Humboldt (9 page)

“Cannabis farmers want to pay taxes,” said Joey Burger, the association's president, a serious-looking man in his late twenties with a trim beard and short brown hair. Burger repeated the refrain that, with legalization, Humboldt could become “the new Napa of Cannabis.”

In calling it cannabis, Burger used the term that dispensary owners and others in the business had begun employing in the media in an effort to be taken more seriously. As Max Del Real, the lobbyist, explained, “Pot is the drug, cannabis is the commodity.”

That afternoon, there was talk of marijuana certification, testing, and insurance. The commercialization and legalization of the industry was a whole new world, and similar to the “What's After Pot?” meeting held earlier in the year, everyone in the room knew how important it was for the people in Humboldt County to secure a place in that world to avoid a total collapse of their economy. As Burger explained a few weeks before the meeting, “I don't want to see tumbleweeds blowing through my town.”

I
n the decades between the discovery of sinsemilla and the looming legalization vote that threatened to turn Garberville and Redway into ghost towns, with tumbleweed blowing through, time passed for Mare Abidon in a cyclical fashion. Throughout the 1980s, she supplemented her work as an art teacher and her newfound forest activism by growing a small amount of marijuana. Many people grew on public land in those days—or on private land that didn't belong to them. The latter was called guerrilla growing, and it reduced a grower's chance of getting caught if his patch were raided. Plants grown on public property are nearly impossible to trace. Like many people in her community then, Mare and her two partners grew in the King Range National Conservation Area, a 68,000-acre mountainous wilderness area located near her cabin.

The years passed, marked by quiet winters long with rain, when chanterelle mushrooms the size of dinner plates would grow wild on the forest floor. In the spring, bright orange poppies and purple lupine would appear along the roadside, marijuana seeds would sprout and be sown, and Mare would put on an Easter Bunny suit and hop down to the meadow to entertain the children during the annual community egg hunt. Hot, dry summers were followed by the busy harvest season. Mare's life was interspersed by occasional love affairs, and actions to save the last of the old-growth redwoods from being clear-cut.

But there were moments during this blur of time that Mare recognized as turning points. Sometimes they were dramatic, like the arrival of the helicopters that buzzed low over the hills to take out plant after plant, grower after grower. Other times, they were gradual, like the awareness that some of her friends had started to make a lot of money off pot, not just to sustain a counterculture lifestyle, but also to achieve something that looked more like the American Dream they had supposedly left behind. Some bought nicer cars, built bigger houses, and began to take long vacations to faraway places. Then there was the danger element that came creeping in, and with it, outsiders who were willing to hurt people. The most horrific example was what happened to Kathy Davis.

Mare first met Kathy Davis in 1970, during that first summer in Humboldt when she helped her cousin build a house. Davis was a social worker who had come from Berkeley in 1968 with her husband and young daughter. She was a pillar in her community. She sat on the county grand jury, and on the board of the local credit union. She cofounded the Garberville Hospice to provide care for the dying, and was the kind of person who would watch your baby for you while you were sick. She raised chickens and planted iris bulbs. Like so many in her community, Kathy Davis also grew pot.

Mare loved Kathy. She thought she was a firecracker. The last time Mare saw her, Davis told her how much she was looking forward to growing older. But she never got that chance. In September of 1982, Davis was beaten and strangled to death in her drying room by two men who had come to rob her. She was thirty-eight years old. Two weeks later, her cremated remains were scattered around the apricot tree in her front yard. At her memorial a group of longhaired men and women dressed in faded jeans and sundresses held hands around a small pond, linked in grief and shattered ideals. Mare stood among them. Everyone sang “Amazing Grace,” and Mare thought to herself, My God, everything is changing.

Even more change was to come, like years later, when the United States government invaded.

On the morning of July 29, 1990, the seventeen-year-old daughter of one of Mare's neighbors went for a walk near her home by the coast. As Blossom Edwards strolled through the woods, she came upon five or six men lying on the forest floor. They had camouflage smeared on their faces and automatic weapons that were pointed right at her.

“Hey, who are you?” Blossom asked. “What is going on?”

The men wouldn't respond. As soon as Blossom returned home, word about her encounter with the men with guns traveled through the community quickly, by CB radio and by phone. It was the first that many people in Southern Humboldt heard about “Operation Green Sweep.”

The men, it turned out, were part of a group of some two hundred army soldiers, National Guardsmen, and federal agents who had been sent to Humboldt by President George H. W. Bush to destroy illicit gardens and remove the irrigation systems, water tanks, and other infrastructure used to grow them in the King Range National Conservation Area, the place where Mare used to grow. The soldiers were members of the Seventh Infantry Division who had recently helped depose Manuel Noriega during the Panama invasion.

The army's arrival in Southern Humboldt marked the first time in U.S. history that active-duty troops were used to enforce domestic laws in a nonemergency situation.

The size of the domestic marijuana crop had apparently become an embarrassment for the first Bush administration. At an antidrug summit in Cartagena, Colombia, earlier that year, during a conversation about that country's coca crop, the Colombian president had asked Bush about the marijuana grown on the North Coast of California. Operation Green Sweep was Bush's response. As a government spokesperson told members of the media during the operation, it was undertaken to show our southern neighbors and people around the country that the Bush administration took marijuana growing seriously. His drug czar, William Bennett, identified California as the “epicenter of America's drug problem.”

Mare was livid when she heard about Green Sweep. She couldn't believe that her own government had come into her community and pointed guns at her friend's daughter, and that her own army was being used against her. It was as if they had forgotten that she and her friends were Americans, too, regardless of the plants they grew. In true Southern Humboldt style, Mare and a bunch of other outraged community members headed down to the meadow called Hidden Valley, which was being used as the military staging area. There, at the edge of the sprawling wilderness area, across a dirt road from men with guns and camouflage vehicles and Black Hawk helicopters, they held a protest that was surely like nothing the authorities had ever seen before.

Word spread, and people showed up in Volvos and pickup trucks. They brought their children and their indignation, which they expressed on hand-painted signs they waved in the air:

“Plants Can't Shoot and They Can't Run, So Why Bring the Guns?” read one placard.

“Yanqui, Go Home Grown” advised another.

A few people in the crowd held up “U.S. Out of Humboldt County” bumper stickers.

Despite the outrage, because this was Humboldt, there was a carnival-like air to the protest. A little girl blew bubbles. The Garberville Marimba Band set up its enormous xylophones under a tree and made music that sounded like falling rain. There were lots of beards and tie-dye, a man in a coyote mask, and a Ronald Reagan impersonator in a pink sports coat who gave an animated speech reminding everyone how the Declaration of Independence was signed on paper made of hemp.

Across the dusty road, a group of highway patrol officers with thick moustaches and aviator shades warily observed the spectacle unfolding in front of them.

At one point, Hoy, a woman who two decades later would say of the marijuana industry, “Peaceful hippies, my ass, this is all about greed,” broke into song next to a group of lawmen, while a friend filmed the encounter. Hoy wore army fatigues, and her short dreadlocks peeked out from under a flak helmet.

“They destroyed our black history,” she sang at the top of her lungs, grinning and leaning in close, seemingly taunting the men until they dispersed.

The protest vigil continued throughout the two-week Green Sweep.

On August 2, about fifty members of the local and national media were given a tour of the operation. During the press conference beforehand, the national director of the Bureau of Land Management of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Delos “Cy” Jamison, explained the message of Green Sweep. “We won't tolerate unlawful drug activity on public lands,” he said. “It's a crime we have to spend this much time and manpower doing it.”

Jamison showed the press some of the growing materials they had pulled out of the forest, which included chicken wire, flowerpots, fish emulsion fertilizer, plastic waterlines, and a surfboard. The idea was if they removed these things, the growers wouldn't return.

“If they come back, we'll come back,” he threatened. “We're serious about that, because it fits in with our national drug strategy.”

Later, as journalists passed by the protest on their way to the Green Sweep encampment, they were warned the demonstrators were likely to turn riotous at any time.

The protestors never went berserk, but there was an attempt to challenge the government's presence. At one point, seven people, including Mare, decided to take a stand by crossing the official perimeter.

Mare knew she risked arrest, but she felt it had to be brought to light that the government was treating its own citizens this way. She had put herself on the line for her beliefs before, though usually she didn't get arrested. She tended to end up in the hospital. Once, she dislocated some ribs when a falling tree almost crushed her while she was trying to save a grove of old-growth redwoods called Sally Bell. Another time, while she was trying to mediate a dispute, an angry logger punched her in the face and broke her nose.

The guns in the holsters of the men across the road intimidated Mare, but as she stood with the group that had decided to challenge the perimeter, a friend who was a former Marine instructed them to say, “We're nonviolent. We're not going to hurt anybody. We know you're going to arrest us, but we have to cross this line.”

As she moved across the road, hands linked with the other protestors, Mare repeated these words over and over.

“We're nonviolent. We're not going to hurt anybody. We know you're going to arrest us, but we have to cross this line.”

As soon as Mare ducked under the police line, plastic handcuffs were wrapped around her wrists and she was arrested along with the others. They were placed in a van beyond the trees. Black Hawks thumped overhead, and Mare and the others tried to talk to the young men with guns who were holding them.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Why are you being so un-American about it all? Do you think we are Viet Cong or something?”

After darkness fell, the protestors were released.

On the day that Mare and the others were arrested for literally crossing the line, more than three hundred people showed up at the protest. Many had come directly from Reggae on the River, an annual music festival held nearby on the banks of the Eel. Instead of inciting a riot, the crowd turned into a kind of gigantic hippie party.

At one point, a man stood on a makeshift stage next to a “Humboldt Nation” flag, two words that had come to symbolize the apartness and independence of the place where he was standing.

“We're not calling for a revolution,” he told the crowd. “We're calling for an end to the war on pot.”

In the masses before him, someone held up a giant banner that read, “Legalize Marijuana.”

It was probably unimaginable at the time that twenty years later, when it looked like legalization might finally come to pass, it would send tremors of fear through the community.

Later, Rod Deal took to the stage. Deal was Southern Humboldt's Bob Dylan. He was tall and skinny, with Buddy Holly glasses and a black bandito moustache. He strummed his guitar and sang a song called “Marijuana Man.”

“I'm an herb smoker. I'm proud to be a marijuana man.”

People danced and sang along in front of him, everyone moving to his own beat.

“Things are bad now, but they're gonna be good,” Deal sang. “We're gonna know freedom the way that we should.”

The citizens of Southern Humboldt weren't the only ones displeased with Operation Green Sweep. Then-Humboldt County sheriff Dave Renner didn't take kindly to how the government had “stormed in” to his county.

“If the Feds have the money for this kind of operation,” the sheriff told the
Los Angeles Times
, “they ought to give it to local law enforcement that is more effective and is truly responsible to local citizens. The results speak for themselves, and they are not good.”

The results were pretty abysmal. By the time Green Sweep swept out of town, the two-hundred-man operation pulled a total of 1,400 plants. Nobody wanted to officially admit how much Green Sweep had cost the taxpayers, but the National Guard alone spent $400,000, according to
The
New York Times
. For contrast, during that same two-week period, twenty members of CAMP, including five sheriff's deputies, destroyed eight thousand plants. As the troops pulled out, the marquee on the Garberville movie theater had a message for them: “Green Sweep U.S.A.—Another $700 Hammer,” in reference to the Defense Department scandals of the 1980s, when hundreds of dollars were spent on individual toilets seats and household tools.

People continued growing their profitable weed in Humboldt, of course, and contrary to the Bureau of Land Management director's promise, the army and National Guard did not return. Gradually, though, most who grew on public land in those days moved their gardens onto their own property, especially after the passage of the state's medical marijuana law six years later. But the story of Green Sweep and the community's reaction to it speaks to the rebellious nature of the place, and how much things would continue to change in the coming decades as marijuana became increasingly legal. The image of seventeen-year-old Blossom Edwards stumbling upon armed troops would be seared into Humboldt's collective memory forever. What remained largely ignored was how the other children of Humboldt's growers fared.