The 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.”
Oh Shadrack. Just a broken boy.
Cast aside by your mama, just like a broken toy.
Oh Shadrack, just a thieving punk.
Your bridges are all burned and all your ships are sunk.
Every fall when the plants were tall,
you’d come creeping in
and rip off your neighbors again and again and again.
Oh Shadrack, just a broken boy.
Cast aside by your mama just like a broken toy.
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.
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 ecstasy—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.