Humboldt (12 page)

Before Edward could answer, Deputy Conan Moore showed up at the gate.

“There's a grow here and there's no Two-fifteen,” Bob called out to him.

Then a woman emerged from the house. She was wearing jeans and flip-flops; large silver hoops dangled from her ears. She had been in the middle of coloring her hair when Bob arrived, and it was piled on top of her head in a dark, wet coil.

“Aren't there cases where you give someone more time to get one?” she asked.

“I used to do that, but not anymore,” Bob replied.

“So, what, we have to unplant them and then replant them?” The woman started to tremble and cry. “This is helping us,” she said, her voice cracking. “Is there any way you could possibly let me call her and bring it over?”

Bob called the sister in Briceland. It turned out that she did have a 215, but she needed it for her garden. These plants, it seemed, were doomed to be pulled.

“How many are there?” Bob asked Conan.

“I counted fifty-nine,” he said.

Most were in the ground, and about eight or so were sitting in pots on top of a plastic pickle barrel near the gate. Planted among the pot plants were some tomato plants, lettuce, and a tiny strawberry patch. Everything looked in need of a good watering.

Bob was frustrated.

“It's simple, simple rules. You grow marijuana, you have a Two-fifteen. We're going to take the grow and I'm going to cite you both,” he told the couple. “I won't arrest you and take you north, but there is a big lesson here. I'm very lenient when it comes to marijuana, but you have to have a Two-fifteen.”

The woman sobbed as Conan walked among the plants and took pictures of them. He then snapped on a pair of blue plastic gloves and picked up a small machete. Conan had been with the Sheriff's Department for only a few years and had recently transferred to Garberville from the Hoopa substation, which was located near the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the largest reservation in the state. He was stocky, with a thick brown moustache and a bit of a paunch. He had the kind of sturdy build that would have made for a good logger, in another lifetime.

Pulling out the grow took a matter of minutes. Conan grabbed each plant by the stalk, bent it, and gave it a good whack with the machete, which made a dull
thwap
as it cut through the fibrous stalk.

“Could you please leave the tomatoes?” the tearful woman called out from the porch.

He did. When he was finished, Conan stacked all the plants in the back of Bob's SUV and scraped the blade of the machete clean on the edge of a plastic pickle barrel that was sitting in the yard.

“So if I get my own Two-fifteen and it's posted, would I be able to replant?” the woman asked.

“Of course,” said Bob, as he began to read her husband his Miranda rights.

On his way out, Bob shook his head. “I could have cared less if they were over the limit. We don't care about numbers anymore as long as they have a Two-fifteen. So there's just no excuse for it.”

He headed back to the substation to do the paperwork. Somewhere, out among the trees, Keith Conn was waiting for him. Beyond that, there were more marijuana plants than he could ever count or chop down, inching slowly toward harvest.

T
he plants in the greenhouse had grown big and tall, and into the names Mare Abidon had given them. Mare christened the six plants she grew every year, and in the fall of 2010, a tall
sativa
named Willow stood toward the back. Willow towered over the other plants. Her long, stacked flower clusters, or colas, were as long as Mare's forearm and scraped against the ceiling. Next to Willow stood Red Haired Beauty, Petey, and Big Bertha, the name Mare bestowed every year on her largest, roundest plant. Outside the greenhouse, next to an old solar panel, Mare grew her other two plants.

After endless months of watering, staking, and attention, it was finally harvest time, and perhaps the final one before marijuana was fully legal. Dressed in white overalls and armed with a pair of clippers, Mare began snipping off the top colas and stacking them gently in the Indian rice basket at her feet. The idea was that by clipping off the top buds, whose hairs had already started to turn brown and were ready for harvest, the smaller flower clusters underneath would be exposed to more light and would reach maturity faster.

Earlier in the year—around the same time Mare was getting excited about the “What's After Pot?” meeting, and when semis loaded with marijuana soil were beginning their annual roll through town—a man named Jim had started these plants. First, he took the tiny speckled seeds and wrapped them in a damp paper towel, which he then placed somewhere warm. Within a week, when tiny white shoots poked through the seed casings, he gently pressed them into a tray of moist earth. Soon, little green leaves appeared, first two, and then four, and like tiny green butterflies, they began their long reach for the sun.

Mare and Jim had known each other since the 1970s. He now lived on Mare's property and worked as her pot “partner,” helping with the crop in exchange for rent. There was another man, a younger guy named William, who also lived on the property, in a similar arrangement. He helped Mare with firewood and other manual chores. Mare always thought she'd end up on a women's commune, but somehow she'd ended up surrounded by men.

Growing from seed was the old Humboldt way. Most new and industrial-scale growers grew from clones, which were clippings from a female plant. Just as a slip of a geranium will produce the same colored flowers and lemony-rose scent of the plant it was taken from, a branch of a female marijuana plant will grow to possess the same qualities of its “mother.” Growing from clones eliminated the guesswork involved with pot growing, and saved time and energy for growers who didn't want to bother having to throw out half their crop once the plants revealed their sex, or risk seeding their crop if they failed to detect a male before he released pollen into the air.

Mare had tried growing from clones once, about ten years earlier, and she didn't care for it. It didn't seem natural. It was like the difference between using chemicals or compost for fertilizer. Growing pot to Mare was a process where every year it was different; you never knew what you were going to get. It was about alchemy. Mare found clones rather dull. The year she grew with them, all her plants were females and they were exactly alike; it was like they all had the same name. Clones seemed so automatic, which was the point, but growing so that everything was identical didn't appeal to Mare. It was like the difference between monoculture and diversity.

Some of the seeds used to grow Willow, Big Bertha, and the others had an unusual provenance. While on a recent art tour of Europe with an old friend, Mare had stopped by the Sensi Seed Bank in Amsterdam. She was hoping to buy some pure
sativa
seeds. Mare had been growing
sativas
since the early days. It was her specialty. She called it “lady dope” because it produced a light, cerebral high that she and her female artist friends favored because it seemed to inspire creativity. In the beginning, of course, everyone grew
sativas
because the pot they smoked came from Mexico and Colombia, where
sativas
flourished, and before
sinsemilla
, they just plucked out the seeds that came with their stash and planted them in the garden. Then, in the late 1970s, a few cunning couriers brought
indica
seeds back from Asia. Mare credited the Vietnam vets with bringing
indica
home with them, but then there were also people from the community who traveled east on a very specific mission, like the man from Southern Humboldt who called himself Douglas Fir.

In 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion, Douglas Fir landed in Afghanistan. He then proceeded to smoke hash and play badminton at a house in Kabul, while a messenger was dispatched into the mountains of the Hindu Kush. The messenger returned with
indica
seeds, which Douglas Fir brought back to Humboldt sewn in the hems and cuffs of his clothing. The short plants the seeds produced reached maturity quicker than
sativas
, and their high was intoxicatingly strong. Over the years,
indica
seeds were crossbred with
sativas
in thousands of wacky-named combinations, producing a super-strong, THC-heavy high. The first time Mare ever smoked
indica
, it felt as if her knees were melting under her. There was even a word among pot smokers to describe the kind of catatonic high
indica
could produce:
couch lock
.

As pure
sativas
fell out of favor, Mare stockpiled seeds from friends, but the strain she grew was weak, since a seed stock could continue for only so long. Since
sativas
had become so rare, and it was illegal to buy marijuana seeds in the United States, she figured she'd stock up in famously liberal Holland.

When Mare reached the counter at the Sensi Seed Bank in Amsterdam, she requested a pure
sativa
.

“You might want to try something else,” the man who was helping her suggested. “
Sativas
are really difficult for beginners.”

Mare snorted. “Who do you think started all of this?” she asked.

The interaction was the first inkling Mare had that something had changed while she was living her bliss in the woods.

The man behind the counter had no idea that the indignant older woman in front of him had been growing pot since before he was born, but he put her in touch with the local seed guru. The guru, it turned out, was also from California. Though it is a federal felony to bring marijuana seeds into the country, as a white, elderly hippie, Mare clearly didn't fit the profile of the modern-day drug mule. When she returned home, hidden in her luggage, inside a half-eaten box of chocolate nibs, were a handful of seeds called Jumping Jack Flash. Hidden inside Mare herself, in her “orifice,” was a strain called Bubble Gum.

It was these very seeds that were crossed with another strain that produced the plant Mare had begun to harvest. When her basket was full of musky, sticky flowers, she turned around and walked back toward the cabin she referred to as her favorite art project. Mare had designed the building in 1980, with the help of a passive solar living handbook. It was exactly as you'd imagine a cabin in the woods: surrounded by mossy trees, no signs of civilization in sight, and a model of self-sufficiency and sustainability. Water came from a nearby stream, heat from the woodstove, and electricity from the solar panels near the greenhouse. Mare's only utility bill was for the propane she used to cook and sometimes heat her water.

She pulled open the sliding glass door and entered the main living space, which was always bright and airy no matter what the season, thanks to the six enormous windows that made up the entire south-facing wall. Mare shuffled past the jumble of blankets and pillows that covered her bed. Beyond it were stairs that led to the loft where she dried her pot and herbs, and the small woodstove, which she kept burning steadily throughout the harvest to ensure that her plants dried at an even temperature. Feathers and crystals hung from the window above the kitchen sink, which looked out on the tree line.

To say that the compact space was cluttered would be a severe understatement. As she made her way toward the stairs, Mare had to step over a pair of fuzzy black slippers, and a layer of pine needles, dog hair, branches, and other debris. An old vacuum cleaner was parked next to a stack of
National Geographic
s, and it had clearly not been fired up in a while.

Every nook and cranny in the room seemed to be overflowing with relics from Mare's past. Among the contents hemorrhaging from under the stairs, for instance, were a book on herbology, an illustrated poster of wild mushrooms, some old cassette tapes, an empty bag of organic blue corn tortilla chips, pink spray paint, and a box of Georgia O'Keeffe note cards.

Mare was well aware of her housekeeping skills, or lack thereof. Her whole philosophy on the subject was summed up in the A. A. Milne quote she'd tacked up next to her back porch door: “One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries.” Mare had considered making copies of the quote and handing them out to her friends, so that instead of cleaning their houses, they could just put up the sign, too, but she'd never gotten around to it.

Mare was famous among her friends for her banking system, which was a direct result of her disorderliness. Living in a cash economy, where to store your money is always an issue. The old-school Humboldt way was to bury it in your yard or deep in the woods, in plastic pickle barrels or glass Mason jars. This led to many stories about people who buried their savings and weren't able to find them again, or who came across a cache of cash while landscaping a new backyard. Mare didn't bury her money so much as lose it by accident. Things even disappeared on her person. Once, she bought cashier's checks at the post office and put them in her shoe for safekeeping. She then proceeded to forget about them. She looked everywhere for those checks, until one day she felt a lump in her shoe and discovered the valuable clump of worn-down paper. She used to hire her friends' daughters to search her house for money. She'd pay them a 25 percent finder's fee.

It was warm up in the loft. Mare had sealed off the far end with white and pink sheets, which she had tacked to the ceiling and draped on the floor. She peeled back the cloth and stepped inside her drying area. String was pulled tight across the ceiling in neat rows, to be used for hanging the buds. A few were already in the process of drying, infusing the space with a sweet, skunky smell. She began clumping together the smaller buds in the basket and attaching rubber bands around their stems. Even though it was damp out at the coast, Mare didn't have a problem with mold or mildew that year like Crockett did. She then attached paper clips to the bundles of buds, bent them into little hooks, and hung them from the string above.

After three days or so, when the outside leaves of pot had grown brittle to the touch, Mare would wrap paper bags around the branches while they were still hanging. She would then check on them daily, until the stems cracked when she applied a little pressure. When this happened, they were ready, and she would carefully place the dried flowers in paper bags for around two weeks of curing. Then she would wrap the paper bags up tight and place them in a black plastic garbage bag, which she would store somewhere cool and dark until she had a buyer. Unlike most growers, Mare didn't trim her marijuana right after harvest. She used an old herbalist's trick, leaving the outer leaves to form a protective barrier over the buds while they dried, which provided a cushion and helped preserve their scent during storage.

Mare wiped her hands on her overalls, stood back, and surveyed her work. Though she had been hanging pot in her loft for years, she had made some new additions to the space this fall, specifically the sheets that enclosed the area. The blinds were pulled shut, but the sun seeped around the edges and through the pink material, casting a rose glow and giving the enclosure a womblike feeling.

But the idea behind the sheets wasn't about atmosphere; it was about sanitation and creating a dust-free environment. In the old days, a little cat or dog hair on pot was proof that it was homegrown, but Mare had recently joined a collective, and this clean drying space was one of the membership requirements.

Not long after the “What's After Pot?” event, a local couple held a meeting at the Octagon at Beginnings in Briceland, the place for community gatherings of all kinds. At the meeting, the couple announced that they were going to form a collective under the state's medical model, to provide patients in the Bay Area with good, old-fashioned Humboldt medicine, grown the traditional way: organically, under the sun, by farmers who had been doing it that way since the very beginning. They called it the Tea House Collective, and their target patient was the discriminating Whole Foods shopper. Anyone interested in joining the collective had to be a medical grower, pay $1,500, and donate a pound of pot. In exchange, everyone in attendance was told, the collective would try to sell their marijuana legally to patients for $2,800 a pound, which was a nice price.

Mare didn't make that first meeting, but she heard about it from her neighbors and thought the collective would be the way to get her pot to patients legally. She had been growing medically for years. Her 215 was for her asthma and her arthritis. Recently, though, it had been harder and harder to sell her crop. Mare still had two pounds from the previous year in storage that she had been unable to find a market for. Old college friends who used to buy from her in the Bay Area had started to die off, or had begun to go to the dispensary down the street when their stash ran out. The Tea House sounded like the wave of the future, and a way to be legal and out in the open whether or not the legalization measure passed in November.

In turning in her application, membership fee, and pound of pot, Mare joined a group of some two dozen others who wanted to go legit. Many were seniors, like her, fellow Back-to-the-Landers who were now in their sixties and seventies. They included a folk musician with a white beard and twinkly eyes who used to live in the West Village and had once played guitar with Peter, Paul, and Mary. He was joined by his fortysomething son, a second-generation grower. Other members included a Prius-driving grandmother whose ninety-one-year-old mother sometimes helped trim her pot, a former art school professor from Chicago, a woman from Hawaii who'd ended up in Humboldt by accident thirty years earlier, and an environmentalist from Minnesota who had helped save vast swaths of alerce forest in Chile. As the Prius-driving grandmother put it, they were, for the most part, “old-growth growers.”