Humboldt (3 page)

Government price support program, indeed.

Then, in 1996, Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act, became law, and medical marijuana patients were allowed to grow their own. Since the law was written so loosely that just about anyone could become a medical marijuana patient, more people entered the growing game, especially in recent years, as the economy tanked. Pot wasn't just an Emerald Triangle product anymore. People around the state began growing more of it in their garages, attics, and backyards, and prices on the black market began to spiral downward. Now, in 2010, a statewide initiative called Proposition 19, the Regulate, Control, and Tax Cannabis Act, would, if passed by voters in November, legalize pot outright. It was the reason for the community meeting Mare had attended. Crockett's boss and his friends were also worried. Frankie was completely against legalization. His motto was “I'm not in this for the money, I'm in this for a lot of money.” A sticker on the wall at his house summed up his feelings and the feelings of many other growers: “Save Humboldt County, Keep Pot Illegal.”

The vote was just over two months away, and Crockett still hadn't made up his mind yet about legalization. On one hand, he liked the idea of drastic changes in history, and ending marijuana prohibition sounded cool. On the other, he listened faithfully to the radio news program
Democracy Now!
, he was partial to conspiracy theories, and his distrust of government ran deep. Sometimes Crockett would tell people he played both sides of the War on Drugs. He knew that growers supported the economy with all the money they laundered, but there was also another side that he didn't agree with, the whole prison industrial complex, with its judges, and prison guards and police who earned money by locking people away. The government had spent $41 billion that year alone fighting the War on Drugs, according to a study by the libertarian Cato Institute. It was a war Crockett knew could never be won.

He also wondered how he and his friends would make a living in a world where pot was legal and no longer as lucrative. With legalization, would companies such as Philip Morris plant acres of ganja in the Central Valley? Or, worse yet, what if China started growing pot for export? They'd be selling it at dollar stores. These thoughts had all occurred to Crockett, but he put them out of his mind as he lay on the couch and finished his joint to the tinny sound of the “Hotel California” remix playing on his laptop.

First, he had to guard the crop and get through harvest. Then he had to get paid. And then maybe he could start thinking about legalization and his future. He already had a five-year plan. By the time he was forty, he wanted to get his pilot's license, find his father, and build a little cabin on the commune where he grew up.

On this late August night, the marijuana flowers outside were beginning to fill out and were near their resiny peaks. It was a time when sheriff's deputies might come to your gate to make sure your medical paperwork was in order. And it was rip-off season, when thieves could make off with a year's crop in one fell swoop. Paranoia permeated the hills of Humboldt this time of year. It explained the pit bulls in the back of the trucks around town and the brisk sales of motion-detecting cameras and alarm systems at the Security Store up in the Meadows Business Park (the “insecurity” store, as some people called it). The irony was that while most outsiders feared stumbling upon armed growers in Humboldt, most growers feared being stumbled upon by armed men themselves. It wasn't only money they risked losing. Media reports about violence in the community were often exaggerated, but the sad truth of the matter was that people had been losing their lives over marijuana in Humboldt County for almost as long as it had been grown there.

The first known bust of a pot grower in Humboldt County went down on September 29, 1960, north of the city of Arcata, near a stream of water known as Strawberry Creek. After a multiple-hour stakeout that morning, a sheriff's deputy arrested and charged a man named Eugene Crawford with growing a little more than two dozen, three-inch-high pot plants. Crawford had arrived at the scene with a box and shovel in hand; he said he was going to dig worms. He was found guilty after a three-day trial the following year. A decade later, the first recorded marijuana-related killing occurred.

October 4, 1970, was a Sunday, and outside the dairy town of Ferndale, Patrick Berti came to check out two four-foot-tall marijuana plants that were basking in the fall sun. Berti was twenty-two, had grown up in Ferndale, and had just been accepted into law school in San Diego. He examined the plants, unaware that he was being watched. For, hidden in the bushes nearby, was an ambitious young sheriff's deputy on a stakeout. Larry Lema was also from Ferndale and had known Berti for years. At one point, Berti held up a marijuana branch that the deputy would later say he mistook for a weapon. Lema drew his gun and fired, ripping a hole in Berti's chest.

As he lay bleeding on the riverbank, Berti recognized the man who'd pulled the trigger.

“Christ, Larry,” he cried. “You've shot me.”

Then Patrick Berti died. The pot plants didn't even belong to him, but to a friend. Berti had come to the river that day to marvel at their height. A Humboldt County grand jury later ruled Berti's shooting “justifiable homicide.”

In the decades that followed, there were more pot-related deaths, and some stood out more than others, like that of Kathy Davis, the social worker with the heart of gold whose 1982 murder during a robbery at her home shattered the innocence of the community. Then there was the nineteen-year-old boy, and member of the second generation, who was shot to death at a local swimming hole during a deal gone wrong. There were also people who disappeared, leaving their family and friends in a perpetual state of unknowing. The community became wary and distrusting of outsiders, of anyone they didn't know. But business continued, and in some ways it was amazing that there weren't more murders, given the hundreds of millions of dollars in cash exchanged every year in deals that were often nothing more than “a handshake on a dusty road,” as the local song goes.

But then again, almost everyone seemed to know of someone who had been killed.

Though Humboldt County has a low violent-crime rate compared to the rest of the state, in 2012 the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office analyzed the past eight years of data on local homicides, and this is what they found: Of the thirty-eight murders committed during that period, twenty-three, or 70 percent, were drug-related. The drug was usually marijuana. The sheriff noticed that these homicides were not tales of “reefer madness”; assassins hopped up on pot were not driving around looking for innocent prey. Most of the murders were business violence—say, a skirmish over wages or somebody getting shot during a rip-off. During that same period in Napa County, which has a similar population size and whose economy is based on a legal intoxicant—alcohol—there were only eight murders, and just one was marijuana-related.

When you worked outside the law, it seemed the disputes were settled there, too.

Crockett knew since childhood that the potential for violence and rip-offs were part of the business, and Frankie had told him before he moved up to the cabin, “If the rippers come, don't risk your life. Get off the hill.”

But Crockett had other plans.

Hidden under the tangle of blankets on his unmade bed was a loaded .22-caliber handgun. It was silver with a black handle, and weighed heavy in his hand. Crockett had too much riding on this. He had quit his job and worked too hard in that garden just to let it all disappear. If the rippers came, Crockett planned to stand his ground. It wasn't about the plants. It never was. It was about the money.

After Crockett exhaled a final cloud of smoke, he headed back outside. The main garden was located farther out on the property. Dust billowed up behind him as he sped along in a Yamaha Rhino, an off-road vehicle that looks like a mini dune buggy. It was close to midnight, and there was only darkness and trees and the high-pitched hum of the Rhino's engine.

When he pulled up at the final gate, Crockett killed the motor on the Rhino, and the lights went out. Again, it was pitch black until the four enormous greenhouses came into view. They were covered in translucent white polyurethane, which gave them a ghostly glow. The three on the right were cylindrical-shaped and about a hundred feet long. From above they must have looked like enormous joints. The fourth was square and about twice the size of the cabin. The whole setup looked like a commercial nursery, which, in a way, it was—an illegal commercial nursery.

Crockett unlocked the gate and strode toward the nearest greenhouse. The thick, musky scent of marijuana hung heavy in the air. The plant's trademark odor was often compared to a skunk's spray; it was the smell that had led to a million busts. He swung open the door of the cabin-shaped greenhouse to have a look at the girls, as growers call female marijuana plants. They were still there, lined up obediently in tidy rows.

They were the same strain he had smoked earlier, O.G. Kush. But whereas the plants he and Zavie grew under bright lights in the house would reach only a few feet tall before they flowered, sun and time coaxed these ladies to heights of around ten feet. Though it was dark, their shadowy shape revealed an industrial uniformity. While many outdoor plants are large and unruly, these were tall and skinny and manicured in a fiercely attentive way, like
premier cru
grapevines.

A few days earlier, Crockett and Zavie had gone through and removed the larger leaves on the plants and tied the heaviest branches to wooden stakes with blue plastic ribbon. While marijuana was known throughout the world for its serrated five-finger leaf, it is the dense, odorous flowers that produce the mind-altering high. As the flower clusters, known as “buds,” thickened nearing harvest, the plastic tape and stakes would prevent branches from snapping under their growing weight. O.G. Kush was known among smokers and brokers for its distinct smell and high. Among growers, it was also known for having a weak stem and being prone to mold. The blue tape would help support the stems. As for the mold, there was nothing Crockett could do about that but pray.

He chuckled as he surveyed the blue tape that snaked through the plant in front of him. How it was tied said so much about his and Zavie's differences. Crockett's tape was pulled tight and ran in mathematically straight lines, while Zavie's zigzagged haphazardly around the plants' branches like an unraveled ball of yarn.

Crockett shut the greenhouse door and did a quick walk around the other structures. Between each one was a row of heirloom tomatoes, bell peppers, chard, and beets. It was silly, but Frankie had insisted that Crockett and Zavie grow the vegetables. In case someone buzzed the greenhouses with a plane, Frankie somehow thought they'd think it was a veggie farm. The veggie garden took a lot of work to put in, and while they were doing it, Crockett grumbled to Frankie, “Fuck man, we want to be dope growers, not vegetable growers.”

In all, there were around seven hundred marijuana plants inside the various greenhouses that dotted the property. Because they were hidden behind a thin layer of polyurethane and weren't exposed to the full sun, the plants wouldn't reach the epic proportions some growers were famous for. As with all gardening or farming, the potency and yield of a pot plant came down to the green of a grower's thumb. Multiple-pound plants weren't uncommon among seasoned growers, and one old-timer was rumored to have grown a single monster plant that produced thirteen pounds of pot one year, thanks to his special fertilizer.

Come harvest, Crockett hoped his plants would each produce at least half a pound of pot. One of his connections had promised to pay $3,400 a pound, which meant that after it had been cut, dried, and processed, the pot grown in these greenhouses would net close to $1 million in cash. But that was still a couple of months away. So much could happen before then. Rippers could come. The cops could pay a visit. If the legalization measure passed, and the RAND prediction was true, the market could crash. In the meantime, Crockett would sit in the cabin and guard the crop with his life.

It was late, and he had to be back to water the garden early the next morning. Crockett started up the Rhino, revved its tiny engine, and sped off into the darkness in a cloud of fast-moving dirt.

It was only a matter of days before someone would be shot in a remote Humboldt garden filled with emerald green plants much like his.

E
mma Worldpeace had just finished up a day's work as a sales associate at Chico Sports LTD when she noticed the missed calls. They were from her little sister, Lisa. It was odd that Lisa had called a few times. Though the sisters were close, they weren't in touch often. Emma decided to call her back as soon as she got home. She hopped on her bike and began the short ride back to the house she shared with her boyfriend, Ethan.

It was early on the evening of August 26, 2010. The dense, dry heat that could make the Central Valley city of Chico feel like a brick oven was just beginning to subside as Emma pedaled down Arbutus Avenue toward the sage-green suburban home she shared with Ethan and a roommate. Emma was twenty-three years old, with pale skin and a smattering of freckles. She had her father's button nose and wide, doe-like brown eyes, though the first thing everyone noticed about her was her hair, which hung in shoulder-length ringlets and was the russet color redwood needles turn after they fall from the tree. Emma's legs pumped up and down like pistons. She was an avid cyclist and regularly rode at least fifteen hours a week.

After stashing her bike in a shed behind the house, where there were enough bikes to start a small rental business, Emma stopped to kiss her boyfriend. Ethan, a tall, athletic thirty-four-year-old, was drinking a beer with a buddy under the shade tree in the backyard.

Only then did Emma think to pick up her phone and return her sister's call. Lisa was two years younger. Of her five siblings, Lisa was the only one with whom she shared both parents, though Emma considered all her siblings equal. Lisa also used to be the only one who shared Emma's hippie last name, though she had dumped it a few years earlier for the flashier-sounding name of an Italian sports car.

“Hey, girl!” Emma said when her sister picked up.

Lisa sounded strange.

“Did you hear about Mike?” she asked.

“No.”

“I don't know exactly what's going on, or if it's true or not,” Lisa said hurriedly, the words tumbling out of her mouth. “But basically it sounds like there were some guys living on his property and there was some kind of a fight, and they say he shot someone and has been taken into custody.”

After trying to reassure her sister that everything would be okay, Emma hung up the phone, cracked open her laptop, and began scanning the local papers back in Humboldt. There was a lot of news online about the shooting, and it wasn't good.

“At least one man was severely injured in a shootout in Kneeland last night, apparently in a marijuana-related dispute,”
The North Coast Journal
reported.

They were calling it the Kneeland Shooting, and the details were grisly. A forty-year-old Guatemalan immigrant named Mario Roberto Juarez Madrid had been shot and killed in an enormous marijuana garden in a place called Kneeland, in the hills outside Eureka. Another man had been shot in the face and back and had stumbled onto a California Department of Forestry base early that morning.

The prime suspect was Mikal Xylon Wilde, age twenty-eight. He'd been arrested later that morning while driving his big green truck on a road near where the shooting took place. In the mug shot that had been released, Mikal's head was shaved, his beefy shoulders bulged out of a tank top, and he stared blankly at the camera. It was a face that was deeply familiar to Emma. She'd known Mike since childhood. They had been friends; then her mother and his father had children together, and he became family.

Emma considered him her brother.

She scanned the stories for clues to what had happened, searching for anything that might lead her to believe that Mike didn't do it. According to the news reports, Mike had hired three men to tend to a marijuana garden of more than 1,500 plants. The two survivors told police that Mike had recently changed their work agreement and told them he could no longer afford to bring them food, or gas for the irrigation truck, and that they'd have to water the plants by hand. The men had balked at the new conditions, and found their way to a phone, where they called someone to come pick them up. When Mike found out, they said he returned with a gun and opened fire.

A man was dead, another injured, and Mike was in jail. Fear, sadness, anger—so many emotions bubbled up inside Emma. She felt a lump in her throat, and her eyes started to burn, but she fought back the tears, and the urge to go running to Ethan. After all, one of her coping mechanisms during times of crisis was not to talk. She had learned long ago to keep her stories to herself.

It wasn't until after Ethan's friend left that Emma pulled her boyfriend aside and told him the news.

“There was an incident involving my brother Mike,” she said. “I don't know if it's true or not, but according to the reports, there was some kind of fight that had to do with plants or supplies, and one guy was shot and killed.”

“Oh my god, I'm so sorry,” Ethan said, as he enveloped her in a giant hug.

Like seeds sown in a garden long ago, the roots of this story about growing up in marijuana culture began years back, during a winter rainstorm in the hills of Southern Humboldt.

It was February 1987.

“The baby is coming!” she hollered.

She had long dark hair and a childlike face. Her name was Linda Rivas, but she'd called herself Sage ever since she met a shaman in Harvard Square years earlier who told her she should change her name, go west, and join the Rainbow Tribe. Sage had already given birth twice, and knew it was time, even before the pressure began to come in those rhythmic waves known as contractions.

“Hey guys! It's coming now!”

The baby's father came running. His name was Stephen Frech. He and Sage had met a few years earlier while she was living in the Resting Oak Village, a settlement of old vacation cabins on the Eel River. Frech was a short, stout man with an enormous curly red beard. He looked as though he hailed from the Hobbits' Shire. In reality, he was a Volks­wagen mechanic from rural New Jersey who was known around Southern Humboldt as EZ Out, after his special method for popping windshields out of cars. His technique involved sitting in the driver's seat and pushing against the glass with his stubby legs until the window popped out with a satisfying crack.

EZ Out set Sage up in the bed next to the woodstove in the living room and rubbed her back, while word was sent out to contact the midwife. Since there was no phone line in the house, someone had to drive to the top of the dirt road, a few miles away, to get enough of a connection on the CB radio to let the midwife know the baby was on its way.

As the hours passed, the rain fell steadily and the contractions came harder and faster. A small crowd gathered in the living room to witness the baby's arrival, but still there was no midwife.

When it became obvious the baby was coming, midwife or not, a small power struggle ensued between EZ Out and the unborn baby's godmother, Tie-Dye Debrah, over who was going to catch the newborn as it entered the world. When the moment finally came, in front of a warm fire, surrounded by loved ones, a baby girl was born. Her father and godmother still hadn't settled who would hold her first and started pulling on her.

“Wait a minute!” her mother wailed. “Stop! The cord is still attached!”

When the umbilical cord was cut, the newborn was wrapped in a tie-dye rainbow blanket. She was bald and breathtakingly innocent. Her parents named her Emma Rosa.

As for her last name, around the time of her birth, Sage and EZ Out couldn't agree on whose name to use. One day in town, Sage got to talking to a man named Barefoot G
eorg
e, who used to live in a school bus and led a decidedly shoeless existence. Sage explained her predicament to him.

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” she told him.

“Why don't you call her Worldpeace?” Barefoot George suggested. “There's no reason to fight over a name. Give her the name Worldpeace, and there will be peace over this.”

Sage liked the sound of that, and the idea that every time people heard her daughter's last name, they would have to think about peace on earth, even if just for a moment.

So Emma Worldpeace was bestowed her unusual last name, one that she would carry into adulthood and that in many ways would help define her. As she would one day explain, “It's hard to be an asshole when your last name is Worldpeace.”

When Emma was still a baby, the family moved to a new home. The house was a two-story geodesic dome on eighty acres located deep in the rolling, grassy hills of a community called Salmon Creek. The building was covered in shingles and looked like a giant orb. The main living space was a round, open room with a kitchen that looped around to the left. It had giant windows that were framed by the grapevines that grew outside, and rugs were spread across the floor for people to sprawl upon.

Downstairs, there was a secret passageway. The entrance was next to the bedroom where Lisa, Emma's younger sister, was born. In the cool, dark root cellar where Sage stored her preserved pickles and jellies, a hidden panel opened and led to a crawl space that wound up through the walls. It was a favorite spot for Emma and her siblings when they played hide-and-seek.

Life at the dome, as they called it, was a world unto itself. The highway was a forty-five-minute drive away, and “town,” Garberville or Redway, an hour away. Not that they ever needed to go anywhere. The property was a wonderland where just walking to the top of the two-mile-long driveway was an all-day adventure. Snacks grew on the pear, fig, and walnut trees that dotted the property, and what seemed like the world's biggest mulberry tree towered behind the goat shed. Up a steep hill from the dome, in a giant oak, someone had built a tree house that could make a child's heart sing; it had a working woodstove, a small deck, and a stained-glass window.

Like most everyone in their community, Sage and EZ Out supported themselves by growing pot. For Emma, this was as normal as if her parents raised cows or worked in an office. Sometimes she'd join her mom and siblings and carry water deep into the woods to water the plants, which were hidden under the forest canopy. It didn't occur to her then that there were risks to the work, or that her parents could go to jail for what they were doing.

That realization would come later, in a shockingly sudden way.

At the time, there was a more visible shadow to life at the dome. EZ Out was a drinker. He could go through twenty-four beers in a day. Sage had come to realize that she couldn't count on him to help with the children or the crop. She kicked him out, and EZ Out began the deeper descent into alcoholism that would land him in San Quentin State Prison for drunk driving a few months later.

Around this same time, Sage figured it was time to buy a property of her own. She found a house in another small hill community, called Ettersburg. Morning Glory Manor, as the house was called, was located down a dirt road lined with twisted red manzanita. The driveway meandered past the barn where Emma's older siblings, Aia and Omar, slept, and then the horse corral and vegetable garden, before it turned up an impossibly steep grade. At the crest of the hill, next to the shed where the generator was stored, Morning Glory Manor stood on stilts. It was three flights of stairs to the front door, which was framed on each side by stained-glass windows depicting the house's namesake periwinkle flower.

Morning Glory Manor was located off the electrical grid, which meant the generator that provided the family's electricity had to be filled with gas from time to time. Firewood needed to be chopped and stacked, and the pump that brought water from the creek to the house had to be turned on and off at least once a week.

And so Emma Worldpeace continued her life completely off the map.

Shortly after moving to the new house, Sage began dating an accountant and jazz guitarist named Jim Wilde. Jim was a quiet, older man with a son named Mikal, who was the same age as Emma's twelve-year-old sister, Aia. Emma looked up to Mike in that admiring way younger kids do. He was allowed to eat sugary cereal, and he had a TV in his room, and a stereo on which he'd blast Snoop Dogg and Too $hort. Mike became her stepbrother, and in many ways, he treated Emma as a big brother should. He gave her rides on his four-wheeler, and let her hang out with him and his friends. If he thought she was being too nerdy or too straight, he would affectionately refer to her as “Lisa Simpson,” as in “Don't be such a Lisa Simpson.” He also introduced her to alcohol. The first time Emma ever drank was with Mike. They stole some of Jim's beers from the fridge, smuggled them out of the house, and sipped them in the woods.

Mike was all about adventure. One summer morning, when Sage brought Emma and Lisa over for a visit, he suggested the girls join him on a hike. They set out with Mike's sheepdog, Rudy, on an old logging road. They followed the road until they arrived at an open meadow that had a giant fir tree standing in the middle. The meadow looked out on tiny Salmon Creek School. The velvet green Bear Buttes Mountain towered in the distance. Pushing on, they came upon a patch of hillside that had been scorched by fire. In the middle of it stood a trailer that had been licked black by the flames. Whoever had lived in the trailer seemed to have left in a hurry. Inside the charred cabinets were dishes and dish soap, and there were clothes left in the bedroom. The trailer fascinated the three explorers, as did the singed pot plants they found in a ditch outside, dry and crispy, but unmistakable.

Emma, Mike, and Lisa were so engrossed in their discovery that they didn't notice the fog rolling in off the Pacific and over the ridgetop behind them. Cool and thick, it blanketed everything in its mist. By the time the group decided to head for home, they didn't get very far before they realized they were lost. With the fog swirling around them, they couldn't figure out which direction they needed to head. They searched for landmarks, like the school, which was located just below the Wilde house, but the mist was so dense they could barely see a few feet ahead of them.