Humboldt (6 page)

Time passed in a blur at Gopherville, the way it does when one is happy. So it came as quite a shock when Mare learned that not everyone on the commune felt the same way she did, and it all came screeching to a halt.

All along the North Coast, experiments in communal living flickered out in various ways, but the beginning of the end of Gopherville can be traced to a trip a couple of commune members made to a place called Lighthouse Ranch. Located at an old Coast Guard station in the north of the county, Lighthouse Ranch was a religious commune owned by a real estate agent and evangelical Christian minister named Jim Durkin. Brother Durkin gave Mare the creeps. He reminded her of Willy Loman from
Death of a Salesman
. She found him overbearing, paunchy, and slobbering. Her unfavorable view stemmed in part from what happened next: the two commune members who visited Lighthouse Ranch returned to Gopherville and, one by one, began converting others into what Mare could only describe as dreary Jesus freaks. Those who didn't convert had to leave.

Mare was heartbroken. It felt as though her family were breaking apart. At one point, one of her recently converted sisters came to her in her clay studio/chicken coop and suggested that Mare ask Jesus into her heart.

“Just try,” the woman coaxed her. “Invite him in and see what happens.”

Mare knelt on the floor of her studio and asked Jesus into her heart.

He didn't make an appearance.

Mare hung around a bit longer, but the breaking point came when Brother Durkin sent word that she was forbidden from working in the garden and that a woman's place was in the kitchen.

“Bullshit” was her response.

Len had also had enough of the new Gopherville by then. Mare and Len left the commune and camped nearby, on the Mattole River, for a while. Over time their interests diverged, and the couple saw less of each other. Mare spent the following years camping in the summer and caretaking homes in the winter. She joined a woman's consciousness-raising group, where she forged close friendships, and made ends meet selling pottery at the annual Bay Area Renaissance fair. Somewhere in the middle of it all, something happened that changed the economy of the area. When Mare heard about it, she thought it was exciting. It was a new horticultural technique that produced marijuana that was so potent people in the cities were willing to pay a lot of money for it.

It was called
sinsemilla
.

It's difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the technique for growing sinsemilla, or seedless pot, arrived in Humboldt County, but it was most likely sometime around 1974 or 1975. Mare thought she heard about it from the Vietnam veterans. Others recall a man who passed through town and instructed everyone to “pull all the males.” One thing is for sure, word spread fast, and soon everyone was growing what the media would soon come to call “the Cadillac of cannabis.” Sinsemilla may have been born elsewhere, but Humboldt growers mastered it.

Marijuana, which is Mexican slang for cannabis, is a flowering annual. All species of cannabis are dioecious—​that is, male and female flowers appear on separate plants. Males produce pollen, and females produce seeds—​and that's where the trickery begins. Both plants produce flowers, but unpollinated females produce much more resin, the sticky substance that contains both the terpenes that give pot its potent aroma and the cannabinoids that are responsible for its psychoactive properties, notably delta-​9-​te
trahydrocannabino
l, or THC. In order to grow seedless female flowers, sinsemilla, you must remove the male plants before pollination.

Around the same time that marijuana growers in Humboldt and the neighboring counties of Trinity and Mendocino began producing sinsemilla, the U.S. government inadvertently helped create a market for their new industry. In the mid- to late 1970s, the American government supported the Mexican government's spraying of the toxic herbicide paraquat on the Mexican marijuana crop. At the time, more than 90 percent of the marijuana smoked in the United States came from abroad. The strains were called Acapulco Gold, Colombian Gold, and Panama Red, after the places where they were grown. Like the jug wines that graced American dinner tables at the time, these were simple, lightweight versions of what was to come.

Marijuana continued to flow north from Mexico, but after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned of the serious health risks that paraquat-laced pot posed to consumers, there was a sudden interest in other sources. By 1979, the year Congress suspended the paraquat-spraying program, an estimated 35 percent of the marijuana smoked in California was homegrown. This percentage would only continue to rise in the following years, as California marijuana became synonymous around the state and nation with a quality high. By 2010, the year of the legalization vote, one study estimated that 79 percent of all marijuana consumed in the United States came from California.

And so an industry was born in Humboldt County, one that would bridge the cultural divide between hippies and rednecks by providing income for all, and would bring a new economic boom to the area just as the old industries were drying up. Word spread, and people flocked from faraway places to cash in. As the pillar of the local economy became a forbidden plant, Mare would hear stories about friends who had helped teach old-timers how to grow. On her trips into town, she'd notice how some hippies had started wearing the checked flannel shirts of the loggers, and how some of the rednecks had begun wearing their hair long. Things started to feel more equal. The children of the two cultures were the true hybrids. They went to school together, became friends, and fell in love with each other. As the local logging and fishing industries dwindled even further, bumper stickers began to appear on the backs of the dusty pickups around town announcing the transition: “Another Logger Gone to Pot.”

By 1979, even
The New York Times
took note. “Marijuana Crops Revived California Town” was the headline of an article about Garberville. The story was one that would be retold in every medium over the coming decades: growers had made a killing with their latest harvest (“$500 to $1000 a pound, five to 10 times the price paid five years ago”); Main Street was bustling; sheriff's deputies had confiscated more pot than the year before; and there had been an uptick in marijuana-related crime. Accompanying the article were photos of deputies standing next to long, leafy plants that, to the untrained eye, looked like freshly cut bamboo.

Perhaps the case that best represents how pervasive marijuana growing became in Humboldt County over the years, how it transcended social and class boundaries until seemingly everyone was doing it, is the story of the lieutenant sheriff's deputy Delbert Frame. Del Frame, as he was known, grew up on a dairy farm in Ferndale. He was a tall man with a round, Nordic face and blond hair that he wore combed neatly back. He'd met his wife, Rita, at Boston University and had fought in the Korean War. The couple had three sons and a daughter, and they eventually settled in a ranch-style home on Sunset Avenue in Redway. Del Frame ran the Garberville sheriff's substation in the 1970s, where he was remembered as a kind and calm boss. Rita worked as a court clerk.

After his retirement, when Del Frame was sixty and recovering from his third heart attack at a hospital three hours south, law enforcement broke down his front door. Many of the men who took part in the raid that day had been to the house before as guests. A neighbor had tipped off the authorities that Del Frame, veteran, dairyman, and, most important, retired lieutenant sheriff's deputy, was growing marijuana on land he owned up Alderpoint Road.

“Everybody else is doing it, why not us?” Frame had told his wife before he planted his first crop. Rita Frame didn't think it was such a good idea, but Del was always so confident. He didn't seem to have a problem with people smoking pot, either, as long as they didn't abuse it. The Frames always thought alcohol was worse. Besides, the extra money would help their kids get ahead in the world.

Authorities seized more than four hundred pot plants from Del Frame's property on the hill. His partner in the operation, a former highway patrolman named Bud Miller, was also arrested. Frame was tried, and sentenced to five years in federal prison. Two months after his release, he had a stroke while sitting in an easy chair in his living room on Sunset Avenue. He died six years later.

Mare, meanwhile, continued to help Len grow a little marijuana down by the river. She earned most of her income, however, selling clay pots at the Renaissance fair. She didn't really start growing her own crop until 1980, after her father loaned her the money to buy her land. That was just before the dull, sickening sound of helicopters moving through the sky became commonplace every fall. The War on Drugs played out in a different way in the hills of Humboldt than it did in the inner city and beyond the southern border. Prices skyrocketed as the stakes were raised, and the unlucky experienced the devastation and stigma of being busted.

T
he day the sheriff came began like any other. That September morning in 1997, Sage woke Emma World­peace and her sister Lisa in the bedroom they shared at Morning Glory Manor. She brewed a pot of coffee while the girls brushed their hair and washed the sleep from their eyes. Their older siblings, Aia and Omar, walked up to the house from the barn, and everyone ate breakfast together and packed a quick lunch before it was time to pile into the Pathfinder and drive to Ettersburg Junction to meet the school bus.

As usual, Emma was nervous about missing the bus and was the first inside the car.

“Hurry up!” she shouted. “We're going to be late!!”

The bus ride to school was only around fifteen miles, but the journey took close to an hour, due to all the stops to pick up other students and the bumpy, unpaved road that forced them to move at a crawl.

The tiny alternative school that Emma and her siblings attended was perched on a bluff near the coast. The school year began with a field trip so the students could get to know one another. There were group meditation classes, and a choice between aikido and African dance for P.E. Years earlier an artist named Mare used to teach the students how to make paper and clay faces.

Emma's older sister, Aia, had a dentist appointment that morning and stayed home from school, but everyone else made it to the bus on time. Nothing really remarkable happened that morning, until Emma's teacher pulled her aside.

“There's something going on at your house,” she said. “Your mom doesn't want you to take the bus all the way home.”

Normally, the bus would drop Emma off at the top of her driveway. On this day, Emma, Omar, and Lisa were instructed to get off at Ettersburg Junction. When they pulled up, Sage was standing in front of the Pathfinder with baby John on her hip. Aia was sitting in the passenger seat. Sage looked like a ghost. It was clear that she had been crying and was trying to hold it together.

It was obvious that something horrible had happened.

A few days earlier, a black helicopter had buzzed Morning Glory Manor. As everyone knew, a helicopter flying low across Southern Humboldt at the time was usually looking for only one thing. In the fall of 1983, the ominous sound of helicopter blades cutting through the air became commonplace at harvest time. It echoed up and down valleys and gulches, and made stomachs cramp and heart rates accelerate among those who grew illegal plants, for it signaled the arrival of the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting.

CAMP, as it was commonly known, was a task force of federal, state, and local agencies operated by the California Department of Justice's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. On any given day during the eight-week-long CAMP season, members of various agencies, including the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Department of Fish and Game, the Coast Guard, local sheriff's deputies, and others, would participate in a very involved version of weed whacking. Only they didn't call it weed; they called it dope.

Law enforcement had been chopping down marijuana in Humboldt—eradicating, as they called it—since a sheriff's deputy arrested Eugene Crawford next to his tiny plants back in 1960. Starting with Operation Sinsemilla in 1979, federal and state funds helped eradication efforts become larger and more militarized. CAMP helicopters were filled with men prepared for battle: dressed in camouflage and armed with automatic weapons.

To growers, helicopters were the ultimate crop-destroying locusts.

After spotting and photographing marijuana grows from the air, authorities would return on raids. Pot would be chopped down, hauled out, and burned or buried. Whenever possible, the grower was arrested. The annual raids led to the creation of a term among growers: to get “CAMP'ed” meant that law enforcement had destroyed your garden. In the 1980s and throughout the '90s, the era before medical marijuana, there was more focus on small-time pot growers, and anyone could get CAMP'ed. As the helicopters swarmed the hills for weeks on end, it was like a game of
Dungeons & Dragons
. As one longtime grower described it, “You never knew where the dice were going to land.”

The greenhouse that contained the plants Sage was growing that season was located next to the barn. It was usually covered in plastic sheeting. The day the helicopter passed over, Roland, the man who was helping Sage grow her crop that year, had peeled back the plastic because the plants were growing tall and pushing up against it. Sage and Roland had planned to go down to Whitethorn Construction that day to get poles to make the greenhouse taller, but before they left, the helicopter swooped over the ridgetop.

“Oh my God, Roland!” Sage yelled. “Cover it!”

But it was too late.

The helicopter passed overhead with a clear view of thirty tall green plants flourishing inside the open greenhouse.

Everyone in the family felt a little nervous afterward, but Sage decided not to cut the plants down. They weren't yet ready for harvest. She knew it was a risk, leaving them there for law enforcement to confiscate, but before giving the matter any more thought, a friend's five-year-old child died in a horrible car accident. Sage became so preoccupied with her friend's grief that she forgot all about the helicopter and the risk she was taking leaving her plants in the ground—​until she pulled up at her house with Aia on the way back from the dentist that morning.

The gate was open.

“That's weird,” Aia remarked. “Didn't we leave the gate closed?”

Then Sage and Aia noticed the strange cars parked next to the barn. There was a jeep, a green truck, and another vehicle they had never seen before. They were confused. By the time they figured out what was going on, they had been spotted.

“Are you Linda Looney?” one of the CAMP officers asked Sage after she rolled down her window.

“No,” Sage replied, truthfully.

Later, they would learn that CAMP had pulled the name off a school paper in Aia's bedroom.

“Then you can turn around and leave if you want.”

But Sage didn't leave. Baby John, in the backseat, was tired and in need of changing.

“I need to go up to my house and get some diapers for my baby,” she said.

Sage also demanded to see a search warrant. There was an affidavit for a search warrant. Sage and Aia sat in the living room while officials from CAMP searched the house and grounds.

When Emma got home after school, she discovered that Morning Glory Manor had been turned upside down. It was like a scene from a movie where someone discovers their house has been ransacked. All the closets were open, and every box and bag that had been inside them was piled on the floor. Sage's bedroom was the worst of all. All her drawers were open, and most of their contents had been dumped on her bed. The crib where baby John slept was upturned. In Aia's room, in the barn, her bed had been thrown against the wall, and shards of a smashed mirror littered the ground. In Emma and Lisa's bedroom, the cabinets were open, and clothing was strewn across the floor. Most embarrassing for Emma was that someone had gone through her underwear drawer, found her memory box, and dug through its contents. She had been collecting keepsakes in the old shoebox—letters from boys she liked, ticket stubs from movies, and all the other little things that document a budding life.

When the authorities left, they handed over a list of everything they were taking with them. It included Aia's passport, a small amount of cash from Omar's room, and photos from the family albums that included images of the three girls. In one, they smiled at the camera from the kitchen table, with marijuana branches hanging from the rafters behind them. In another, they sat at the same table industriously clipping pot. Most devastating of all, authorities seized the cash they'd found under Sage's bed, which had been set aside to cover the mortgage over the coming year. Sage would eventually be charged with marijuana cultivation, possession, intent to sell, and child endangerment.

For ten-year-old Emma, the bust was a life-changing event. It was traumatic. Things got hard fast. The money taken from under Sage's bed had been her mother's entire savings. The plants that would have sustained the family through another year were also gone. Sage signed up for food stamps. There were trips to the food bank, and lots of cheap polenta dinners. During the long months that followed, there were many long drives north to Eureka for court appearances. Emma would push John in his stroller down the long courthouse hallways while her mother met with lawyers and a judge. Emma felt ashamed about what had happened, and didn't feel like she could talk about it with her friends at school. The strangling code of secrecy extended even to busts.

Sage tried to fight the charges—she didn't want a felony on her record—but in the end, she took a plea bargain and was sentenced to three years' probation and community service, which she spent working at the Garberville thrift store. With no money to make her land payments, she eventually had to sell Morning Glory Manor. Around the same time, she also discovered, at the age of forty-two, that she was pregnant with her sixth child. So she gathered up her children and moved in with her partner, Jim. It was close quarters. Emma, Lisa, and Aia slept in a queen-size bed, and Omar on a futon in the downstairs living room. Jim's son Mike had already left home around this time. He had dropped out of high school at age sixteen and moved in with an overweight Filipino named Robert Juan, whom everyone called Buddha. Years later, Buddha would go down in one of the biggest busts in Southern Humboldt history, but at the time, he was a prosperous pot grower, and Mike lived in a shed on his property. Emma would see Mike when she went up to trim pot for Buddha. Like many girls in her community, Emma had begun trimming pot for pocket money at an early age, about thirteen.

Once, while Emma was living with her mom and Jim, Mike's older brother, Shadrach, came to visit. Mike's mother had left when he was just a toddler; Shadrach was her son from another relationship. The day he called round to the house looking for Mike, Emma couldn't help but notice the massive tattoos that covered Shadrach's arms and the slash mark–shaped scars across his chest.

He told her the scars were from where he had been stabbed.

Shadrach's face looked weathered and old, and he seemed spun out on drugs, and dangerous. As he sat on the couch in the living room next to her little brother, John, all Emma's instincts screamed at her to get the baby away from him.

On that same visit, Shadrach sealed his fate in the community. It was close to harvest, and Emma had heard that he had ripped some people off. Some local teenagers had found Shadrach in an abandoned cabin in the hills, high on heroin and surrounded by trash bags full of stolen weed. He was last seen leaving town on a Greyhound bus.

Later, Shadrach became a legend when a local group known as the Camo Cowboys released an album about marijuana culture, including the songs “Family Felony,” about the multigenerational nature of the business, and “Flower Police,” about how the cops who bust growers kept the prices high. Included on the album was a melancholy tune called “The Ballad of Shadrack.”

At the end of the song, Shadrach overdoses in Santa Cruz. In reality, Shadrach ended up in prison. When the song came out, Emma caught Mike listening to it over and over again. She didn't understand how he could handle it; the song was so damned sad. In a way, Mike's mother had cast him aside like a broken toy, too. Emma met her once when she came back to visit. She showed up at Jim's house in a stolen U-Haul and announced that there was a man in the back of the truck who was dying of AIDS. She had a young boy with her, another son. All of them looked like they were dying to Emma. It must have been the only time in Mike's memory that he saw his mother. There was screaming and yelling. Emma retreated upstairs. She could hear Jim chasing Mike's mother off and telling her never to come back.

Around this same time, Emma quit smoking pot. She was thirteen years old. She was at her friend Anika's house, and the two girls had been lying on bunk beds getting high. Anika's mother came in and noticed the smell. She was not one of the more permissive parents.

“What are you doing, little girls?” she asked. “That's not cool, you can't be smoking pot.”

Something about her words stuck, and Emma and Anika decided then and there that pot smoking wasn't so cool, and that they weren't going to smoke anymore. To solidify their intention, the girls decided to destroy their stash. They did so in a very Humboldt way. Whereas the rest of America might have flushed the pot down the toilet, in a region short on indoor plumbing, the girls did the next best thing. They knelt on the banks of a nearby creek and dumped the contents of their plastic baggie into the rushing water and quietly watched the dried green flowers float away.

The decision to stop smoking pot would help Emma focus more on her studies. It would also allow her to see clearly that something was wrong in Humboldt when her friends started dying.

The feeling of being in danger, of being unsafe, didn't begin until Emma Worldpeace started high school. Emma was a bookworm growing up and was often immersed in a story. She especially loved to read memoirs and novels about other people's childhoods. Dorothy Allison's
Bastard Out of Carolina
left quite an impression on her. The story of incest and abuse made Emma feel all the more that there was something idyllic about her community. Sure, things were a little weird because people grew pot and you weren't supposed to talk about it, but Southern Humboldt felt like a safe place. Emma could run around naked, and her parents, whatever their shortcomings, had always been so idealistic and hippie, and there were always plenty of hugs and a lot of love to go around.