Humboldt (15 page)

But there was also a group of dissenters who spoke out in favor of legalization. They called themselves Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), and were a group of retired judges, police officers, and others who said they had experienced the War on Drugs from the front lines and saw that it wasn't working.

“I have learned that most bad things about marijuana—especially the violence made inevitable by an obscenely profitable black market—are caused by the prohibition, not the plant,” retired San Jose police chief Joseph McNamara wrote in an editorial in the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

To the parents who were concerned that legalization would result in an explosion of pot use, especially among young people, McNamara pointed out that the United States had some of the world's strictest marijuana laws, and at the same time, the world's highest pot use rate, twice that of the famously liberal Netherlands. Studies indicated that marijuana use was not good for developing teenage brains, but pot prohibition didn't make it harder for kids to get their hands on it. McNamara cited a recent Columbia University study that found that teenagers said it was easier for them to buy illegal pot than government-regulated booze.

The polls bounced back and forth during the summer, and for many months, 19 was ahead. In September, according to a field poll, 49 percent of California voters favored legalization. By late October, only 44 percent polled said they intended to vote for it.

On the night of the vote, no one knew which way it would go.

Around the same time Mare was lying in her bed listening to the radio, closer to town, in a 1960s-era ranch house surrounded by a tall wooden fence, Crockett Randall was getting ready to take a shower. He peeled off his clothes and dropped them onto a linoleum floor that was covered with soggy towels. The house belonged to Frankie. It was the one where the door next to the bathroom opened into a brightly lit room where even more little money trees grew. Down the hall, in a living room decorated in a style that can only be described as bachelor-stoner, with orange walls, sarong curtains, and leather couches, Frankie and Zavie were awaiting news of 19 on a giant flat-screen TV.

Harvest was still in full swing, and while Crockett enjoyed being around female energy after all that time alone in the cabin, by this point, after spending practically twenty-four hours a day surrounded by others, he was tired of it all—of Zavie's incessant drinking, and of people complaining about the bad Mexican food at the restaurant in Phillipsville. He was ready to be done and move back home. But first he had to let the hot water wash off a day's worth of resin and sweat.

Shortly after 9:00 p.m., CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer delivered the news.

“Marijuana will not be legal in California. Not today.”

Crockett was in the shower when he heard Zavie and Frankie shouting. He threw on a towel and ran dripping down the hallway.

“Did it fail?”

“Yes!” they shouted.

“Yeah!” he cheered, and then jokingly added, “Let's double the price!”

In the end, Crockett was so indifferent that he hadn't even bothered to vote, but he still felt like celebrating.

Elsewhere in Humboldt, other whoops and cheers filled the air.

Inside the Brass Rail, a former bordello for loggers that was now a combination steakhouse and Thai restaurant, this affirmation was heard in the bar above the jubilant cries that followed news of the measure's defeat:

“We won't be a ghost town!”

In her cabin out at the coast, Mare sighed.

After all those years, it had seemed that legalization might finally happen.

But it wasn't to be. The jails weren't yet going to be emptied of the people arrested for marijuana. She and her friends weren't yet going to be able to claim their roles as master growers. And the pot bushes around her deck would also have to wait.

Mare shut off the radio in disappointment.

Then, because her personality was one that always looks for the bright side, she realized it wasn't the end of the world. It just meant not yet. In one way or another, she thought, marijuana legalization is definitely on the way. Maybe the next time it appeared on the ballot it wouldn't seem to favor the industrial grower so much. Mare shut her eyes and began to drift off to sleep, Lucky snored, and the wood in the stove at the end of her bed burned warm and low.

Two hundred miles away, in the living room of a sage-green house in the town of Chico, Emma Worldpeace cracked open her laptop to have a look at the news. She'd just finished a day at the bike shop, and eaten dinner with Ethan. Over the past few weeks, while coming and going from work, Emma had noticed a group of young people campaigning for Prop 19 in front of the Safeway grocery store next door. Emma thought it was great that they were getting out there informing people about legalization. She had voted for 19 via absentee ballot in Humboldt. She knew it was going to be a close vote but couldn't help but feel bummed when she read the results.

“Prop 19 didn't pass,” she told Ethan.

It felt like a step backward to Emma. Here California was the first state to authorize medical marijuana, and now Californians had chosen to continue to waste money locking people up for growing and using marijuana, and to reject what Emma saw as an opportunity to bring in tax revenues for schools. Emma just didn't get it.

Early the next morning, in a house in Shelter Cove that looked out over the Pacific Ocean, Bob Hamilton turned on his computer and scanned the news. Bob never stayed up for election results, not even presidential ones. Like everyone else in Humboldt, he wasn't as interested in the Republican sweep of the House or that Jerry Brown had been elected governor again.

Bob had voted for legalization, and couldn't help but feel disappointment when he read that 19 had lost, though he wasn't that surprised.

He figured the majority of Californians still didn't approve of marijuana. He also reckoned that all the people making money from it wanted their profits to stay high. A few weeks earlier, he had peeled some “Save Humboldt County, Keep Pot Illegal” stickers off a mailbox at the Whitethorn Post Office. These were the same stickers Frankie had stuck up in his house near Garberville. They gave Bob a good laugh, but he didn't leave them on the mailbox, because they were vandalizing federal property. He figured that no one who grew or sold pot wanted 19 to pass.

But he wasn't exactly right.

In the end, all three pot-producing counties of the Emerald Triangle rejected legalization. The numbers in Humboldt were 46.8 percent in favor, 53.2 percent opposed, which closely mirrored the statewide results; the measure failed in California 46.5 to 53.5. In SoHum, the numbers against legalization were even higher: 65.6 percent against and 34.4 percent for.

The irony that the majority of voters in California's pot-producing heartland were against legalization wasn't lost in the news cycle, and some of the comments following the news coverage were not kind.

“Let's grab machetes and head up to Humboldt…Humboldt, your little community just pissed off a ton of people who are sick of paying your inflated crop prices!” read one comment on a
Huffington Post
story.

Another commenter on an article on the
Mother Jones
website: “I would encourage all in California to boycott weed grown in the Triangle, the citizens of which voted overwhelmingly against Prop 19 to protect their own profits. Let them choke on their own smoke.”

But in the end, the reasons the measure failed weren't because of pot growers. Residents of the Emerald Triangle represent just a sliver of the state's population. The midterm elections saw a lower turnout among marijuana-friendly youth voters. In an off-year election cycle, people who turn out to vote are often older and more conservative. Midterm elections are not traditionally the time when progressive initiatives are passed, especially one as underfunded as Prop 19. Two other things had happened that fall that might also have helped sway the vote.

In late September, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who opposed Prop 19, signed a bill into law that reduced the penalty for possession of less than an ounce of pot from a misdemeanor to an infraction, which was the equivalent of a parking ticket and meant that one could get off with a $100 fine and no criminal record. This helped enforce the idea that pot was pretty much already as good as legal in California. The new law, however, did nothing to address the sale, transportation, or cultivation of the drug, which of course remained entirely illegal on a federal level.

Then, in October, a few weeks before the vote, U.S. attorney general Eric Holder threatened a showdown with Washington if California legalized pot outright. In a letter, Holder vowed to fight Prop 19 and “vigorously enforce” federal drug laws.

And so Prop 19 failed. If there was a silver lining to it all, it was that Prop 19 pushed marijuana legalization into mainstream American politics, and helped pave the way for two successful legalization initiatives in other states two years later.

After reading the news that morning, Bob Hamilton finished his coffee and caught one last glimpse of the ocean before he headed out the door and began the drive back to a job that would continue exactly as it had the day before, in that frustrating place known as the gray area.

I
n the year following the vote, Bob Hamilton chased convicts, chopped down illegal gardens, encouraged transients to move on, and got lost on dirt roads searching for fake addresses listed on arrest warrants. But he did it all with a different attitude. In this community of secrets, he now had one of his own.

Around the time of the vote, Bob and his wife met with their accountant. She handed them a folder, and when they opened it, they found a piece of paper inside that read, “Congratulations! You can retire at 50!” It turned out that those years of working hard and saving and making safe investments looked like they were going to pay off for the Hamiltons. Though Bob was more than ready for a change, he and his wife decided to be prudent and wait to retire until their daughter Jessica was out of college and settled in a job. But they set a date, and in July 2013, Bob Hamilton would turn in his badge, and he and his wife would begin a new life somewhere else. They would leave the futility of his fight behind.

That was more than two years out, and unfortunately, knowing his departure date gave Bob quite a case of short-timer's disease, one that made putting up with the “pot shit” even harder. In the spring, when Dazey's Supply was having its annual sale, complete with a reggae concert, free veggie burgers, and vendors selling everything needed to grow a healthy pot garden, Bob drove by and just shook his head. It looked like a fair for dope growers. Another time, Bob let out a yelp when he caught Solar Dan, an old hippie who rides an electric skateboard, sparking up in front of Redwood Realty in Garberville, right next to a No Loitering sign. Solar Dan had a thick German accent and a bead that hung from his beard like a tassel. His nickname came from his fondness for lighting his joints with a magnifying glass and the sun. He had recently begun holding meetings about the idea of renaming Garberville and Redway the “Emerald City,” because he thought it would help locals take charge of their “ganja future.”

“I'm not loitering, I'm waiting,” Solar Dan told Bob dismissively, as he exhaled a fragrant cloud of pot smoke into the air.

In the end, the short-timer's disease may have affected Bob's attitude, but it didn't affect his job performance. He still had two of the sharpest eyes in Southern Humboldt, and maybe the sharpest nose, which turned out to be very unfortunate for one particular pot smuggler.

In November 2011, almost exactly a year after the vote, Bob Hamilton pulled through the parking lot of the Best Western Inn in Garberville on his way to the sheriff's substation next door. Out of the corner of his eye he spied a Chevy Suburban that was parked a little funny. It had a cargo trailer attached and Michigan plates and was taking up multiple parking spaces. Deep in the back of his mind, Bob thought, Bet that guy's hauling dope. Then the thought passed, and Bob arrived at the station and filled out his report.

A little while later, Bob pulled back out and onto Conger Street when that same Suburban passed right in front of him, and the powerful scent of what smelled like an entire family of skunks curled out the vents of the trailer and right up Bob's nose. The guy was hauling dope, all right, poorly packaged, smelly dope.

Bob pulled the Suburban over just before Alderpoint Road.

The driver was a white man in his thirties. He was clean cut and seemed a little nervous.

Bob told him why he'd stopped him.

“I think you're transporting. I smelled a big odor of marijuana coming out of this trailer,” he said. “We can handle this two ways. I can call and get a search warrant, or you can be cooperative.”

“Am I still going to go to jail?” the driver asked.

“Oh, yes,” Bob replied. “But it'll be in your favor in the report.”

When he opened the trailer, Bob found that it was filled with ninety-two cardboard boxes. Inside the boxes were more than 275 pounds of pot. It was the biggest traffic stop bust of his career. (Bob's previous transportation bust record was 80 pounds.) He also found $10,000 in cash and $2,000 in money orders. The marijuana was surely destined for out of state, which would have been a federal felony. Bob figured that since it was Humboldt County, the driver would probably get off on probation.

A few weeks later, Bob had one of those days when he helped protect the grower from the outside man.

When he arrived at work early that November morning, he learned that a home invasion had just taken place in Benbow, a community of some three hundred people situated around a golf course, just south of Garberville. Just before four o'clock that morning, a forty-one-year-old man was asleep in his bed with his twenty-one-year-old wife and their small child when the man was awoken by a strange noise. When he got up to investigate, he found an intruder standing in his hallway. The intruder was wearing a mask that was pulled down tight over his face and was pointing a gun at him.

“Give me your fucking money and I'll leave,” the intruder said.

Behind the intruder, the homeowner saw the shadowy outline of another uninvited guest. This wasn't good. The homeowner produced $1,000 in cash.

“I need more money than that. Give me everything you got!” the intruder screamed.

Then he pointed his gun at the homeowner and pulled the trigger. The bullet grazed the top of the man's skull but didn't pierce it. The wound was bleeding, as head wounds do, but he was alive. The intruder told him that he would kill him if he didn't come up with more cash.

The man handed over another $3,000 and his wife's wedding ring. The two suspects then fled.

In a study conducted the following year, the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department determined that twenty-eight home invasions were reported in the county over the eight-year period from 2003 to 2011. All the invasions took place in homes where marijuana was grown, bought, or sold. In many of the cases, people were shot or stabbed. The sheriff, Michael Downey, suspected that the actual number of violent robberies was much higher. Downey figured that there were many cases where growers survived such incidents—battered and bruised maybe, but in one piece—and didn't report them. After all, how do you report that someone stole your contraband, or the large amount of cash you just happened to have lying around?

In this case, the injured man and his wife called the sheriff.

After Bob arrived at work early that morning, he was instructed to stake out a red Volvo that was parked near the house. In what was clearly not the best-planned rip-off in history, the robbers appeared to have left behind a getaway car. They didn't come back for it, but by tracking the car's owner, the Sheriff's Department learned that a suspect in the robbery might be staying at a local hotel. He was described as having short-cut black hair, a beard, and being of Middle Eastern descent.

A little while later, a man matching that description cracked open the door and stepped out of a room at the Garberville Motel, another one of the town's run-down one-star lodging options. Bob was waiting in his vehicle nearby, and the moment he saw the man, he entered a heightened state of nerves and awareness. Whoever had ripped off that man in Benbow earlier that morning had a gun and wasn't afraid to use it. In a rush of adrenaline, Bob shot his car across the parking lot toward his suspect, who had just popped open the trunk of a white sedan. Bob screeched to a stop in front of the sedan and ordered the man and the people sitting in the car to put their hands up. In the car's trunk, Bob found a bag filled with damp dark clothing and two gray knit stocking caps with eyeholes cut out of them.

The suspect was a twenty-five-year-old Yemeni American from Oakland named Hussain Obad. When Bob searched Obad's pockets after he'd handcuffed him, he found $1,634 and the keys to the red Volvo.

While Bob guided Obad into his vehicle, the young man looked up at him and asked, in a matter-of-fact manner, “So, boss, how many years do you think I'll get?”

The truth was, Bob didn't know.

Two months later, in January 2012, Bob Hamilton found himself zipping along the highway between Eureka and Arcata, past the massive warehouses of the California Redwood Company and the row of eucalyptus trees that stand like guardians along Humboldt Bay. He was on his way to work.

Bob had been reassigned. Due to the state's financial crisis, fourteen positions in the Humboldt Sheriff's Department had been frozen and another five people had left. This meant that services to rural areas such as SoHum were reduced, and Bob was moved to cover a bedroom community north of the city of Arcata called McKinleyville.

That same year, budget cuts caused the state of California to “leave the drug trade,” in the words of Sheriff Michael Downey. In 2012, the enemy of the marijuana grower known as CAMP was restructured and renamed. In its first year, the Cannabis Eradication and Reclamation Team (CERT) operated for four days in the county, compared to what used to be eight weeks of CAMP.

Initially, Bob was bummed when he got word of his transfer. He thought Northern Humboldt would be full of “tweakers,” or meth users, but the assignment ended up being a welcome change of pace. There were fewer transients and zero hippie buses broken down alongside the road. Sure, there were still pockets of what Bob called “junkyard mentality”—front yards decorated with burnt-out cars and bleak trailer parks that were home to people hanging on by a very frayed thread—but there seemed less of it than there was down south. Then there was the wonderful fact that roads Bob now rolled on were all paved, which meant he could get everywhere he needed to go so much quicker. He did not miss rumbling up dusty or muddy track with the sound of a banjo playing in the back of his mind. The other silver lining was that Bob wasn't sent to the courts. That, he figured, would have been so damn boring it would have made him want to eat his gun.

When Bob left the Garberville substation, that building he hated, and feared contained asbestos, he left his mark on the Missing and Wanted person's wall near the secretary's desk. Next to the Missing flyer for Robert Firestone, the old man with dementia who had gone walking and was never seen again, Bob stuck one of those amusing “Save Humboldt County, Keep Pot Illegal” stickers he'd peeled off a mailbox before the vote. Above the Wanted poster for Keith Conn, the “real bad motherfucker” whom Bob never managed to catch, he taped an article from the local paper about how the Humboldt Growers Association had hosted a fund-raiser for the district attorney's reelection campaign that past fall. The part about how the growers had raised $5,000 for the D.A. was marked in yellow highlighter.

To Bob, that said it all.

Northern Humboldt proved to be a different world. Of course pot was grown there, and “unemployed” boys drove big expensive trucks—it was still Humboldt after all—but it was nothing at the level it was down south. The foggy coastal climate meant that a lot of people grew indoors, which made it all seem much more discreet.

On some days up north, when Bob was between calls from, say, a trailer park manager who wanted to evict a tenant and a woman whose bedroom had been trashed by an ex-boyfriend, he would catch fleeting glimpses of the raw beauty he adored. While on a drive through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, he'd marvel at the Roosevelt elk, with their antlers that looked like the forked branches of an oak tree. On the way back to the highway, he'd take in the moss-covered trees that lined the road through the park. They were so fuzzy and surreal they seemed straight out of the pages of Dr. Seuss.

Humboldt County was a beautiful place, there was no mistaking it, but it had become like a Hollywood set for Bob. It was like a façade, and behind the façade was a different story, one of trash, and meth, and familial dysfunction. Of course it wasn't just Humboldt. Cops deal with the margins and extremes of society everywhere; the bowels, as Bob put it. His pessimism about the place was an occupational hazard, and he knew it. Sometimes he wished he had never returned to Humboldt, had never gotten to know its underbelly and learn what lurked behind the trees. It could have stayed a place of perfect beauty for him, like the way he saw it when he was a kid.

But there was no going back, and maybe that was the lesson. There was only going forward, and Bob had a date to move toward: July 2013.

He and his wife were busy working on the plan. They had spent a few weeks that past September in Italy. They flew into Rome and drove out into the countryside, where they spent ten days participating in the grape harvest in Le Marche. Then they pushed on to Tuscany, where they ate cheese and cold cuts and drank wine, and met a man who might be interested in having them help run his B&B. That was the dream, a B&B or maybe an olive grove somewhere in Italy for part of the year. The other half of their time, the Hamiltons were considering working as volunteers for international disaster relief with the Red Cross. Bob would be former law enforcement, and his wife was a nurse; these were skills sure to come in handy somewhere.

Helping people was ingrained in Bob, and he wanted to do it in a way that was productive and felt good. People loved firefighters, but not everyone loved cops. Volunteering in emergency situations sounded like a way in which Bob could use his skills and people might actually appreciate him.

In the meantime, he had a job to finish and a deadline to shoot for.

“Only five months, twenty days, and eight hours to go,” he'd say at the start of a workday, and then he'd laugh. “But who's counting?”