visit and sample the latest harvest. The business possibilities were endless: “bud and breakfasts,” where rooms overlooked fragrant green gardens; a marijuana museum, detailing the history of the area's decades-long experiment in civil disobedience; food and pot pairings at local restaurants; and some kind of four-wheel-drive trolley service, like the limos of the Napa Valley, to cart intoxicated tourists up unpaved roads to tour the pot farms.

“I'm not dying until there's a tasting room in Humboldt County!” a woman with a brown bob and glasses passionately declared.

She was greeted with an enthusiastic round of applause.

That evening, Mare Abidon wasn't worried about the price of pot or how she might brand herself; instead, she was bursting with hope. She had always expected that marijuana would become legal one day, and when it did, she planned to plant big pot bushes in plain sight between the cherry trees around her deck. In fact, she'd never imagined it would take this long. She never really understood the whole War on Drugs, or why the government considered marijuana such a menace. She thought it was great medicine, and even safer than alcohol as a way to unwind at the end of the day.

With the coming legalization, Mare thought that all the jails were going to be emptied of people arrested for pot, and that she and her friends who grew it were finally going to become legitimate members of society.

Much was discussed that night, but what Mare took away, what she'd always remember, was that giddy rush of emotion, the feeling of pure liberation as she stepped into the light and walked toward that growers' table. “It was like crawling out from under a rock that I had been under for decades,” she later confessed.

But, of course, not everyone felt that way.

A
gainst the shadowy outline of the mighty redwoods, the speeding Ford pickup looked like a toy powered by some far-off remote control. A balmy, late summer wind whipped through the truck's open window and through the sandy brown hair of the man behind the wheel. It was late, and there was no emergency, but Crockett Randall sped as if his life depended on it. He loved to drive fast. He called it taking an engine to its limit, but it wasn't really about the engine; it was about the adrenaline. The closer Crockett came to death, the more alive he felt, whether it was hurtling down a snow-covered mountain on a snowboard or driving thirty miles over the speed limit on a dark country road.

At thirty-five, Crockett was old enough to know better, but teetering on the edge was part of who he was, and he did it in ways you'd never suspect just by looking at him. Crockett had a strong, square jaw, shy blue eyes, and a permanent tan earned by bobbing around on a surfboard off the North Coast, braving hypothermia and great white sharks in the hope of catching the perfect wave. One of Crockett's greatest gifts was that he possessed the quiet, unassuming presence of someone you could easily forget was in the room.

This chameleon-like quality helped him blend in with the ranchers he worked with at the volunteer fire department back home, and with the men he used to operate heavy equipment with. The aging hippies on the commune where he grew up still accepted him as one of their own, and when the police pulled him over for speeding, which happened at least once a month, usually all Crockett had to do was flash the license that permitted him to drive fire trucks, and the cop would realize he was part of the brotherhood. Then there was the underworld where Crockett made his money, where everything was built on trust and intuition. He belonged to that brotherhood, too.

In many ways, Crockett was the perfect example of the kind of men who migrated to Humboldt County every year. They came from around the country and sometimes from abroad, like miners of old, hoping to strike it rich. In general, these newcomers didn't tend to tithe their earnings with donations to hospice, or spend $1,000 on raffle tickets to support the community school. These newcomers often lived in isolation out in the hills, where they clear-cut hillsides and grew pot. Or they filled buildings with impossibly bright lights and grew their plants indoors, with
dies
el-​​
p
owered
generators. Crockett was part of this Green Rush, as it was called, but he also came to the marijuana industry honestly.

He was born into it.

The Avenue of the Giants that Crockett raced along was a thirty-mile strip of asphalt named after the redwood forest it meandered through. Back before the state built a four-lane highway through most of Humboldt County, the Avenue was the main thoroughfare north. Now it was a rambling country road, a parallel scenic route that offered tourists a way to submerge themselves in the splendor of the big trees without having to leave their cars.

Sometimes when Crockett roared down the Avenue with his coworker Zavie, with “My Dick,” by Mickey Avalon, blasting on the stereo, Crockett would wonder about the tourists they passed, with their RVs and cameras. Did they have any idea what was going on here? But then he and Zavie would arrive at the South Fork of the Eel River and park so that Crockett could catapult off the truck's tailgate into the water—the “Humboldt diving board,” he called it—and the sweat of the morning's labor and that very thought itself would be washed away with the current.

At this late hour, Crockett's destination wasn't the Eel, which was running low and dry beyond the trees. He was headed back to the cabin on the hill, to the place where he'd been on lockdown for the past few weeks. An hour or so earlier, he had snuck off to eat at the Avenue Café in Miranda. He dined at his usual spot, at the redwood slab counter. Under dim lights, he ate chicken parmigiana and scrolled through friends' Facebook updates on his laptop. A lone highway patrol officer sat a few seats away. After the officer left, Crockett peered out the window to make sure the cop was headed in the opposite direction, then settled up his bill and tipped the waitress. Crockett had to get back to the cabin. Every moment he was away there was a risk that someone could come and take everything he had spent the past five months working toward.

Crockett turned off the Avenue and gunned up a hill. He left the redwoods behind as he climbed higher into a dense forest of Douglas fir and tan oak. After a few miles of twists and turns, he arrived at a driveway that was sealed with a metal gate. The sign that hung from it read “No Trespassing.” Crockett's fingers moved nimbly across the padlock. He lifted up the heavy chain, and the gate swung open.

Dust billowed up around the truck as Crockett bounced down the bumpy dirt road, the kind that wore cars out before their time and felt so far from civilization it seemed like it might lead straight into the African bush. There were two more padlocked gates and two more warning signs: “Private.” “Keep Out.” Unpaved roads reminded Crockett of the commune he grew up on. But those roads had been tamer; grizzled men never hauled giant trees down them, and they didn't have Humboldt's foreboding barriers or signs.

The cabin was located down a steep grade past the final gate. As Crockett pulled up in front of it, the headlights on his truck illuminated the small square building and the tree line just beyond. He killed the engine, and everything went black. After a few seconds his eyes adjusted, and it was as though the dark sky had been pierced with a million holes. The stars guided him behind the cabin, where he flipped on the generator, a necessity for life off the electrical grid. Its diesel-powered rumble broke the stillness of the country night.

Obscured by the darkness beyond the cabin was a greenhouse full of mature marijuana plants. Deeper in the wood were even more greenhouses full of hundreds of plants. When all was said and done, the pot grown in them was expected to fetch close to $1 million.

Inside the cabin, Crockett kicked off his flip-flops, settled into the couch, and prepared to roll a joint. He operated in a near-permanent state of stoned, which didn't make him lethargic or giggly, like those idiots in the movies; it just made him quieter than usual. Whenever Crockett tried to stop smoking, he found himself unable to sleep. The bed where he spent his nights was directly across the room. To his right, the kitchen area was piled high with dirty dishes. Past the kitchen, a door led to a tiny bathroom, where the toilet was filled by a hose that ran through the window. The shower was outside.

The cabin was rustic, but it was downright palatial compared with how some people lived during the growing season. It could get pretty rugged in the Humboldt Hills. Some people stayed in buildings so shoddy that light seeped through the boards. Others lived in tents and trailers. Many places didn't have indoor plumbing or a toilet and a hose, which meant people had to head to the outhouse or into the woods to do their business.

Crockett knew he was fortunate, and he was comfortable enough being by himself, but sometimes he missed seeing familiar faces every day, and having a smooth, curvy body to press up against at night. When he moved to Humboldt that spring, he figured it would be good to take a break from women for a while, but now he wished he had brought one along. Zavie also missed female companionship. Sometimes the two schemed about opening up a brothel together. They figured if they could provide their fellow growers with hookers and blow, they'd be able to take all their money. Zavie had gotten so lonely lately that he'd started lusting after the seventeen-year-old who cleaned their weed.

The trimmer girl, as they called her, had manicured the pot Crockett was about to smoke. With her Fiskars sewing scissors, she had shaped the bud into the tight, compact, grape-size nugget he stuck in his herb grinder. The metal prongs minced the flower and infused the cabin with the smell of sweet pine. He then poured the contents into the fold of a rolling paper and began rubbing it back and forth between his thumbs and index fingers to form a joint.

Crockett's favorite kind of weed at the moment was Blue Dream, but the joint he was rolling was filled with O.G. Kush. Marijuana comes in different varieties, called strains. Most strains are crosses between the two primary species
Cannabis sativa
and
Cannabis indica
. Marijuana growers create hybrids of the two and give them names that have never passed through a marketing department: Headband. Sour Diesel. Green Crack. Earlier in the summer, a strain with the unforgettable name of God's Pussy won the
High Times
Medical Cannabis Cup in San Francisco. (Due to public backlash, it was renamed Vortex a few days later.) The O.G. Kush that Crockett was about to smoke was a particularly popular strain. Rappers composed odes to it, and there was strong demand for it on the black market. This particular bud had come from a recent harvest Crockett and Zavie grew inside a house their boss Frankie owned near Garberville.

While there is no one way to grow pot, as growers are fond of saying, there are basically two: inside, under high-wattage lights, or outdoors in the sun. Marijuana grown indoors can be harvested every two to three months. Outdoor plants are traditionally harvested once a year, in the fall. New methods involving light deprivation, or “depping,” trick the plant into flowering earlier and can lead to multiple outdoor harvests. Frankie required that Crockett and Zavie grow a small indoor garden to ensure a steady flow of cash. The windfall, however, would come from the outdoor garden on the hill, the one Crockett spent his days and nights guarding from authorities, and thieves, the garden that was located in greenhouses in a clearing in the forest near the cabin where he was now sitting.

Like the children of Humboldt's growers, marijuana had always been part of Crockett's life. His first memory was of being on a plane with his mother. They were leaving Arizona, where Crockett's father was sitting in jail, busted for smuggling pot across the Mexican border. Decades later, Crockett would have no memory of the man. He didn't even carry his last name.

In the late 1970s, Crockett's mother brought him to live on a commune north of San Francisco. Like Humboldt, his corner of Marin County was a place that had been settled by Old World ranchers and fishermen, and then, in the 1960s and '70s, by the New World counterculture. On the commune, Crockett was first introduced to the tall, fragrant plant that would play such a big role in his life. As a young boy, he loved pressing the smooth peppercorn-size seeds into soil and adding water. Little green shoots seemed to pop out of the wet earth almost instantly, like magic beanstalks.

When he started elementary school, his mother supported them by selling pot and cocaine to local fishermen. Crockett knew by then that it was a secret he must keep. He worried about coming to school smelling of the plant during harvest time, or that someone might notice how the plastic bags that carried his sandwiches had tiny green flakes in the corners, remnants of what they once held. By the time he was seventeen, Crockett was selling pot in a local trailer park. Though he has held other jobs over the years, he has been involved in the marijuana industry in some way ever since.

Crockett had known Frankie since elementary school. They rode the bus together when they were little, and in high school they carpooled and smoked pot before class. Later, they were briefly roommates. Then Frankie fell in love with a girl from Southern Humboldt and moved there to join her. He found work in the marijuana industry, as men who are brought into the community often do. He started out working for others, and moved up fast. Frankie lived in the Bay Area now, with a new girlfriend, but owned property in Humboldt, and a shiny new Mercedes. Most important, Frankie had reached the stage where he could afford to pay people to work for him.

Frankie's timing had been fortuitous. After fifteen years of operating heavy equipment, Crockett was ready for a change. When Frankie approached him with the job offer, Crockett agreed to move to Humboldt to manage the season's marijuana crop for a cut of the earnings, somewhere around $100,000 in cash. Like sharecropping in the South, the arrangement is called
partnering
in marijuana culture, and is common among growers who live somewhere else or just prefer to pay someone else to dig holes, stake up plants, water, fertilize, set mouse and rat traps, walk waterlines, and handle all the other manual labor that goes along with pot farming.

Crockett had never lived in Humboldt before, nor had he ever grown a giant outdoor garden, but it sounded like a good chunk of money, and he did have experience growing a few plants in a spare bedroom back home. He had also spent years working as a middleman, or broker, as they call it in the business, connecting friends with buyers and taking a cut off the top. Growing for Frankie sounded like a lucrative deal, until Crockett learned about the Zavie element.

Zavie was a tall, skinny guy, with slightly buck teeth and pencil-thin dreadlocks. He was born in Jamaica, the lovechild of a hippie mother and a Rastafarian father. He and Frankie met in junior college, where they used to party and snort cocaine together. Zavie was a functioning drunk, and would party for days on booze and coke until he passed out. Recently, Zavie had gotten a DUI and was facing a few months of jail time. Zavie's arrival on the scene meant that Crockett wouldn't have to work so hard, and at first he was happy to have someone to share the load with, until he came to understand just who that someone was.

The garden that Crockett and Zavie were growing for Frankie up near the cabin was big. While it was legal under California law to grow a small number of plants for medical use, gardens over 100 plants risked stiff mandatory sentences under federal law. Theirs was many times that, and its flowers were destined not for medical patients at dispensaries, but for the black market that for decades had ensured that marijuana farmers were among the world's richest. At various times throughout the 1980s pot was worth more per ounce than gold. In the early 1990s, some master growers in Humboldt earned as much as $6,000 a pound for their outdoor crop.