I studied the menu. Crockett offered some helpful advice. “Don’t eat the fish.”
I’m not sure I saw any fish on the menu.
E plugged some quarters into the jukebox and a plaintive country song came on. It was Brad Paisley singing the story of a man whose wife is making him choose between her and his love for fishing. E sang along with the chorus: “I’m gonna miss her …”
I turned to the Guru. “Do a lot of tourists come here?”
The Guru laughed. “If a tourist shows up here, they’re lost.”
There was only one person working the lunch rush—and by that I mean there was only one person to wait tables, work the bar, and cook the food—a well-built middle-aged woman who looked like she could hold her whiskey and throw a punch better than me. She smiled, gave me a wink, and warned us that she’d “try to do her best” with our order. I appreciated her honesty.
I have to say that the Sierra Nevada mountains are beautiful, stunningly so. It’s no accident that they’ve been designated national parks and protected wilderness areas. But I was less convinced that they were prime locations for growing cannabis. The soil is rocky and it gets freezing cold at night. It was the opposite of the kind of environment you’d find in a greenhouse in Holland or an indoor grow room. As we sipped cold Pacificos and waited for the food, I turned to Crockett.
“So what makes this area so special for growing cannabis?”
Crockett suppressed a soft burp and considered my question. He didn’t say anything for a minute as the Guru went outside to smoke a cigarette and E sauntered over to plug more money into the jukebox. I didn’t know if they had left because they were bored or because Crockett was going to reveal some secret.
“We can grow our outdoor here from the end of April to the middle of November without any problem as long as we’re below two thousand feet. Above that you’ve got to harvest by Halloween. That gives us a really long flowering time—not as long as some tropical areas but what you miss in the tropical areas are the cold nights and season change.”
I’m not a farmer, but that didn’t stop me from trying to sound like one.
“Aren’t cold nights bad for the plants? I mean, isn’t that why all those orchards have fans and flame throwers to blow warm air across the fields?”
Crockett shook his head.
“Temperature has a great deal to do with quality, bud size, and crystal production. It has a huge influence on everything. It influences some varieties more than others, but the ones it does influence, when the temperature drops you see a pickup in density, crystal production, coloring. I really like the cold nights and warm days. It really does a spectacular job on our outdoor. I can take our outdoor plants down to Los Angeles and they can’t tell the difference.”
He smiled. “Until I show them the indoor.”
Like a classic French vintner, Crockett believes in the concept of terroir, the idea that the land and location where the plants live—the climate, soil, and peculiarities of geography—have a huge influence on the quality of the end product.
“You can tell if something’s been grown in the mountains. You can taste it.”
I was skeptical. You can taste the mountains? That sounded suspiciously like a beer commercial. “How’s that?”
“Altitude has a lot to do with it. Right now we’re at seven thousand feet and there’s less oxygen and more CO2, which is good for the plants. And we have higher amounts of UV rays, which produces more crystals because they’re trying to protect the plant from the sun. Crystals are a whole protection deal—that’s why they’re there.”
We were interrupted by the waitress/bartender/cook carrying an armload of cheeseburgers that turned out to be surprisingly tasty. The smell of the food brought E and the Guru back to the table.
As we ate, the Guru gave me detailed instructions on how to deal with poison oak. The minute I got back to the cabin, he said, I needed to shower in cold water with lots of soap. I looked at my arms. There was no sign of anything other than some scratches and dirt. The Guru chewed on his burger and shook his head.
“It takes a couple days before anything happens. When I get home, I’m showering with a soap they use on nuclear submarines.”
“What kind of soap is that?”
“It’s what they use if they’ve been exposed to radiation.”
On the way to what they call “the airstrip” we stopped at another grower’s house who I’ll call Slim. He’s Crockett’s best friend from high school and part of a network of loosely affiliated California-legal growers in the area.
We pulled into the driveway to find Slim standing in the shade of a modern-looking farmhouse sharing a pipe with a dude who sported a thick reddish beard and was wearing a logo T-shirt for some alt rock band underneath a long-sleeved flannel shirt.
The Guru looked over at Crockett.
“Who’s the dude?”
“He moved up here from Orange County to try and grow.”
With a pair of cheap, oversized sunglasses and an ironic trucker cap, the OC grower looked like a poster boy for the Hipster Relocation Program.
By contrast, Slim is a lanky, energetic country boy who seems to be constantly sunburned and delighted by everything. We got out of the truck and Slim offered Crockett a hit off the pipe.
“What is it?”
“Goo.”
Crockett took a toke and passed the pipe to the Guru. The Guru took a hit and passed the pipe to E. E sucked down a long pull and passed the pipe to me. I declined. I didn’t feel much like smoking. I’d just crawled through a hillside of poison oak, eaten a cheeseburger, and been advised to shower with soap used to wash nuclear waste off, so the idea of smoking a heavy indica like Goo didn’t appeal to me at all. “Besides,” I told myself, “you’re working.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this ritualized circling of the pipe and lighter would continue for the rest of the day.
On the way over we’d been talking about dankness and what Crockett thought the word meant. Crockett picked up the thread of the conversation with Slim.
“What do you think ‘dank’ means?”
Slim reloaded the pipe and thought about it.
“I dunno. Good bud.”
Crockett pointed to the pipe and asked, “Do you think this is dank?”
Slim looked at the pipe. “The Goo? Yeah. It’s dank.”
Crockett shook his head.
“That ain’t dank.”
The OC grower shifted his feet, looking suddenly uncomfortable. I’m guessing he grew the Goo and wasn’t prepared for a spontaneous critique of his bud with a group of connoisseurs, especially if they weren’t liking it so much. He checked the time on his iPhone, like he had an appointment or something, then looked over at his SUV.
Crockett held up his hand and revealed his criteria for dankness. “You gotta have all five of these to be dank.” He counted them off on his fingers. “You got appearance—what I call bag appeal—the flavor, the smell, the taste, and the effect. Dank should have all five of them.”
I started to point out that flavor and taste might actually be the same thing, but then I second-guessed myself. Maybe they’re not. One could be the aftertaste. Sometimes the smoke tastes one way when you inhale but leaves a different taste when you exhale.
The Guru shook his head.
“No, man. Dank is a kind of super-stinky bud. You know, bad-smelling diesely skunky shit.”
I disagreed. “Sweet-smelling bud can be dank.”
Crockett nodded. “The five parts make good bud dank, and that helps you sell it. And that’s the name of the game.”
The OC grower, who’d said almost nothing the entire time we’d been standing there, suddenly took on a slightly aggrieved expression. He waved to Slim and skulked off. Crockett watched him go and shrugged.
“The Goo wasn’t dank.”
Slim had just returned from a family fishing trip in Alaska and was eager to show off his catch. He gave us a tour of his freezer, pulling out frozen f
ilets of salmon and halibut, and excitedly recounted the details of each particular catch.
He held up one large hunk of halibut. “I didn’t think I was gonna get this guy on the boat.”
We jumped back into the truck and Slim piled in with us. He broke out a couple of fat nuggets of something he called Ghost OG, and while Crockett drove, pipe loads of the Ghost were passed around.
As the pipe and lighter made their way around the cab, Slim began to rhapsodize about Alaska. “They hunt wolves up there now. They used to be, like, protected, but they killed a lady jogger.”
Crockett looked over. “Wolves attacked a jogger?”
“Yeah,” Slim nodded, “so now they can hunt wolves again.”
The Guru exhaled a plume of Ghost smoke out the window and passed the pipe. He looked at Slim. “Who jogs in Alaska?”
E flicked the lighter, ready to fire up the bowl, then asked, “Was she jogging in the woods?”
Slim flapped his arms in an exasperated shrug. “I don’t know where she was jogging. That’s not the point.”
The Guru looked at me. “The jogger might not feel that way.”
E stroked his beard philosophically, like he was in an imaginary episode of Hunting on a Budget, and said, “I’d be surprised to see wolves in the city.”
Slim kept waving his hands around, trying to get the conversation back on track. He was stoned and his face flushed as he flapped his gangly arms in the air.
“Listen.” He turned to make sure we were listening, then continued. “So in the gift shop of the lodge they got wolf pelts and wolf teeth and stuff like that. I thought about bringing some back for you guys, because they’re so cool.”
The Guru’s face collapsed into a puzzled frown. “What would I do with a wolf pelt?”
Slim had already considered this. “You could make some sweet boots.”
The conversation immediately derailed into an in-depth discussion of the pros and cons of using wolf fur for boots, but eventually, just like the pipe, it came back around to Slim, who’d just finished sucking down another hit of the Ghost OG.
“But then I saw this hat. You wouldn’t believe it! It was fuckin’ unbelievable. It’s a hat, but like, it’s the wolf’s head.” No one was following this line of thought, so Slim clarified: “They turned a wolf head into a hat. It was totally cool.”
Crockett looked at him quizzically. “A wolf hat?”
“Yeah, you wear the fuckin’ wolf head on your head. It’s got eyes and its mouth is open and fangs showing and shit. The ear flaps are the wolf’s paws.”
Slim demonstrated, his hands making imaginary wolf paws run alongside his head.
“Like, little wolf legs, hanging down on the sides.”
It got quiet in the truck for a moment as everyone tried to imagine a hat made from the head of an Alaskan wolf. Slim sat back and grinned. “I would’ve gotten one, but it was eight hundred bucks.”
The truck rumbled along a series of back roads, the pavement narrow and rutted or disappearing altogether in some places, as we navigated a series of switchbacks and climbed to a higher elevation. Eventually we reached “the airstrip.”
It was a large parcel of land on top of a mesa, a meadow bisected by a dirt road that ran about a quarter of a mile from a weather-worn farmhouse to a sheer cliff. The former owners of the property were weekend pilots who used this as an improvised airport. A sign that said “Road Ends” was posted at the edge of the cliff and was all that stood between an unsuspecting driver and oblivion. The drop was steep and the bottom rocky, but the view of the surrounding mountains and canyons was breathtaking. An old couch had been balanced on the edge for taking in the view, but a recent windstorm had tossed it into the abyss. I looked down and saw its battered Ethan Allen corpse shattered on the rocks below. The only sign of civilization that remained was an old toilet, perched majestically atop a granite boulder.
We doubled back to the farmhouse. As the truck pulled to a stop a gangly young man burst out of the house holding an old pie tin with a blob of black gunk on it.
“Hey! Who wants some heroin?”
This was Slim’s younger brother, Red. Like Slim, he’s excitable, but unlike Slim he’s got a mischievous streak. Red likes to cause trouble.
“Fresh heroin!”
Crockett shot Red a look that froze him in his tracks. Red stood there, hesitating, unsure if he’d made some kind of faux pas. Crockett pointed at me. “Do you know who this is?”
Red looked at me, then back to Crockett. “No.”
“You don’t know who he is or what he does?”
Red’s face suddenly flushed crimson and I realized how he got his name. “No.”
“And you come out of the house announcing you’ve got heroin?”
Red looked at the ground, his face the color of a ripe tomato. He poked at the black gunk in the pie pan and laughed nervously. “It’s not really heroin. It’s hash.”
The Guru declared that he needed one of Red’s sodas and so we trooped inside the farmhouse. I was surprised by the interior. I guess I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t rustic or country; it was totally suburban. There were two large mismatched couches, a few overstuffed chairs, and a shag carpet in some kind of wretched autumnal color. It was like a classic rec room from the 1970s, the slightly musty den where young men sat around on their granny’s old furniture smoking weed and watching television—which was, I suspected, pretty much what went on here.
A box of shotgun shells and a shotgun rested on the fireplace mantle, but I didn’t find that unusual out in the boonies. What did strike me as strange was the fat little quail chirping away in a cage. A handwritten sign identified him as “Topper.” Topper seemed to like the company. He chirped and hopped around, making the little oddball plume on top of his head wiggle and bob.
I watched Topper as several more bowls of Ghost OG were consumed and a few brave souls tried Red’s hash.
And then it was time to walk.
Red picked up the shotgun and took the lead. He kept the gun at the ready and by way of explanation said, “It’s been a bad year for snakes.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard that.”
Apparently it was also a bad year for bears and mountain lions. Crockett pointed out a big pile of fresh shit just off the trail. “Bear.”
I began to think that Red needed a bigger gun. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know much about wildlife or survival. I’m the opposite of that Survivorman guy on TV who gets dropped into remote areas to live off the land. But I can, perhaps unlike the Special Forces–trained survival experts, drop into any restaurant in the world and find something to eat. I can read a menu, whatever the language, like a Native American tracker reads the woods. Maître’d’s and sommeliers don’t scare me. What does give me a moment of hesitation is strolling through rattlesnake-infested scrub for the second time in one day, only this time with the bonus of being stalked by apex predators.
“What happens if we see a bear?”
Crockett smiled. “There’s only one thing you need to take with you to survive a bear or mountain lion attack.”
I took an uneducated guess. “Pepper spray?”
Crockett shook his head. “Someone who’s fatter and slower than you.”
That got a big hoot of laughter from everyone. I discreetly checked out my companions. They were all younger than me but were wearing flip-flops or clunky boots. I could probably beat them in a sprint, especially if the sprint involved avoiding carnivorous predators. It helped that I hadn’t had any of the Ghost OG.
I followed Red and Crockett into a large cluster of manzanitas and pines to find several tall and healthy-looking cannabis plants. Crockett introduced each of them. “That’s Island Sweet Skunk. That’s a Chocolope. Over there are a couple Super Lemon Hazes.”
Even though Crockett has the legal right to grow cannabis in California, he still planted his crops in a discreet, natural pattern, so that they would be hard to detect from the hel
icopters that the DEA and Inter-Agency Task Force fly over the region. It’s a strange position to be in—legal or illegal depending on who’s looking—and not without risk. In one well-known case, a cannabis grower named Bryan Epis was sentenced to ten years—the “minimum mandatory” sentence—in a federal penitentiary for growing plants in his basement, even though he had the legal right to do it in California
We zigzagged through the brush, following deer paths until we found another cluster of vibrant green, healthy-looking plants springing up and swaying in the late-afternoon breeze. I noticed a complex web of irrigation hoses spreading out through the woods.
Several of the plants were a strain Crockett had developed himself, a cross between an OG Kush and Skunk Haze that he sells to dispensaries in Los Angeles.
“This is a variety that we created about ten years ago that I began to call ‘Banana’ because it has a faint banana smell, but because I had mistakenly taken a name that had already been used, we renamed it Private Reserve. But locally, we still call it Banana.”
“You’d think people would be able to copyright names.”
But then I realized that on a federal level it would be difficult to copyright something that’s illegal.
Crockett thought about that for a moment, then shrugged. “I don’t care what they call it. It doesn’t matter to me. I know what it is.”
I have smoked Private Reserve a couple of times and feel like I can say with some confidence that it has all the elements of dankness going for it. It’s got a nice balance of the muscle-relaxing stone of indica and the soaring high of sativa, but what really takes it to the level of dankness is the influence of the Haze, that special genetic something that provides a trippy psychoactive effect. It’s a strain that’s right up there with the best I’ve tried, but outside of a few fans in Los Angeles and the locals in the mountains, it’s unknown.
I was curious how Crockett ended up developing it.
“Where did it come from?”
Crockett lit a cigarette and checked one of the plants as he talked. “I’d been searching for a long time for a particular OG Kush cut, and when I found it, I grew it for a while. It’s called the Ghost OG.”
Heart of Dankness Page 12