Bob Hamilton was in what he called harassment mode. The transient population had been picking up in town, and he felt he was spending way too much of his time dealing with it. A typical interaction went something like this: While cruising down the main drag in Redway, Bob spotted a white Ford Econoline van of 1970s vintage parked in front of the liquor store. It had an old floral-print sheet strung up in the window for curtains, and had clearly seen better days. If the van’s engine started, which looked doubtful, it didn’t look like it would make it out of town. It was the same white Ford Econoline van that had been parked there all morning.
Bob pulled up alongside the van and picked up the mic that was attached to the public address system on the outside of his car.
“You have to move on,” he ordered, his voice booming across the pavement. “You’ve been parked here too long. This area has a two-hour parking limit.”
Bob then cruised up to the Mateel Community Center and the Grace Lutheran Church parking lot. On his way back down the hill, he noticed the van hadn’t budged an inch.
“God damn it!” Bob swore as he shot across the street and pulled up alongside the Econoline again. This time he hopped out and knocked impatiently on the van’s sliding side door until a dazed-looking man emerged. He had long, curly blond hair and a graying beard. He was missing a few of his front teeth and was wearing a faded black T-shirt that read, “I’m Not 50. I’m 18 with 32 Years’ Expertise.”
“As I already made it clear, you need to move on,” Bob told him. “This area has a two-hour parking limit.”
The eighteen-year-old with thirty-two years’ expertise didn’t want to move on.
“I don’t have any place to go,” he said.
He was also having some health problems.
“Just so you know, the last time, I had a hard time walking from here to the store because my back was out,” he told Bob, who didn’t appear the least bit interested.
As he pulled away for the second time, Bob breathed a deep sigh and continued down the road, past the sandstone bluffs, toward Garberville. He rolled past the Humboldt House Inn, and the Branding Iron Saloon, which an irate customer once shot up with a machine gun. Across the street, in front of Flavors café, a group of travelers in their early twenties were camped out on the sidewalk with large backpacks.
“You need to move on. No loitering. Pack up your stuff and go.” Bob’s voice boomed again out of the PA.
As he drove away, he muttered under his breath, “Get a fucking life.”
It was that kind of day. Word had finally come in about the budget cuts. As everybody knew, California was broke, and cutbacks were happening everywhere. For the past few months, Bob had been worried that he might either lose his job or end up working security at the county courthouse in Eureka. Things weren’t as bad as originally forecast. Bob wouldn’t lose his job or end up in the courts, but he was going to have to work twelve-hour shifts. He had pulled long shifts during a previous budget crunch, and knew that they were long and hard, and that, at times, he would be the only deputy on duty and that he’d have to call on Highway Patrol for backup.
After ridding the sidewalks of transients, it was time for Bob to begin working through the pile of arrest warrants stacked on the seat next to him. Outstanding warrants were faxed down from the sheriff’s headquarters in Eureka every morning. Most were for people who had been arrested and bailed out and had failed to show up for their court date; people wanted on methamphetamine charges, or for child abductions, or for evading or assaulting a police officer. On top of a pile was a warrant for a twenty-four-year-old man with piercing brown eyes and a goatee who was wanted for drunk driving. The address listed was up a dirt road near Briceland. Bob punched the coordinates into the GPS on his dash, drove a few miles out of town, hung a right, shifted into four-wheel drive, and began a long, slow climb.
Humboldt’s dirt roads are infamously rough and labyrinthine, and this one was no exception. Most are unmarked, and many gates don’t even have numbers. People who live up the dirt roads have to give directions to visitors that sound straight out of Winnie-the-Pooh, such as “Turn left at the gnarled madrone,” or “Veer right at the faded prayer flags.” If they are particularly courteous, they will escort their visitors to their house the first time they come. The dirt roads seemed made for people to get lost on, especially people with badges in official vehicles.
At one fork, where the road diverged in three directions with no markers, Bob paused for a moment and shook his head.
“Holy smokes, this is like Arkansas. I keep expecting someone from Deliverance to come out here and start playing the banjo.”
But there were no banjos. Just more dips and turns and dust and locked gates, until the road eventually came to an end. The number on the gate was 840. The number listed on the warrant was 1445. The twenty-four-year-old wanted on drunk driving charges had probably given a fake address. It was often the case.
Bob began to creep slowly back down the hill, with his window open so he could scan the hillside and brush below. Suddenly, he hit the brakes.
“Oh my God!” he shouted. “Look at the size of that fucking greenhouse!”
Through the trees, in the distance, was a greenhouse the size of a small office park. Bob hopped out of the truck, binoculars in hand, to have a clearer look. He could just make out the shadowy shape of marijuana plants on the other side of the papery-white greenhouse walls.
“Plants are tall already,” he observed.
Bob had spent the past week eradicating pot plants out in Shelter Cove. He had decided that he wasn’t going to deal with marijuana this year because it never led to anything, but then the Shelter Cove Resort Improvement District, the company that provides utility services to the area, had a lawyer draft a letter to the Sheriff’s Department requesting assistance dealing with outdoor grows. So Bob spent the past week whacking away at plants that either didn’t have 215s posted next to them or were over the county’s plant-count limit. Big outdoor grows were an environmental issue to Bob. In an unregulated industry, not all growers were eco-friendly. The chemicals and fertilizers some growers used to encourage plant growth leached into the groundwater and then into the river, where they fed gigantic blue-green algae blooms. Then there was the water itself. Marijuana was a thirsty plant, and many growers pumped so much water from the local rivers in the dry summer months that they reached dangerously low levels.
Bob found it all disgusting. He was still fuming about outdoor grows when the call came in on his cell phone. It was from one of the bounty hunters he had met recently who was trying to track down a fugitive named Keith Conn.
Keith Conn first entered Bob’s orbit a few weeks earlier, when he fled from one of Bob’s colleagues on Sprowel Creek Road in Garberville. Conn drove a blue Toyota pickup, and he ran a couple of cars off the road as he made his getaway. He was wanted in other California counties on drug and burglary charges, and now he was being sought in Humboldt for evasion. In his Wanted poster back at the station, Keith Conn had ruddy skin and wide, uneasy eyes. He was twenty-nine years old and, in Bob’s opinion, a “real bad motherfucker.”
The bounty hunters had shown up recently looking for Conn and were now in regular contact with Bob. The one who called had just gotten word that Conn was hiding out in a trailer a few miles up Highway 101. Bob called for backup.
“Phillipsville Loop Road,” he said to dispatch.
Then he flipped on his flashing lights, punched on his gas pedal, and raced toward the highway.
Phillipsville Road was located in Phillipsville, a tiny town on the Avenue of the Giants known for its seedy trailer parks, its meth problem, and the Riverwood Inn, a 1930s-era roadhouse and Mexican restaurant that offered live music on the weekends. As Bob raced up the highway at around ninety miles an hour, Deputy Conan Moore shot past him on the left. Conan’s cruiser was faster than Bob’s Expedition, so the plan was that Conan would go in first, around the back of the road that looped around the town, between the Avenue and the river. Bob would come around the other way, so Keith Conn wouldn’t be able to escape.
Just past the town’s entrance sign, Bob pulled over to the side of the road, directly across from one of the access points to Phillipsville Road. He sat there hunched over with his hands tightly gripping the wheel, waiting for word from Conan, and entered a kind of trance. His breath was deep and labored, and his gaze was fixed hard on the country lane across the street. After the chase Conn had engaged in with Conan, anything was possible with the man. In a few minutes bullets could even start flying. Should Conn decide to make a break for it, Bob was ready to pounce.
“Are you there yet?” he radioed to his colleague.
“Here.”
In a surge of adrenaline, Bob hit the lights and stepped on the gas. His SUV shot across the road. He screeched to a halt a few hundred yards down the lane, next to Conan’s cruiser and an old Airstream trailer. Bob had barely stuck his vehicle in Park before he was out the door, popping the snap on the Taser he carried on his right leg as he rushed toward the trailer. He banged loudly on the door.
“Sheriff’s Department! Step out and let me see your hands!”
Bob entered the trailer, while Conan waited outside.
Instead of gunfire or screaming, there was only silence.
The aluminum trailer was dented and sagging and looked like a beat-up UFO. A bucket propped up one corner, and it looked like it had been a long time since it had been pulled anywhere on vacation. The property where the trailer was parked was equally run down. There were piles of things under the fruit trees in the yard, and even the light poles couldn’t seem to get it together and tilted sadly toward the ground. But like everywhere in Southern Humboldt, natural beauty wasn’t far. Across the street was a grassy meadow where horses ran free, and in almost every direction were tree-studded hills.
Bob emerged from the trailer with a woman in handcuffs. He sat her down on a broken porch swing outside. She was skinny, with bleached hair and a worried face. She shared a name with the disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding. A few minutes later Bob brought an older man with a white beard to join her. He was barefoot and shirtless; a metal chain ran from the belt loop of his jeans to the wallet in his pocket, where his ID revealed he was sixty-four. Behind a ratty camouflage tarp in one corner of the yard was a scrawny 215 medical pot garden, but Keith Conn was nowhere to be found. When Bob was done searching the trailer, he uncuffed the couple and let them go.
Bob sighed when he got back in the Expedition. It felt like he’d been chasing Conn forever, and he would have lived for a month off the high of catching him.
He called in the news to the bounty hunter in Sacramento.
“He wasn’t there,” he said. “But there was a woman named Tonya Harding.”
There was a pause.
“No, not that one.”
The bounty hunter offered up one more tip: Conn might be with his girlfriend, a woman who went by the name of Brandy Land, who was staying at the Lone Pine Motel in Garberville.
“Lone Pine, number nine,” Bob told Conan, as they got back in their vehicles and headed toward Garberville.
Driving back down the 101 toward town, Bob felt let down, but part of him still hoped he might find Conn in the motel room. He wanted to catch him so bad, he could feel the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
The Lone Pine Motel was located on Main Street directly across from Ray’s Food Place. Rooms started at sixty dollars a night and, according to a sign out front, included free wireless “enternet” and use of the pool. Contrary to what the name of the motel seemed to suggest, there was no pine tree towering over the place. A redwood tree used to grow in the parking lot, until it became the casualty of a severe storm that past winter. A local chain saw artist carved what was left of the stump into a kind of feline sculpture that Bob referred to as “the kitty.”
Room number nine was located next to the street. Conan went around to knock and see if anyone was inside, while Bob stood guard on the sidewalk to make sure no one popped out of any windows. A few minutes later, Conan strolled back around the side of the building empty-handed. He looked at Bob and shrugged. Bob scrunched up his face and pretended to cry.
It was nearly the end of the day when the last call came in. A local businesswoman asked Bob to meet her at the auto parts store across from the Laundromat. She had short brown hair and a stocky build. She pulled Bob aside and gave him the name of a guy she said was involved in high-level pot trafficking with people from LA.
The house was located near the ACE hardware store in Garberville. A beat-up twenty-year-old Honda Accord was parked out front, next to some garbage bags and old car seats. A short wooden gate sealed the entrance to the yard. Standing in front of it, Bob had a full view of a small crop of three-foot-tall marijuana plants. A heavyset man sitting in the yard saw Bob and walked up to the gate.
“Do you have a Two-fifteen?” Bob asked him. “For this law to work, if you have marijuana, you gotta have a Two-fifteen. If it’s here and there’s not a Two-fifteen, I gotta yank it.”
“I’m growing for my sister who lives out in Briceland,” said the man, who identified himself as Edward. “She has a Two-fifteen.”
Bob entered the long, rectangular yard. There were a few trees and rosebushes sprouting up around it; the small plot of pot plants was near the back fence. The house was a one-story and pistachio green. A large heap of trash, or perhaps storage, was piled under a tarp to the right of the front door.
Bob looked at Edward.
“It has to be here when I show up. If there’s no Two-fifteen posted, I have to consciously believe it’s an illegal grow,” he said. “It’s on your property, and I have to assume it’s yours. That’s what we’re up against. How many plants are there? Twenty-nine? Twenty-one?”
Before Edward could answer, Deputy Conan Moore showed up at the gate.
“There’s a grow here and there’s no Two-fifteen,” Bob called out to him.
Then a woman emerged from the house. She was wearing jeans and flip-flops; large silver hoops dangled from her ears. She had been in the middle of coloring her hair when Bob arrived, and it was piled on top of her head in a dark, wet coil.
“Aren’t there cases where you give someone more time to get one?” she asked.
“I used to do that, but not anymore,” Bob replied.
“So, what, we have to unplant them and then replant them?” The woman started to tremble and cry. “This is helping us,” she said, her voice cracking. “Is there any way you could possibly let me call her and bring it over?”
Bob called the sister in Briceland. It turned out that she did have a 215, but she needed it for her garden. These plants, it seemed, were doomed to be pulled.
“How many are there?” Bob asked Conan.
“I counted fifty-nine,” he said.
Most were in the ground, and about eight or so were sitting in pots on top of a plastic pickle barrel near the gate. Planted among the pot plants were some tomato plants, lettuce, and a tiny strawberry patch. Everything looked in need of a good watering.
Bob was frustrated.
“It’s simple, simple rules. You grow marijuana, you have a Two-fifteen. We’re going to take the grow and I’m going to cite you both,” he told the couple. “I won’t arrest you and take you north, but there is a big lesson here. I’m very lenient when it comes to marijuana, but you have to have a Two-fifteen.”
The woman sobbed as Conan walked among the plants and took pictures of them. He then snapped on a pair of blue plastic gloves and picked up a small machete. Conan had been with the Sheriff’s Department for only a few years and had recently transferred to Garberville from the Hoopa substation, which was located near the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, the largest reservation in the state. He was stocky, with a thick brown moustache and a bit of a paunch. He had the kind of sturdy build that would have made for a good logger, in another lifetime.
Pulling out the grow took a matter of minutes. Conan grabbed each plant by the stalk, bent it, and gave it a good whack with the machete, which made a dull thwap as it cut through the fibrous stalk.
“Could you please leave the tomatoes?” the tearful woman called out from the porch.
He did. When he was finished, Conan stacked all the plants in the back of Bob’s SUV and scraped the blade of the machete clean on the edge of a plastic pickle barrel that was sitting in the yard.
“So if I get my own Two-fifteen and it’s posted, would I be able to replant?” the woman asked.
“Of course,” said Bob, as he began to read her husband his Miranda rights.
On his way out, Bob shook his head. “I could have cared less if they were over the limit. We don’t care about numbers anymore as long as they have a Two-fifteen. So there’s just no excuse for it.”
He headed back to the substation to do the paperwork. Somewhere, out among the trees, Keith Conn was waiting for him. Beyond that, there were more marijuana plants than he could ever count or chop down, inching slowly toward harvest.