I was born and raised in Northern California just south of the region known as the Emerald Triangle. In Napa and Sonoma, where I grew up, wine grapes are the cash crop, but marijuana is still part of the local culture and economy. My parents weren’t growers, but they were members of the counterculture, and when I was little they would take me to parties that in my memory were a blur of laughter, long skirts, scratchy beards, and the sweet, heady scent of marijuana. Since childhood, it is a smell I have associated with adults having a good time.
As I grew older, I became aware of the gamble people took to work in the lucrative underground economy. When I was fourteen, my best friend’s father went to prison for growing marijuana. Her sense of secrecy and shame was so strong that I didn’t learn until the last minute that the FBI had seized her family’s home and that her father was going away for five years. I happened to be sleeping over that night. In the morning, I stood awkwardly in the hallway as my friend’s father hugged her good-bye. She walked into her bedroom and quietly shut the door. At the other end of the hallway, her little brother sobbed.
That was in 1990. In 2010, when I moved home after five years in New York, I discovered that growers weren’t going to jail like before, and their underground economy was speedily going mainstream, complete with marijuana trade shows and city permits for pot delivery services. Now that seemingly anyone could grow pot under the medical marijuana law, I wondered what all this meant for the notorious pot towns I’d heard about up north, like Laytonville in Mendocino and Garberville in Humboldt. What was a pot town? How does a place become one? And how were all these changes to the industry affecting them?
I decided to see if I could answer some of these questions. Originally, I thought I was doing research for a book on how California legalized marijuana, and I figured whatever was happening up north would be part of that story. I had been to the area before to see the big trees, but I knew nothing of the culture. When I crossed the redwood curtain and arrived in Humboldt that summer, I had no idea I was entering another world and that what I found there would become the story. I quickly realized that the only way to understand this world and earn the trust of the people who lived there was to become part of it. I originally went to Humboldt for a week. I left more than a year later.
The entire time I lived in southern Humboldt County, I was always open about who I was: a journalist at work on a book about the community. Despite the ominous reputation of Humboldt growers in the mass media—the armed and dangerous renegade ready to shoot anyone who ventures on their property—I never really felt unsafe. Granted, I was asked three times if I was law enforcement by younger, paranoid types, but I saw only one gun. In general, I was welcomed with incredible warmth and acceptance. After years of living in secrecy, many elder members of the community were especially eager to share their stories.
And what stories they shared: how they discovered their cash crop by accident, hid from helicopters, and built a community with their bare hands. In an era when small farming had all but disappeared, Humboldt pot growers earned a decent and sometimes great living working the land in a breathtakingly beautiful place. It was an American Dream of sorts. There were often moments when life there reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting, with a big, leafy marijuana plant towering in the background, like the time I attended a school fund-raiser where pot smoke hung in the air, and a man auctioned off nylon bags for making hashish alongside baskets of homegrown tomatoes and hand-knit scarves.
Early on, I realized that I couldn’t tell the story of the place through just one person, so I focused on four people who represent different aspects of marijuana culture: Crockett represented the younger, business-minded grower who had come to Humboldt to make money. Mare was the woman who’d planted the seeds that helped start the industry and who never gave up on her hippie ideals. Emma had been raised in the community and decided early on it wasn’t worth the risk to grow. And like someone out of an old Western, Bob was a deputy sheriff in a town of outlaws.
I witnessed many of the events described in this book. Some scenes were recounted to me during interviews and supplemented with court documents, news reports, and second-source interviews. Many of the spoken words were uttered in my presence. Other quotes were confirmed whenever possible. The statements of Mikal Wilde, whose lawyers declined to let him speak with me due to his ongoing legal case, are paraphrased based on a reliable source.
The majority of my reporting took place while spending open-ended days and nights with my subjects. We went to the grocery store, cooked dinner, went to parties, worked in the garden, and, in the case of Bob, patrolled the area. In addition to my main characters, to have a deeper understanding of the area and culture I conducted interviews with dozens of other community members. Sometimes it felt as though I had interviewed the whole town.
During my time in the community, I straddled the role of outsider and insider. To make ends meet, I found a job serving wine and crepes at a local jazz club and café. Even though I didn’t work directly in the industry, I understood that marijuana money indirectly paid my salary too.
While I lived in Southern Humboldt, I got lost on dirt roads, cooled off in the Eel River on summer days, hunted for mushrooms, fell under the spell of the redwoods, and made wonderful friends with people who, of course, grew pot. I saw how this income enabled them to pursue their dreams, but I came to believe that their economy is built upon something that is wrong—not the marijuana itself, but the fact that medical laws aside, it is still fundamentally illegal. For the readers who wonder about my stance on the issue, here it is: I believe that marijuana should be legal and regulated, for the economy, for the environment, for civil rights, for Mexico, and to end the violence associated with its illegality. No one should ever die over a plant that doesn’t kill people.
With the passing of the recent recreational use laws in Colorado and Washington, and as more states approve medical marijuana, it looks like the long, slow march toward legalization will continue. If that happens, someday the story of the people whom Mare calls the marijuana moonshiners will be just a footnote in history, and this book will ultimately be just a snapshot in time of a place called Humboldt.