Early 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.
After a few minutes, Bob started his car back up and continued on his journey to the coast. He passed by the roadside memorial for Sean Akselsen. Seven years after his murder, it was still well tended with fake flowers and mementos spilling out from a mosaic altar. The falling rain splattered noisily on Bob’s windshield as he drove by Whitethorn Construction, a lumber and building supply company run by a tall octogenarian with a bushy beard named Bob McKee. In the 1960s and ’70s, McKee became famous in the area for subdividing old ranches and selling parcels to the new settlers. Many members of the counterculture considered him the father of their community.
“I was looking to sell the land to people who really wanted it,” McKee explained to local journalist Mary Siler Anderson in her book Whatever Happened to the Hippies? McKee didn’t care if someone had driven the two hundred miles from San Francisco on a Vespa or if they had arrived in a converted potato chip truck. If they loved the place and wanted to live there, he was willing to sell them land.
As for the cash crop that so many people eventually planted on land he sold them, at first, McKee said he had no idea marijuana could even grow in Humboldt; he thought it came from India or some other exotic place. He didn’t seem to care much about it as a moral issue, but he had the foresight to worry when pot became valuable.
It was the start of what McKee called a “false economy.”
“I guess my concern was what people were going to do when it was gone,” he said, decades before community members would gather at the Mateel to discuss that very issue. “I knew the money was going to go away. Either it was going to get wiped out or it was going to be legalized, but one way or the other it was going away.”
For Bob Hamilton, it couldn’t go away soon enough.
Past Whitethorn Construction, the trees were barely visible through the mist as Bob entered the King Range National Conservation Area. At the top of the peak, his radio crackled. He eased the cruiser over to the side of the road and called in to dispatch.
Someone had just reported that a man armed with two AR-15 assault rifles was going to be doing a series of armed robberies of indoor marijuana grows in the town of Fortuna. Bob was instructed to be on the lookout for the guy’s vehicle.
“This should be interesting,” Bob said to dispatch. Then he plunged down the steep, windy road that led to Shelter Cove.
The Cove, as it is known to locals, is situated on the Lost Coast, a place that frontier writer Bret Harte called “America’s uttermost west.” It earned its name back in the 1930s, when engineers building the Pacific Coast Highway were forced to turn inland and bypass the area because of its steep, rugged terrain. That decision helped create the longest undeveloped stretch of coastline in California. It is now a popular three-day hike for backpackers, and a place where the mountains of the King Range drop dramatically into the ocean. At Cape Mendocino the land juts out at the state’s westernmost point. Offshore, three fault lines, including the infamous San Andreas, meet and rub shoulders.
Shelter Cove, the only town on the Lost Coast, was established as a resort in 1964. Developers envisioned four thousand homes overlooking the sea there. Lots were sold, sight unseen, but many were so steep that it was impossible to build on them, and Shelter Cove became a land swindle. Today the Cove is a small village of some seven hundred residents who must drive an hour of windy road to cover the twenty miles to the nearest grocery store. Bob estimated that about half of these residents were pot growers who had turned their homes into indoor gardens.
On this wet and rainy Sunday, he drove past houses with uninspiring architecture and tiny blue street signs warning that the area was in a tsunami zone. Bob cruised by the golf course, and the Cape Mendocino Tea House, and pulled around Wedding Point, where surfers check the waves with binoculars and paragliders set sail. He eased to a stop in front of a sporty blue Subaru that was parked next to a row of houses. The car’s owner had done seven years in federal prison for marijuana cultivation. He was also Bob’s friend.
The two men rode motorcycles together. Like many Southern Humboldt men, Bob’s friend was a member of a local volunteer fire department. Bob’s theory was that many growers became members of local fire departments out of guilt over how they earn their money. Another, more dire reason was that there was nobody else to provide emergency services in the hills of Humboldt, where it could take an ambulance well over an hour to reach the scene of an accident. Neighbors literally had to save each other’s lives.
It was an uneventful morning at the Cove, and after Bob finished driving through town, he headed up the mountain and back toward Redway. On his way, he pulled into the Shelter Cove General Store to refuel. The general store was the kind of place where the wooden floors creaked underfoot and gas was sold at inflated prices, even by Humboldt standards. You could buy a bottle of soda and a bag of chips there, or, in Bob’s case, Milk Duds and a V-8.
On his way back from the bathroom, something caught Bob’s eye that made him bound through the store’s double doors in a fit of laughter.
“What’s with that sign ‘Robert’s in Jail’?” he asked the clerk behind the register, a woman whose husband he had once arrested for growing pot.
“I had to think for a minute who Robert was,” Bob continued before she could answer. “It’s Buddha. I forget that’s his name.”
“Yeah, that’s Buddha,” the woman said quietly.
Robert Juan, more commonly known in the community as Buddha, was the man Emma and her stepbrother Mike had once worked for. In 2003, Buddha met an old logger with a thousand acres of land for sale. Buddha then formed the Lost Paradise Land Corp., and began offering people a chance to buy into the corporation with a hefty down payment. They could then live on the land and make small monthly payments. Around forty people purchased a stake in the place. Many, if not all, did what they do in Humboldt, and grew pot there. They called the settlement Buddhaville, after its founder.
The Feds called it a criminal conspiracy.
On June 24, 2008, an army of 450 federal and law enforcement agents raided Buddhaville. People would remember that each agent seemed to have his own unmarked SUV or sedan, for the convoy of vehicles that passed along the Briceland–Shelter Cove Road on the way to the bust seemed endless. Authorities hauled off ten thousand marijuana plants, $160,000 in cash, and thirty guns. Buddha was eventually given a five-year sentence. All those who invested in the land lost their money. During the backlash following the bust, someone burnt down Buddha’s house.
“Robert’s in Jail,” the piece of binder paper tacked to the bulletin board in front of the store read. “For four plus years.”
In looping, feminine cursive, the sign instructed anyone who wanted to write Buddha to put their name on a list, and Buddha would send a note initiating correspondence. It was signed by a woman named Holly, with that morning’s date.
Bob was still chuckling as he started up the cruiser and pointed it back up the mountain. Twenty miles or so down the road, just past the turnout to Seeley Creek, a muddy track marked by a row of mailboxes, Bob saw something that he had never noticed before, something that made him gasp, and temporarily forget about marijuana and all his other frustrations.
He flipped the cruiser around and doubled back. About a hundred feet away, on the other side of the creek, a clear stream of rainwater cascaded down a stone cliff. Trees growing at the top of the fall looked as though they might tumble off. The scene was so lush and green it looked like it belonged on a postcard from Kauai. Bob sat there in silence and took in the beauty of the place, and just for a moment he was reminded why he’d come home.