Emma 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 George, 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.
Lisa started to panic.
“It’s going to get dark, we are going to get eaten by coyotes, and we are going to die!” she wailed.
Mike tried to reassure her that everything was going to be okay and that they just needed to make a plan.
In the meantime, Rudy, the sheepdog, had wandered off.
“Ruuuuudy,” they called her name, but their voices seemed quickly lost in the mist that swirled around them.
When Rudy finally appeared, she was panting and exhausted. Everyone was exhausted. They had been out for hours. They hadn’t brought snacks, water, or a flashlight, and the sun was setting. In hindsight, it was a terribly planned expedition.
Then Mike had the idea to send Rudy home. Maybe the dog had an internal homing device.
“Go get it, go home, Rudy!” they ordered.
At first, the dog ignored them while she caught her breath, but then she lifted herself onto her stubby little legs and headed over the hill through the fog. Sure enough, Rudy led them home. Like a good, confident older brother, Mike had known what to do, and Emma would look to him for answers.
In Ettersburg, Sage continued to support her family by growing marijuana. The plants were grown in a greenhouse near the barn where Aia and Omar lived. By then, everyone referred to them as the tomato plants, as in “We have to move the tomato plants” or “It’s time to water the tomato plants.” Emma knew by then not to talk about them to other people. They had become a secret.
Sometimes, in the evenings, Sage would pile her children in her red Nissan Pathfinder and drive down the Briceland–Shelter Cove Road toward town. She often took Emma and her newborn son, John. In January of 1995, Sage had given birth to her fifth child in conditions very similar to Emma’s arrival: at home, during a storm, with no midwife.
On those evening drives, the destination was almost always the same. Sage would park at the bottom of a dirt road near a grove of redwood trees, and with her children in the backseat, she would deal pot.
Most of the time, this meant a lot of waiting. Emma would sit in the back next to her baby brother and read a book. Sometimes she’d listen to music with her mom. She never felt scared or stressed. Eventually the buyer would show up, usually nice, clean-cut older men from the city. They’d sit in the front seat with Sage and exchange a few words. Sage would pull out a plastic bag and show them what she had for sale. They’d smell it, and maybe they’d roll a joint and smoke a little to test the wares. Then they’d discuss the price with Sage.
Often, the buyer would look in the backseat and say a friendly hello to Emma.
“How are you?” they’d ask, and maybe they’d coo at baby John.
Then, in the shadow of the giant trees, Sage and her customers would settle on a price, and marijuana and money would change hands.
Later, people would begin to wonder about the price their children paid for growing up under a cloak of secrecy, and how damaging it was not being able to say what their parents did for a living, carrying the weight of a secret that could send family members to jail. Some would ask themselves how could they expect their children to obey the laws of society if they didn’t obey them themselves.
Just as every generation rebels against the one that came before, the children of hippies with loose boundaries and a cash economy would find their own unexpected way to reject the values of their parents.
But on those dark nights, with a fresh wad of cash for groceries and mortgage payments, such thoughts were far from Sage’s mind. With a backseat full of sleepy children, she would start up the Pathfinder and head for home.
It was all too easy to forget when all your friends and neighbors did it, too, that this seemingly peaceful farming lifestyle was illegal, and that when one got caught and the law came down, it would be with crushing force.