In the year following the vote, Bob Hamilton chased convicts, chopped down illegal gardens, encouraged transients to move on, and got lost on dirt roads searching for fake addresses listed on arrest warrants. But he did it all with a different attitude. In this community of secrets, he now had one of his own.
Around the time of the vote, Bob and his wife met with their accountant. She handed them a folder, and when they opened it, they found a piece of paper inside that read, “Congratulations! You can retire at 50!” It turned out that those years of working hard and saving and making safe investments looked like they were going to pay off for the Hamiltons. Though Bob was more than ready for a change, he and his wife decided to be prudent and wait to retire until their daughter Jessica was out of college and settled in a job. But they set a date, and in July 2013, Bob Hamilton would turn in his badge, and he and his wife would begin a new life somewhere else. They would leave the futility of his fight behind.
That was more than two years out, and unfortunately, knowing his departure date gave Bob quite a case of short-timer’s disease, one that made putting up with the “pot shit” even harder. In the spring, when Dazey’s Supply was having its annual sale, complete with a reggae concert, free veggie burgers, and vendors selling everything needed to grow a healthy pot garden, Bob drove by and just shook his head. It looked like a fair for dope growers. Another time, Bob let out a yelp when he caught Solar Dan, an old hippie who rides an electric skateboard, sparking up in front of Redwood Realty in Garberville, right next to a No Loitering sign. Solar Dan had a thick German accent and a bead that hung from his beard like a tassel. His nickname came from his fondness for lighting his joints with a magnifying glass and the sun. He had recently begun holding meetings about the idea of renaming Garberville and Redway the “Emerald City,” because he thought it would help locals take charge of their “ganja future.”
“I’m not loitering, I’m waiting,” Solar Dan told Bob dismissively, as he exhaled a fragrant cloud of pot smoke into the air.
In the end, the short-timer’s disease may have affected Bob’s attitude, but it didn’t affect his job performance. He still had two of the sharpest eyes in Southern Humboldt, and maybe the sharpest nose, which turned out to be very unfortunate for one particular pot smuggler.
In November 2011, almost exactly a year after the vote, Bob Hamilton pulled through the parking lot of the Best Western Inn in Garberville on his way to the sheriff’s substation next door. Out of the corner of his eye he spied a Chevy Suburban that was parked a little funny. It had a cargo trailer attached and Michigan plates and was taking up multiple parking spaces. Deep in the back of his mind, Bob thought, Bet that guy’s hauling dope. Then the thought passed, and Bob arrived at the station and filled out his report.
A little while later, Bob pulled back out and onto Conger Street when that same Suburban passed right in front of him, and the powerful scent of what smelled like an entire family of skunks curled out the vents of the trailer and right up Bob’s nose. The guy was hauling dope, all right, poorly packaged, smelly dope.
Bob pulled the Suburban over just before Alderpoint Road.
The driver was a white man in his thirties. He was clean cut and seemed a little nervous.
Bob told him why he’d stopped him.
“I think you’re transporting. I smelled a big odor of marijuana coming out of this trailer,” he said. “We can handle this two ways. I can call and get a search warrant, or you can be cooperative.”
“Am I still going to go to jail?” the driver asked.
“Oh, yes,” Bob replied. “But it’ll be in your favor in the report.”
When he opened the trailer, Bob found that it was filled with ninety-two cardboard boxes. Inside the boxes were more than 275 pounds of pot. It was the biggest traffic stop bust of his career. (Bob’s previous transportation bust record was 80 pounds.) He also found $10,000 in cash and $2,000 in money orders. The marijuana was surely destined for out of state, which would have been a federal felony. Bob figured that since it was Humboldt County, the driver would probably get off on probation.
A few weeks later, Bob had one of those days when he helped protect the grower from the outside man.
When he arrived at work early that November morning, he learned that a home invasion had just taken place in Benbow, a community of some three hundred people situated around a golf course, just south of Garberville. Just before four o’clock that morning, a forty-one-year-old man was asleep in his bed with his twenty-one-year-old wife and their small child when the man was awoken by a strange noise. When he got up to investigate, he found an intruder standing in his hallway. The intruder was wearing a mask that was pulled down tight over his face and was pointing a gun at him.
“Give me your fucking money and I’ll leave,” the intruder said.
Behind the intruder, the homeowner saw the shadowy outline of another uninvited guest. This wasn’t good. The homeowner produced $1,000 in cash.
“I need more money than that. Give me everything you got!” the intruder screamed.
Then he pointed his gun at the homeowner and pulled the trigger. The bullet grazed the top of the man’s skull but didn’t pierce it. The wound was bleeding, as head wounds do, but he was alive. The intruder told him that he would kill him if he didn’t come up with more cash.
The man handed over another $3,000 and his wife’s wedding ring. The two suspects then fled.
In a study conducted the following year, the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department determined that twenty-eight home invasions were reported in the county over the eight-year period from 2003 to 2011. All the invasions took place in homes where marijuana was grown, bought, or sold. In many of the cases, people were shot or stabbed. The sheriff, Michael Downey, suspected that the actual number of violent robberies was much higher. Downey figured that there were many cases where growers survived such incidents—battered and bruised maybe, but in one piece—and didn’t report them. After all, how do you report that someone stole your contraband, or the large amount of cash you just happened to have lying around?
In this case, the injured man and his wife called the sheriff.
After Bob arrived at work early that morning, he was instructed to stake out a red Volvo that was parked near the house. In what was clearly not the best-planned rip-off in history, the robbers appeared to have left behind a getaway car. They didn’t come back for it, but by tracking the car’s owner, the Sheriff’s Department learned that a suspect in the robbery might be staying at a local hotel. He was described as having short-cut black hair, a beard, and being of Middle Eastern descent.
A little while later, a man matching that description cracked open the door and stepped out of a room at the Garberville Motel, another one of the town’s run-down one-star lodging options. Bob was waiting in his vehicle nearby, and the moment he saw the man, he entered a heightened state of nerves and awareness. Whoever had ripped off that man in Benbow earlier that morning had a gun and wasn’t afraid to use it. In a rush of adrenaline, Bob shot his car across the parking lot toward his suspect, who had just popped open the trunk of a white sedan. Bob screeched to a stop in front of the sedan and ordered the man and the people sitting in the car to put their hands up. In the car’s trunk, Bob found a bag filled with damp dark clothing and two gray knit stocking caps with eyeholes cut out of them.
The suspect was a twenty-five-year-old Yemeni American from Oakland named Hussain Obad. When Bob searched Obad’s pockets after he’d handcuffed him, he found $1,634 and the keys to the red Volvo.
While Bob guided Obad into his vehicle, the young man looked up at him and asked, in a matter-of-fact manner, “So, boss, how many years do you think I’ll get?”
The truth was, Bob didn’t know.
* * *
Two months later, in January 2012, Bob Hamilton found himself zipping along the highway between Eureka and Arcata, past the massive warehouses of the California Redwood Company and the row of eucalyptus trees that stand like guardians along Humboldt Bay. He was on his way to work.
Bob had been reassigned. Due to the state’s financial crisis, fourteen positions in the Humboldt Sheriff’s Department had been frozen and another five people had left. This meant that services to rural areas such as SoHum were reduced, and Bob was moved to cover a bedroom community north of the city of Arcata called McKinleyville.
That same year, budget cuts caused the state of California to “leave the drug trade,” in the words of Sheriff Michael Downey. In 2012, the enemy of the marijuana grower known as CAMP was restructured and renamed. In its first year, the Cannabis Eradication and Reclamation Team (CERT) operated for four days in the county, compared to what used to be eight weeks of CAMP.
Initially, Bob was bummed when he got word of his transfer. He thought Northern Humboldt would be full of “tweakers,” or meth users, but the assignment ended up being a welcome change of pace. There were fewer transients and zero hippie buses broken down alongside the road. Sure, there were still pockets of what Bob called “junkyard mentality”—front yards decorated with burnt-out cars and bleak trailer parks that were home to people hanging on by a very frayed thread—but there seemed less of it than there was down south. Then there was the wonderful fact that roads Bob now rolled on were all paved, which meant he could get everywhere he needed to go so much quicker. He did not miss rumbling up dusty or muddy track with the sound of a banjo playing in the back of his mind. The other silver lining was that Bob wasn’t sent to the courts. That, he figured, would have been so damn boring it would have made him want to eat his gun.
When Bob left the Garberville substation, that building he hated, and feared contained asbestos, he left his mark on the Missing and Wanted person’s wall near the secretary’s desk. Next to the Missing flyer for Robert Firestone, the old man with dementia who had gone walking and was never seen again, Bob stuck one of those amusing “Save Humboldt County, Keep Pot Illegal” stickers he’d peeled off a mailbox before the vote. Above the Wanted poster for Keith Conn, the “real bad motherfucker” whom Bob never managed to catch, he taped an article from the local paper about how the Humboldt Growers Association had hosted a fund-raiser for the district attorney’s reelection campaign that past fall. The part about how the growers had raised $5,000 for the D.A. was marked in yellow highlighter.
To Bob, that said it all.
* * *
Northern Humboldt proved to be a different world. Of course pot was grown there, and “unemployed” boys drove big expensive trucks—it was still Humboldt after all—but it was nothing at the level it was down south. The foggy coastal climate meant that a lot of people grew indoors, which made it all seem much more discreet.
On some days up north, when Bob was between calls from, say, a trailer park manager who wanted to evict a tenant and a woman whose bedroom had been trashed by an ex-boyfriend, he would catch fleeting glimpses of the raw beauty he adored. While on a drive through Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, he’d marvel at the Roosevelt elk, with their antlers that looked like the forked branches of an oak tree. On the way back to the highway, he’d take in the moss-covered trees that lined the road through the park. They were so fuzzy and surreal they seemed straight out of the pages of Dr. Seuss.
Humboldt County was a beautiful place, there was no mistaking it, but it had become like a Hollywood set for Bob. It was like a façade, and behind the façade was a different story, one of trash, and meth, and familial dysfunction. Of course it wasn’t just Humboldt. Cops deal with the margins and extremes of society everywhere; the bowels, as Bob put it. His pessimism about the place was an occupational hazard, and he knew it. Sometimes he wished he had never returned to Humboldt, had never gotten to know its underbelly and learn what lurked behind the trees. It could have stayed a place of perfect beauty for him, like the way he saw it when he was a kid.
But there was no going back, and maybe that was the lesson. There was only going forward, and Bob had a date to move toward: July 2013.
He and his wife were busy working on the plan. They had spent a few weeks that past September in Italy. They flew into Rome and drove out into the countryside, where they spent ten days participating in the grape harvest in Le Marche. Then they pushed on to Tuscany, where they ate cheese and cold cuts and drank wine, and met a man who might be interested in having them help run his B&B. That was the dream, a B&B or maybe an olive grove somewhere in Italy for part of the year. The other half of their time, the Hamiltons were considering working as volunteers for international disaster relief with the Red Cross. Bob would be former law enforcement, and his wife was a nurse; these were skills sure to come in handy somewhere.
Helping people was ingrained in Bob, and he wanted to do it in a way that was productive and felt good. People loved firefighters, but not everyone loved cops. Volunteering in emergency situations sounded like a way in which Bob could use his skills and people might actually appreciate him.
In the meantime, he had a job to finish and a deadline to shoot for.
“Only five months, twenty days, and eight hours to go,” he’d say at the start of a workday, and then he’d laugh. “But who’s counting?”