Humboldt (7 page)

In the beginning of her freshman year, in 2001, Emma started going to parties up dirt roads in the middle of nowhere. People would get wasted—snort coke, do
ecstas
y—​and no one would have a designated driver. Fights would break out, things felt messy and out of control, and Emma started thinking that maybe something was wrong. People didn't seem to be taking care of themselves. It was like they lived in a world without boundaries, and since teenagers needed something to push against, it didn't become obvious that things were going too far until people starting falling over the edge.

Soon, what Emma would come to call the “sad-ass stories” began.

Throughout her childhood, Emma's brother Omar's best friend was a boy named Sean Akselsen. Sean had dark brown hair and blue-green eyes. He grew into a handsome young man whom many girls developed crushes on, but in Emma's mind, he remained the twelve-year-old boy who liked to skate and draw, and who practiced backflips in the backyard. Sean Akselsen spent a lot of time over the years hanging out at Morning Glory Manor, and Emma loved him. His chuckle was infectious. They rode the school bus together in elementary school, and would listen to Tom Petty and sing the lyrics to “You Don't Know How It Feels,” singing especially loud to the line that had particular resonance in their community: “But let me get to the point, let's roll another joint.”

In the summer months, Emma would often join Omar, Sean, and two brothers everyone called the Twin Rats, and they'd trudge off down a dirt road to the Whitethorn Junction swimming hole—the junction hole, as they called it. It was a beautiful spot, surrounded by shade trees. A sun-bleached rope hung from one of the trees, and they could swing out on it and plunge into the deep, cool water below.

One day in his high school art class, Sean Akselsen designed a T-shirt that read, “Whitethorn Riders. Got Gas?” above the image of a car. The shirt was a hit, and everyone wanted one. Sean, Omar, and their friends started calling themselves the Whitethorn Riders. In her freshman year, Emma briefly dated a Whitethorn Rider named Kaleb Garza. Kaleb was a senior who drove a souped-up Toyota Celica. He took Emma to the prom in a black tuxedo with a burgundy bow tie. She wore a pale green dress.

The first sad-ass story occurred at the beginning of Emma's junior year of high school. On August 25, 2003, Sean Akselsen, the boy Emma used to sing along with to Tom Petty, who used to do backflips in her yard, was murdered in a pot deal. Akselsen wasn't the first youth from the community to be killed for his involvement in the industry. Ten years earlier, in August 1993, a twenty-year-old named John Wyatt Jameton was shot in the head and left to die in the middle of a gravel road during a deal gone wrong. The basic details of Sean Akselsen's murder were eerily similar.

Emma heard that Sean Akselsen had agreed to sell a pound of pot to a couple of guys he had met at a gas station in town. In doing so, he broke one of the cardinal rules of the industry: never do business with strangers. According to the Wanted poster that was put up around town after the murder, the men were African Americans from the Bay Area. They had followed Akselsen out on the Shelter Cove–Briceland Road in a forest green Camaro. Akselsen brought them to the privacy of the Whitethorn Junction swimming hole. It was the same place he had cooled off with Emma and his friends on so many hot summer afternoons.

As fate would have it in such a small community, a friend stumbled upon Sean Akselsen's body on her way to go swimming. He was curled up on his side on the path. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and his boxers poked out over the top of his jeans. There was a pool of blood around his head from where he had been shot.

Sean Akselsen was five months shy of his twentieth birthday.

News of his death rocked the community, but he wasn't the only person killed in marijuana business–related violence that summer. On August 11, just two weeks before Akselsen's murder, two men were reported missing. One was thirty-six-year-old Chris Giauque, a well-known pot grower and marijuana activist who used to drive around the Humboldt Hills with a “Weed Not Greed” bumper sticker on the back of his truck. Giauque was once arrested after trying to conduct a marijuana giveaway on the steps of the Humboldt County Courthouse in Eureka. On August 13, Chris Giauque's blue Toyota pickup was found abandoned along the Avenue of the Giants after he had gone on what was rumored to be a $100,000 pot deal. He is presumed dead, though his body has never been found.

Rex Shinn was also reported missing that August day. Shinn had reportedly gone to get paid for work he had done on a pot farm in the hills. Years later, people involved in Shinn's killing would lead authorities to his remains. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the neck. Marijuana-related crime was one of the top stories in Humboldt's
North Coast Journal
that year, and then-sheriff Gary Philp pointed out, “It seems to be in most cases that the violence involves deals or transactions with people from out of the area, and it appears that the clientele are people that they ought not to be dealing with.”

After Sean Akselsen's murder, a memorial sprang up next to the roadside at Whitethorn Junction, not far from where he was killed. Candles, flowers, a Buddha, photographs, and other mementos of a well-loved person taken too soon were left there. Emma drove out to the memorial with her older brother and sister not long after they heard the news. She brought pictures of Sean. It was intense and heartbreaking to see everyone grieving. Emma looked around and saw people drinking bottles of Crown Royal and driving away.

The memorial for Sean Akselsen was held at Beginnings in Briceland, which was built by the Back-to-the-Land community in the late 1970s and was a cornerstone of the counterculture. The main building at Beginnings was an eight-sided structure known as the Octagon. It was the site of joyous celebrations in the community, like birthday parties, weddings, and fund-raisers, as well as sorrowful ones, like funerals. On the day of Sean Akselsen's memorial, around four hundred people gathered in the field in front of the Octagon and joined hands in an enormous circle of grief.

A microphone was passed around, and people shared memories. Emma wanted Omar to speak, but she could see that he wasn't ready yet. She also wanted to hold it together and not cry publicly. She didn't feel ready to express her grief. Then a teacher from the elementary school that Emma and Omar and Sean had all attended spoke.

When she took the microphone, she shared a memory of walking into class to teach one fall morning and first laying eyes on two beautiful little boys named Sean and Omar. The rest of the story was lost in Emma's mind, because all it took was that image of the two boys with their whole lives and futures ahead of them for the floodgates to open and the tears to come pouring out. All those memories of Sean came rushing back to Emma.

He had been like a family member to her, and now he was gone.

Not long after Sean's death, another friend of Omar's, a boy named Neil, was electrocuted while trying to lift a downed wire off the road. Then Emma's ex-boyfriend Kaleb Garza was killed. Garza had been driving his motorcycle up a friend's driveway. His brother Nate happened to be coming down that same road in a truck. One of the boys didn't have headlights and was using a giant flashlight to light his way. The truck and the motorcycle collided, and as is often the case, the motorcycle lost. The photo of Kaleb that ran in the paper with the news of his death was taken at his senior prom. He looked happy and dapper in his suit with a burgundy cummerbund; cropped out of the photos was a freshman with auburn ringlets and a pale green dress.

The sad-ass stories kept coming. Emma's good friend's brother Kioma Wise was killed in a four-wheeler accident, and mystery swirled around his death. The pain from the loss and the unanswered questions around the death caused Emma's friend to move away. Then a girl at school hanged herself in her bedroom. Craig Eichen died in a car accident. It began to feel to Emma that if you were a young person and went out to party and drove on dirt roads, there was a good chance you were going to get killed. Emma figured it was what every person who lived in a rural community experienced, that growing up anywhere was like growing up in Southern Humboldt. As a child, she just assumed that her surroundings were normal. A few years later, she would prove herself wrong.

E
arly one Sunday morning, Bob Hamilton sat at the secretary's desk in the sheriff's substation in Garberville and surfed the Net. Outside, the rain fell heavily and steadily, as it had for days, giving new meaning to the term
rain forest
. Bob hated the substation, a squat cinderblock building located next to the fire department on Locust Street. He found it shabby and embarrassing. He also suspected that it contained asbestos and lead paint, which is one of the many reasons he preferred to be out on patrol. Bob's office was his car, but sometimes he needed to swing by the substation to fill out paperwork or, in this case, check the news online.

After a quick glance at the headlines, he headed for a white sedan parked out front. He began his rounds while most of the town was still asleep. Normally, he rolled in an Expedition, but it was being upgraded to a new model—much to his chagrin, during the rainy season, when the SUV's four-wheel drive was particularly useful on the dirt roads that turned to mud. After he swung a left onto Main Street, Bob pulled over to send a quick text to his wife, who was visiting their daughter, who was in her junior year at the University of California at Davis.

“Have a good day, dear,” he wrote.

Main Street in Garberville, otherwise known as Redwood Drive, is about four blocks long. Considering its reputation as the epicenter of America's marijuana industry, it is an underwhelming place. It has no stoplight, and only one stop sign. The street is lined with three gas stations, a handful of motels, a movie theater, a grocery store called Ray's Food Place, and an array of small businesses, none of which is a national chain—except for the Radio Shack on Maple Lane, which may well be the only electronics store in America with a fabric store attached. Among Garberville's other institutions are a barbershop that sells guns, a coffee shop called Flavors, and the Eel River Café, whose neon sign, featuring a man in chef's whites flipping a pancake, is as much a symbol of the town as the pot leaf sign at the Hemp Connection across the street.

The way Bob saw it, everything in town revolved around the dope industry. Businesses catered either to the sale and production of marijuana directly—like Dazey's Supply, a commercial grow store that sold millions of dollars' worth of soil every year—or to the women who dated wealthy growers, which was the reason there was a day spa on Main Street. Among its services, Humboldt Hunnies offered Brazilian waxes and organic skin care products to a clientele that included what Bob liked to call “potstitutes,” attractive young women whose social uniform consisted of skinny jeans, long hair, and fake breasts. Bob hadn't coined the term
potstitute
—it was local slang—but using it made him cackle with glee.

At the top of the street near the Umpqua Bank, Bob waved to an older man in an orange sweatshirt.

“Hi!” Bob yelled out his window.

Robert Firestone was in his eighties and had dementia. He was known to wander. Bob tried to keep tabs on him so that when Firestone's family called, he could tell them where he'd last seen the old man. The following month, Robert Firestone would wander off for good, and his face would become a familiar one as he peered out from the Missing Person posters plastered all over town. A two-day search of the area was conducted by boat and helicopter, but Robert Firestone was never seen again. On this day, however, he raised his arm and waved.

Next, Bob began to drive around the town's motels, or “drug fronts,” as he called them. There were four he normally patrolled, including his favorite, Johnston's Quality Motel, which seemed most popular with the meth freaks.

Johnston's Quality Motel was located behind the Getti Up drive-through coffee shack, where girls in low-cut tops served drinks to go. The motel was painted a faded cotton candy pink, and even in the light of day it exuded an ominous vibe, like some kind of backwoods Bates Motel. As Bob pulled past the entrance at a crawl, he greeted the motel manager, a small South Asian man who was standing outside.

“Namaste!” Bob chirped.

His cruiser crawled along the front of the train-car-shaped building, past doors to rooms where he had made too many arrests to count—for dope, heroin, and meth. Bob shook his head and repeated the name of the hotel over and over again, placing special emphasis on the ill-fitting adjective.

“Johnston's Quality Motel. Johnston's Q-u-a-l-i-t-y Motel.”

From the motel parking lot, Bob spied a woman he knew. She was in front of the Shell gas station across the street, scratching a lottery ticket next to the entrance to the station's mini-mart. Like a child who didn't want to be seen, she turned when Bob pulled up alongside her, facing the wall as if she were hiding.

“Where's your paint gun, Barbara?” Bob asked.

“You took it away from me,” she snapped. “Leave me alone.”

Barbara was missing most of her teeth, and her face was covered in the kind of scabs that indicate heavy methamphetamine use. A couple of miles away, a minivan was covered with splotches of paint. It belonged to Barbara's daughter. Bob had taken away Barbara's paint gun after she shot up her daughter's van.

“What a freak,” Bob said as he pulled away and headed past the limestone bluffs and the Eel River and toward Redway.

The area Bob covered was around 1,200 square miles and, as he saw, it, severely underserved. Sometimes he'd be the only person on call in all of Southern Humboldt. He had no idea how many people lived there; no one seemed to. There were only 135,000 people in the entire county, and most of them lived up north, around the cities of Eureka and Arcata. Some estimated that the population of Southern Humboldt was around 15,000 to 20,000, but there was no good official number, given that many people who lived there weren't the type who would respond to a census.

Bob kept track by the communities he patrolled. He carried a slip of weathered yellow paper tucked in his car visor on which he'd composed a list of the various towns and hamlets; some were official settlements, some were not. There were twenty-nine in all: Pepperwood, Redcrest, Holmes Flat, Weott, Myers Flat, Miranda, Phillipsville, Garberville, Redway, Briceland, Whitethorn, Ettersburg, Honeydew, Petrolia, Alderpoint, Harris, New Harris, Shelter Cove, Benbow, Blocksburg, French Camp, Capetown, Bear River, McCann, Eel Rock, Fort Seward, Shively, Ocean House, and Island Mountain, a remote place known to growers as the geographic center of the Emerald Triangle.

On Sunset Avenue in Redway, Bob pulled his car over in front of a house surrounded by a high fence. Many of the houses in Redway had exceedingly tall, fortress-like fences. Bob had been to this house before, and knew that, come fall, pot plants ten feet tall would poke above the top of the fence. The people who lived in the house sold their pot to a collective, which would distribute or sell it to its members on a nonprofit basis, according to state law. Last year, Bob knocked on the door and informed the people living there that they needed to affix to their gate their 215, the doctor's recommendation that gave them the legal right to grow pot. He needed to be able to read it with his binoculars.

In the busy season, from late summer and into the fall, Bob did a lot of inspections to make sure people had their 215s and that the amount they were growing was in accordance with the law. His goal was to try to keep people in compliance and from getting too greedy.

Bob swung his car around in front of Dazey's Motorsports, a shop that sells four-wheelers and Rhinos, like Crockett used, which are particularly handy for reaching remote pot patches in the hills. He thought again about how the war on marijuana was over. This whole 215 thing was a joke. It was like a license to be a criminal. The government needed to get some
cojones
and either make pot legal, or make it entirely illegal. He learned a long time ago that nothing was going to stop it. It was better to just get real about it. If Bob knew anything, it was how to be real.

Bob Hamilton was born in Los Angeles County in 1961. When he was around seven, his parents moved the family to Ferndale, a central Humboldt town of picturesque Victorians and conservative leanings. It was the kind of place in the early 1970s where a “We Drink Hippie Blood” sign hung in the town's Hotel Ivanhoe bar. Bob was the eldest of four. His father was a navy man who ran his family with a firm hand. In 1972, when Bob was ten, his father came home drunk, pointed a loaded .22 rifle at Bob's mother, and pulled the trigger. Bob's father then walked to the local bar and ordered himself a drink before he told the bartender to call the sheriff because he had just killed his wife.

Ten-year-old Bob came out of his bedroom that night and discovered his mother covered in blood. Miraculously, she survived the shooting, though she was left blind in one eye and lost her sense of smell. Bob never saw his father again, but heard that the navy sent him to Vietnam, and that he survived the war and later settled in Texas. His mother, meanwhile, moved the children north to Eureka.

Bob attended junior high in Eureka and worked odd jobs after school to help support his family. In his spare time he loved to wander in Sequoia Park, a patch of ancient forest located in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The grove was a testament to what Eureka looked like before redwoods were chopped down as the city expanded. Bob could spend all day there; it was his own Lost World.

Inside the park it was quiet and cool, and there were dirt paths to race down that were lined with giant sword ferns. Slimy yellow banana slugs inched along in the shade. Bob liked to climb around on the huge stumps of fallen trees. He loved their massiveness, and their beauty and tranquility. To walk among them felt like swimming among blue whales. Enveloped by the trees and the earthy smell of redwood needles and forest floor, Bob felt safe and at peace. It was in Sequoia Park where his lifelong love of redwoods was born.

Around this same time, Bob's lifelong “sensitivity” to marijuana began. He was fourteen the first and only time he smoked pot. He was hanging out after school with his best friend and his best friend's parents. The family was all smoking weed out of a hookah pipe in the living room. Bob's friend suggested Bob give it a try. He shook his head. Then the mother started in; she said if Bob tried it just once, they'd leave him alone. So he pressed his lips against the mouthpiece and drew in a lungful of smoke. Then he had a most unusual, almost allergic reaction: he began to projectile-vomit all over the living room. After that, everyone in school knew not to give Bob any pot.

Bob's mother died in a horrific fire later that same year, and he was separated from his siblings and sent to live with relatives in Southern California. Bob credits the counseling he received after his mother's death with saving him. He was lost and broken, but he eventually learned that his past did not have to define him, and he wasn't destined for perpetual tragedy. His fundamentally upbeat nature no doubt helped as well. Bob joined the air force after graduation, married his high school sweetheart, and they had a daughter. He then served thirteen years as a cop in the Central Valley city of Fresno. Every year, he would find a way back to his beloved Humboldt to visit. The beauty of the place would call him home. After retiring from the Fresno Police Department in 2000, Bob made good on his dream and brought his family back to Humboldt for good. Or so he thought.

Now he couldn't wait to leave. It was spoiled for him. Behind every beautiful vista, Bob now saw dope, and meth, and what he called the “junkyard lifestyle” of those living on the edge. When he retired, he planned on packing up and leaving Humboldt County the very next day.

Continuing on his way to Shelter Cove, just before the Honeydew-Ettersburg Junction, Bob swung his cruiser to the shoulder and pulled around so he was facing the road. He shut off his engine and sat back in his seat. It was time to play the little game he called Scare the Shit out of the Dope Growers.

The idea was that if the drivers and passengers in the passing cars looked over at Bob, they were up to something and would most likely pass along word to their friends that a deputy was parked near the junction and headed to Shelter Cove. If no one bothered to glance over at Bob as they drove by, he figured they were law-abiding citizens.

A large blue truck rumbled past. The young male driver turned and checked out the sheriff's vehicle.

There it was, Bob figured. The “phone tree” will have started, which was the point of the game, really, to get the dope growers buzzing and worried even though he wasn't actually on the hunt.

The first time Bob drove this road in an official vehicle, four years earlier, a few cars were waiting for him when he reached Shelter Cove. The drivers waved him down. They had heard Bob was on his way and wanted to report some recent robberies, including a stolen lawn mower and four-wheeler. Bob asked how they knew he was coming. One of the guys told him that a buddy in San Francisco had called him.

“How did your buddy in San Francisco know I was coming?” Bob asked.

Somebody had called
him
, was the reply.

The same thing would happen when Bob drove up to any of the far-flung communities he patrolled. It was outlaw mentality to spread the word when law enforcement was in the area. “Visitors are on the hill” was one common telephone code to announce their presence. The system worked so well that an entire hillside could be alerted within fifteen minutes of the first sighting of a federal convoy or a sheriff's SUV. Back at the station, Kenny Swithenbank called it the “coconut telegraph,” after the Jimmy Buffett song. Whenever they were headed out into the hills to a place like Alderpoint, looking to arrest someone on a warrant, the deputies would take the back way, through Fort Seward or Eel Rock, to avoid arriving in a ghost town.

A white Toyota roared past. Then came a blue Ford F-150 with two pit bulls in the back. Some of the drivers turned their heads to look at Bob; others just whizzed by.