The sixteen men filed past in a straight line. Their size and coloring varied, but the orange jumpsuits of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rendered them all identical: low-level inmates from the Eel River Conservation Camp. Since 1967, the Corrections Department and the Department of Forestry had operated the “con camp” near the Redway garbage dump. It was a place where prisoners could serve out their sentences picking up trash along the highway, thinning out the forest, or cutting lines in the ground to contain wildfires during fire season.
On this fall day in 2010, one of the prisoners lugged a chain saw; another balanced a weed whacker on his shoulder. There was brush to destroy on a bluff that overlooked Garberville, Highway 101, and the Eel River Valley. In places, the coyote brush and Scotch broom had grown so high it reached the men’s chests. But the problem wasn’t really the brush; it was the people who had been living in it.
Deputy Bob Hamilton of the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department stood on the bluff next to Sergeant Kenny Swithenbank, and watched the men file past. Some made eye contact, but most just stared straight ahead.
“Thanks, guys!” Bob called out cheerfully.
The acre of overgrown brush that surrounded the men made for a secluded spot for the homeless to camp over the summer. It was clear now of people and debris, save for a pair of black boots, a butter knife jammed into an oak tree, and an oil drum full of concrete. The idea was that cutting back the brush now would make it easier to avoid a repeat next summer.
Bob had been with the department for four years, Kenny for more than twenty, and neither had ever seen it this bad. No one could pinpoint when exactly the first homeless drifters, vagabonds, or transients, as the deputies called them, started drifting into town. Some old-timers attributed their arrival to a story that ran in the marijuana magazine High Times back in the 1980s that mentioned the need for seasonal labor in the area. One thing was for sure, this year the transients had flocked to Garberville and Redway in record numbers.
It was like the end of the gold rush.
With the legalization vote looming, maybe transients figured it was their last chance to experience the marijuana heartland before everything changed, like visiting Cuba before the death of Fidel. Whatever the reason for the influx, the transients were many, and they shared a worn, dusty look as they panhandled up and down Main Street, walked their dogs on rope leashes, and swilled booze from paper bags at the Veterans Park in Garberville, which one local had taken to calling “Crusty Park” in their honor.
The majority of the calls the Sheriff’s Department received over the summer were complaints about these people. Back at the station, they kept a file marked “Suspects Warned.” It contained photos of ripped-up sleeping bags, trash, human excrement, and mug shots of grizzled, broken-looking souls, including one man who looked eerily like Charles Manson. Whenever Bob asked a transient why he or she had come to Garberville, the answer was almost always the same: to get a job in the marijuana industry. The irony wasn’t lost on Bob. He knew most growers didn’t hire outsiders, especially marginal ones off the street.
“There’s nothing here for them,” he would say with a shake of his head as he passed a man with a tattered knapsack on Main Street. “They come here looking for trimming jobs that no one is ever going to give them.”
As he approached fifty, Bob’s light brown hair was starting to thin on top, but his vision was still hawklike, and he could spot a marijuana garden a mile away or a child without a seat belt in a passing car. Tall and broad, Bob carried himself in the bumbling manner of someone who reached his height at an early age, and he had a goofy personality to match. He was the kind of guy who talked to cats, mooed at cows, and might crack a joke while he was arresting you. At the taco shop attached to the Chevron station in Garberville, one of two places in town where Bob felt reasonably secure that no one would spit in his food, the Mexican workers referred to him as el chistoso, “the joker.” His favorite place in the world was Disneyland, but he was also a nature lover. He loved the redwoods so much that he swore he’d chain himself to one to keep it from getting chopped down, just as long as he wasn’t working that day. A self-professed people person, Bob enjoyed human interaction, even if, as he put it, most of those he interacted with were criminals. “You have to love what you do because you’re not doing it for the money,” he’d say.
What Bob loved most was helping people.
After four years patrolling Southern Humboldt, it would seem that nothing could surprise Bob anymore, but Humboldt never ceased to deliver. If it wasn’t the transients, who were lured there by the pot thing, it was the pot thing itself. Bob viewed Humboldt as one big marijuana haven. Sometimes, when he was driving along in his white department-issued Ford Expedition and the marijuana industry ads came on the radio, they were just so blatant he’d have to reach over and just shut it off, like the one for “Sweet Sticky Fingers,” which was supposed to help remove gummy marijuana resin from one’s hands.
But then something crazy would happen that would shock Bob out of the silence, those only-in-Humboldt things—like the morning he came across two garbage bags stuffed full of weed in the middle of the highway (they had blown off the back of a truck after a government raid). One time, he saw a man he knew walking toward the bank with massive amounts of cash bulging out of the top of his bag. Another day they got a call at the station from a local motel about a maid who couldn’t clean the bathroom in a certain room because it was so full of marijuana. Sure enough, forty pounds of processed pot was found stacked in the shower, on the floor, and on the toilet. Marijuana was literally everywhere in Humboldt County, and Bob was just awaiting the day when he would see starter pot plants for sale next to the trays of baby tomatoes and sunny marigolds the local grocery stores set outside every spring.
Of course Bob knew that marijuana was big business in Humboldt County. He’d spent part of his childhood there, but he’d moved away for many years and didn’t really understand what it all meant until he started patrolling the Garberville area in 2006 and noticed all the black garbage bags in the backs of trucks that weren’t headed to the dump. It slowly dawned on him that trash bags were what growers used to transport unprocessed marijuana. Then Bob started pulling over people in $40,000 and $50,000 trucks with no visible means of support. Suddenly, the giant pot leaf that towered above the Hemp Connection store on Main Street began to take on a new meaning.
It took Bob a mere month in Southern Humboldt to conclude that America had totally lost the War on Drugs. Everywhere he turned, he’d see that green plant towering above the high fences in people’s yards. Every time he confiscated pot from someone he pulled over, he realized it wasn’t even a molecule in a drop of water compared to what was out there. What he was doing made no difference at all.
It wasn’t easy being a deputy sheriff in a town of outlaws.
Just that month, Bob had busted a guy for transporting eighty pounds of pot. Depending on how the pot was grown and which state it was destined for, those eighty pounds were likely worth somewhere between $120,000 and $240,000. The man Bob arrested posted bail and got his truck back that same afternoon. It was what Bob called a “doper diesel” truck, a hulking Ford F-250 or a Dodge Ram, owned by a guy who grows weed indoors with diesel-powered generators. Bob knew the man got out of jail that same day, because he drove by Bob and waved.
“The laws need to be reworked,” Bob would say. “We just need to acknowledge that we lost the war on marijuana.”
Bob looked forward to the day when he could go into a liquor store and see a pack of Winston Purple Kush next to packs of Salem Sour Diesel and Marlboro Red Hairs. He knew this was a pot grower’s greatest fear, the corporatization of the industry, but he’d tell them it was going to be like the microbrewery model versus Anheuser-Busch. Sure, big companies were going to get in on the racket, but they were going to sell leaves, shake, not the primo, high-quality stuff local farmers had spent decades perfecting. In Bob’s vision, there would be rolling tobacco–like pouches of Humboldt Gold, full of fat, fragrant buds.
Maybe this would mean that all the growers weren’t going to be able to earn a living at it anymore, and people were going to have to get creative and figure out something else to do. He didn’t buy the idea that pot was all there was to do in Humboldt. “Think outside the box,” Bob would tell people. But they didn’t seem to like to hear this much, and sometimes, when Bob was tired of the whole thing, his legalization vision would crumble, and he would just shake his head, sigh, and say, “I am so sick of this pot shit.”
Bob had worked his whole life and paid his way and his dues, so it was hard to see locals and people from other states rent property and not report their income. Bob was tired of doing the right thing and watching people get off scot-free. He also had so many other things to deal with, all those other things society needed law enforcement to handle—like domestic violence, child abuse, unlawful dumping, burglaries, and reckless driving. The weird thing was, when the home invasion robberies happened, Bob often ended up protecting the growers from the outside man.
Recently, Bob had shared his frustrations with a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. The story, “In Humboldt County, Deputies’ Jobs Can Get a Little Hazy,” earned Bob a lot of grief in the coastal town of Shelter Cove, where he lived part time. He had already recently both amused and annoyed some people by playing a joke and showing up to a community fund-raiser with confiscated pot plants tied to the top and bumper of his sheriff’s SUV like some kind of hunting trophy. After the article appeared, people in the Cove had T-shirts printed that read “Don’t Be the Local Bob,” with multiple sets of nosy eyes peering out on the front. On the back they said “& Burst Our Bubble.” One of Bob’s points in the article was that not all dope growers with medical cards were growing only for their pain management, and that most, if not all, were growing for the black market.
Back on the bluff, as the angry sound of a chain saw roared to life, one of the men in charge of the inmate crew checked with Sergeant Kenny Swithenbank to see if they should cut down the oak trees that were scattered among the brush.
“Naw, leave ’em,” Kenny instructed.
With the brush clearing under way, the sheriff’s deputies set out to check on another homeless encampment down by the river. Bob followed Kenny in a two-car convoy down a steep road toward the river bar, a wide strip of rocks that covered the banks of the South Fork of the Eel River. As they passed under Bear Canyon Bridge, the overpass that separates Garberville from Redway, a man standing by the river next to a white sedan exhaled a giant cloud of smoke into the air.
Before the smoke had a chance to dissipate, both deputies hit their lights and bounded out of their SUVs. While Bob frisked the smoker, and the two men who had been sitting in the car next to him, Kenny ran their names through dispatch to see if there were any warrants out for their arrest.
“And the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth” was spray-painted on a concrete block a few feet away from where Bob patted down the men. Next to that, someone had written, somewhat less profoundly, in pink paint, “Go Hippies.”
The smoker, it turned out, had not been hitting a crack pipe, as the deputies had suspected. He had taken a hit of pot from a pipe he had stuffed into a sock and hidden among the rocks. Since there were no outstanding warrants, Kenny and Bob left the smokers by their car and continued back down the river bar, the rocks crunching noisily under their tires.
About half a mile downriver, they pulled to a stop. Bob led the way through the bushes to a trail that was lined neatly with river stones. It wound past a bed of purple pansies, a few tomato plants, and a hand-painted “Welcome” sign, to a clearing where large tarps were strung up over pop-up tents. Two men were sitting in chairs there sipping coffee. The younger of the two had long red hair. His companion had a white beard and wore a red knit cap.
“Good morning,” Kenny Swithenbank said. “Do you know whose property you’re on?
“No,” the older man said, “but we’re trying to be respectful.”
A large Alaskan husky bounded up to Bob, and he reached down and gave it a pat. It smelled of clean, warm fur. Names were established. Rob was the older gentleman in the cap. Zach was twenty-two and from Colorado.
There was the sound of a zipper opening, and a young woman emerged from one of the tents, leaving a dozen puppies yipping in her wake. Her name was Jessica. She had strawberry blond hair and looked like she could be Zach’s sister. She was wearing sweatpants and a sheer tank top that clung tightly to her eight-months-pregnant belly. She began to roll a cigarette.
“Why’d you come out here from Colorado?” Kenny asked Zach. “Marijuana maybe?”
“Marijuana is my medicine,” Zach replied.
“Really?” Bob asked. “Why are you sick?”
Zach ignored him.
“Why did you come here?” Kenny pressed in a calm voice.
Zach rambled about having heard about the redwoods, and then he conceded, “I heard there was good herb out here and jobs to trim.”
“Did you find a job?” asked Kenny.
“No, but I’ve met a lot of friendly people.”
Rob, with the red cap, interjected: “Are you kidding? The Humboldt scene is so popular, I tell people to stay away. The jobs aren’t happening because the growers go and get sixty-year-old women, or they go to Arcata and get some hot college girls.”
“It’s their million-dollar business and they aren’t going to trust strangers with it,” Kenny said knowingly. He then asked Zach what his home life was like.
“When I was little my mom sold pot to support us,” Zach said.
Jessica took a drag off her cigarette, seemingly oblivious to the conversation unfolding in front of her.
“When I was here in June, this place was the shit,” she said. “The Veterans Park was open. The weather was better.”
While Jessica was talking, Bob slipped into the bushes nearby to make a phone call. When he returned, he pulled a pair of handcuffs off his belt.
“Please stand up,” he instructed Rob, who, it turned out, was wanted on a five-year-old warrant for a parole violation in Virginia.
Bob clicked the handcuffs onto Rob’s wrists, and Zach held a thermos up to his friend’s lips so he could have one last sip of coffee before he was hauled off to jail.
As he turned to go, Kenny looked thoughtful.
“I’m not sure who the property owner is—I think it is my cousin’s—but you guys need to think about leaving. I appreciate your respect here, but you are trespassing, and I guarantee that the owner doesn’t want you here. All the homeless camps in Southern Humboldt are on private property.”
Back at his truck, Bob loaded Rob into the back and shut the door. It was over an hour’s drive to Eureka, the county seat, and the nearest holding tank. From the passenger seat, Bob pulled out an enormous green T-shirt and held it up against his chest. It was the T-shirt someone had made up in Shelter Cove after the L.A. Times article came out.
“Don’t Be the Local Bob,” it read.
Bob grinned, but he seemed a little perplexed. “All I did was tell the truth,” he said, shaking his head, which was that he was fed up with working in a gray area and wished the government would either totally ban marijuana or make it totally legal, but no more of this in-between stuff.
Behind him, on a bluff in the distance, a thick black plume of burning brush curled into the air. On days like this, it was hard to imagine that there was once a time in Humboldt County when pot wasn’t everywhere.