“What you guys were smoking.”
Crockett nodded. I looked over and saw Slim trying to shoo a giant grasshopper off of one of the Island Sweet Skunk plants, flailing his arms around like he was doing some kind of stoner kung fu. Instead of just killing the bug, he tried to trap it in his hands and relocate it. But the grasshopper wasn’t cooperating and kept jumping around. Slim couldn’t hide his frustration.
“Come on, little guy. Let’s find you a different plant. C’mon.”
Crockett stood and moved to check another plant.
“I like the Ghost cut because of the nug size and the yield. It’s not a huge yield, but for an OG it’s good. I mixed it with a local skunk variety we’ve been growing around here for years, which is actually an ancestor of the Haze that everybody in Amsterdam is crazy over. It’s a mix between those two, and the genetics that came out of it were just incredible. It’s just a freak of nature.”
“What made you think of crossing them?”
“I thought they would cross well because they’re just such different spectrums. The OG is so indica and the Skunk Haze is so sativa. The Kush cut was probably eight or nine years old when I got it and the seeds from the Skunk Haze are from back in the early seventies.”
The timeline is right. Haze seeds from Santa Cruz circa early 1970s could be the original Haze Brothers Haze. Crockett continued talking while he checked one of his irrigation hoses.
“I wanted to mix that Skunk Haze with something because I knew it was something that no one else had. It’s really unique.”
He smiled, unable to hide the fact that he’s proud of his creation. “And now I’ve got something that no one else has.”
He carefully stubbed his cigarette out in the dirt and turned to me. “I’d like to enter that sucker in the Cannabis Cup.”
I think Private Reserve would do well in Holland, and I say so. “The competition’s fierce, but I think you’d have a shot.”
Crockett didn’t agree that the competition is all that tough.
“When I was in Holland I’d go to these world-famous places and get world-famous weed.” He made air quotes around the words “world famous” as he spoke. “I’d take it back to the hotel and, to be honest with you, the similarities in them all, the effect in them …”
He paused and tried to articulate his concerns.
“A lot of them were so cerebral, they’re breeding out so much of the indica, that you don’t even know you’re stoned. You just feel confused. It seemed like the effects were so light, I felt, I don’t know … I was looking for something more. I really wanted to get annihilated one night and I couldn’t do it.”
Private Reserve or Banana or whatever you want to call it had a fascinating pedigree—it sure tasted like it might be related to the Haze you get in Amsterdam—but I was curious if it truly was the direct descendant of the original Santa Cruz Haze that Neville and/or Sam the Skunkman took back to Holland.
Crockett smiled. “Wait till you meet Jerry.”
• • •
We got back to the farmhouse just in time to see an old Volkswagen minivan come bouncing up the dirt road. The van squeaked to a stop—the hand brake ratcheting in that distinct VW way—and then the side door slid open and unleashed canine pandemonium. Five Australian shepherds came pouring out in a gray and white and black-spotted explosion of barks and yips.
Jerry creakily climbed out after them, carefully lowering his feet to the ground. He looked to be in his early seventies, although it was hard to tell for sure. A giant tangle of gray beard obscured his face and he wore oversized glasses with Coke bottle lenses that grew darker or lighter depending on the sunlight.
Jerry gave Crockett a friendly wave and walked toward us in a kind of happy-go-lucky old coot skank, like he had a reggae song rumbling around in his cranium. He didn’t move like an old man, and he was definitely not about to spend the afternoon playing bingo down at the senior center. Jerry’s a hippie, one of the originals. He’s an acid-battered and deeply fried member of the tie-dyed tribe who still walks the walk and talks the talk. When he’s not growing weed, he performs the most noble of all hippie occupations: He is a Volkswagen mechanic. He wears it proudly, too. His hands and face and clothes and hair were covered in grease and oil. The dogs swirled around me, banging their noses into my body, giving me the canine version of a cavity search. Jerry shook my hand warmly, leaving my fingers with a faint trace of motor oil. He sighed and sat down on the front step of the farmhouse and began polishing a piece of engine, something he called a “rocker bearing,” with a filthy rag.
The dogs growled at one another and fought for attention. I was scratching the head of one and another came up and unleashed a menacing growl until the dog I was petting slunk into a submissive position. The growler then presented his head for me to pet. I fought the impulse to smack him. I’ve never liked bullies.
“What’s with this guy?” I asked.
Jerry laughed. “Oh, he’s an asshole. That’s why I didn’t get him fixed. I don’t know why, but I love my asshole dog.”
The asshole dog went over to Jerry and plopped down on the dirt. The other male was quickly back by my leg, and I resumed scratching him behind his ears.
A breeze had kicked up from the valley and it was suddenly very pleasant to sit outside in the shade and shoot the shit. A pipe had been lit, too. Another round of Ghost OG was passed among the group as Crockett, the Guru, E, Slim, and Red sat around petting the dogs and listening to Jerry tell stories. Jerry enjoyed reminiscing. His eyes lit up when he talked about the good old days of California, a bygone era when the dope was plentiful, the sexual revolution was in full swing, and the music was psychedelic.
Jerry has always grown marijuana. He didn’t always sell it. Mostly he grew it for himself and his friends, constantly keeping a couple of plants going in the backyard in Santa Cruz or Mendocino or wherever he found himself. The bag of Haze seeds from the 1970s that Crockett used to make his Private Reserve strain came from Jerry. According to the story, it was part of a load that was flown by a pilot Jerry was friendly with. The pilot would fly down to Mexico in a Cessna Piper Cub, going under the radar, and pick up a plane load of weed. His memories are foggy on the details, but Jerry thinks this particular pot was picked up in the city of Monterrey in northern Mexico. It was just good Mexican sativa with a little something special about it. That’s all anyone knows about the origins of Haze.
I asked Jerry if they used the word “dank” back in the day. He shook his head. “Never heard that word. We just called good dope”—his voice trailed off—“we called it good dope. Good weed. We didn’t really have a word for it.” He cracked a smile and chuckled. “Just having some was good.”
The long day of covert ops and cheeseburgers and unlimited amounts of Ghost OG was finally taking its toll. People were mellowing out. Heads drooped and even the constantly twitchy Slim was having trouble keeping his eyes open.
I hadn’t smoked anything and the Guru took pity on me, rolling a joint of Jillybean, a strain developed by a female strain breeder named MzJill at TGA Subcool Seeds. Jillybean is a cross between a rare Pacific Northwest Orange Skunk clone and a strain called Space Queen. It’s a nice mix of indica and sativa and isn’t nearly as heavy as the Ghost OG. In fact, Jillybean is delicious, tasting of citrus and mango candy. It’s sometimes prescribed for treatment of depression, and I have to admit that smoking a little took my mind off the strange burning sensation that was starting to flicker across my arms; the first warning signs of an impending poison-oak outbreak. I reminded myself not to scratch until I could get in a cold shower.
Jerry continued to smoke the Ghost OG and polish the rocker bearing as he described his rich and varied career in the drug trade. For a while he and a friend had had a tabbing machine and specialized in producing high-quality blotter LSD. He moved on to making PCP until an explosion blew the wall off the rented house they were using in the suburbs.
When he wasn’t playing with hom
e chemistry or giving tune-ups to Beetles and minibuses, he worked as a smuggler. He and a couple of his friends used to borrow a boat and sail loads of pot between Santa Cruz, Mendocino, and the San Francisco Bay. His smuggling career ended when, on a stormy day, in an ocean surging with large swells, they missed the channel markers and ran the boat into a sandbar. The boat split in two and sank before they even had a chance to untie the life vests from the railing where they’d been secured. Jerry and his companions treaded water in the surge, trying not to get sucked further out by the tide or bashed into an outcropping of rocks by the waves. They were eventually plucked out of the water by the U.S. Coast Guard. They were even interviewed by a local news crew after their daring rescue.
Jerry finished telling the story and shook his head with a wry chuckle.
“Oh, boy. That was a bad day to take acid.”
An hour later I drove up the winding two-lane road toward Sequoia National Park where I’d rented a cabin for the night. The sun was starting to set and the tops of the massive trees were splashed with a glimmering golden light. It was truly one of the most beautiful landscapes I have ever seen.
The cabin itself was rustic, but not as rustic as some of the tent cabins that were available. I had electricity. I had a shower. I wouldn’t have to worry about mountain lions or bears, and thanks to the local market I had a couple of bottles of ice cold beer. Now this was a kind of camping I could get behind.
I followed the Guru’s instructions and put my poison oak–contaminated clothes in a plastic bag, careful to avoid contact with the chairs or bed or anything else that I might sit on, because apparently the powerful oil called “urushiol” that rubs off the plant and causes extreme allergic reactions stays active on clothing until you run them through a washer. I felt like one of those bomb squad specialists in a film, moving extremely carefully, unsure whether to cut the blue or the red wire, not wanting to spread the toxin.
I drank a beer and felt a little better, then took an ice cold shower. Hot water allegedly opens your pores and allows the urushiol to penetrate your skin, so I stood there, engaged in extreme exfoliation, scrubbing my entire body with soap, hoping that the frigid mountain water would rinse away as much of the poison as possible. It was not nearly as fun as it sounds.
I got out of the shower and warmed myself with a second beer. I felt confident that I had removed every last bit of poison oak, or at least I had removed the skin that was exposed to the urushiol. A week later I learned, in painfully graphic terms, that I had not scrubbed nearly hard enough.
I went to the park’s restaurant for dinner and found it full of French tourists. They sat staring at the menus as if they were completely incomprehensible. The menu itself was simple American food: steaks, pasta, chicken, and the house special, the aptly named “Sequoia Burger.” I ordered a Cobb salad and another beer and watched as a French father, looking Euro-suave in white pants and matching white polo shirt, attempted to order for his family. He pointed at the menu and spoke as clearly and carefully as he could.
“We would like zis ’am-burg-AIR.”
The waitress nodded like a happy poodle, her ponytail swishing in the air.
“The Sequoia Burger?”
The Frenchman looked suddenly perplexed, as if something had gone horribly wrong. He turned to his wife, equally suave and attractive in a navy blue dress, for help. She smiled at the waitress and attempted to order.
“The ’am-burg-ER.”
I admired her attempt at deciphering the nuances of the English language. Was it hamburg-AIR or hamburg-ER? She looked at the waitress expectantly. The waitress held her pen next to her order pad, ready to write.
“The Sequoia Burger?”
The French couple exchanged a worried look and consulted each other in rapid French. I wondered if the waitress had some kind of passive-aggressive disorder. The Sequoia Burger was the only hamburger on the menu.
Chapter Twelve
Natural’s Not in It
The next morning Crockett took me to see a giant sequoia called the General Grant. I’m not really sure what it means to name a massive, ancient, and awe-inspiring sequoia after the whiskey-soaked curmudgeon on the fifty-dollar bill, but it certainly is an impressive tree. It stood more than 270 feet tall, which is up there, but what was truly mind-blowing was the size of the trunk—it’s 107 feet in diameter. It’s as wide as a house and looks a lot like a cross between a magical tree in a Miyazaki film and a large booster rocket NASA might’ve built. The General Grant is just under two thousand years old, a relative teenager for a giant sequoia. Some of the other sequoias are thought to be more than three thousand years old. That means that around about the time the Roman Empire ruled the world, these trees were already well established in the Sierra Nevada.
I’d been thinking a lot about plants and what “dank” might mean. From everything I’d learned so far, it seemed like dankness was a kind of natural perfection, the peak expression of a plant’s genetic destiny: a perfect peach or a tomato picked at the absolute moment of ripeness. Dankness could mean a flower at its fullest bloom—which for a flower would be its sexual peak—or maybe it could be a massive tree that has watched over the mountains for more than two thousand years.
Crockett and I sat at a picnic table under a grove of tall sugar pines. He smoked a cigarette while I watched a handicapped squirrel forage for food. The squirrel looked like he’d been run over by a car at some point in his life—perhaps during his careless teen years—and now his back legs didn’t work. But the excess baggage didn’t slow him down; he cheerfully dragged himself from trunk to table and back again, leaving skid marks instead of paw prints.
I jumped when I heard a loud crack. A pinecone the size of a bowling ball had just come crashing down, cratering into the dirt like a meteorite. I looked up at the trees and noticed that they were full of pinecones. These weren’t the cute, decorative pinecones that you spray paint gold and arrange as a festive centerpiece for your holiday dinner. These were killer pinecones, the size of footballs, dangling on branches more than a hundred feet in the air.
“Should we move?”
Crockett laughed and stubbed his cigarette out in the dirt. “The big sugar pinecones, now they won’t hurt so much ’cause they’re opened up and dry, but in the winter, when they’re big and green and the snow weighs them down, they send people to the hospital every year.”
He looked up at the trees and grinned. “But, hey, this is where the biggest stuff in the world grows.”
A loud squawk reverberated through the forest.
“We also have the world’s biggest woodpeckers.”
Like I said, he’s a mountain man. But I wanted to get him back on topic. “So if I want to be a top-notch pot farmer, what’s the first thing I need to know?”
Crockett lit another cigarette. “The first thing you gotta do is create or find superior genetics. That’s the name of the game.”
This is the opposite of what the botanists in Amsterdam told me; to guys like Franco and Aaron it’s all about how you grow.
“I’d heard it was all about the care and feeding of the plant. You know? How you grow them is what’s important.”
Crockett nodded. “For sure, for sure. But I truly believe, and this is gonna flip every commercial grower out, that fertilizer is the least important thing in growing. The most important thing is environment. The environment minus medium.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Environment?”
“Everything from air flow, temperature, and CO2, to the atmosphere you create.”
“You mean you play classical music to the plants?”
He laughed. “Hey, if that works for you, do it.”
He decided he needed to show me, so we get in his truck and drove down the mountain to visit one of his indoor grow rooms.
Although Crockett is a big proponent of terroir and growing outdoors in the crisp mountain air, farming that way limits the growing season. And like with most things
of high quality, the demand outstrips the supply, so he has built several state-of-the-art indoor rooms that allow him to harvest year-round.
I’ve seen a lot of indoor grow rooms, ranging from a small, one-light operation tucked into the closet of a studio apartment in Amsterdam to an industrial warehouse filled with thousands of plants. It doesn’t matter how big or how small they are; they all look like something from a science fiction movie, like how cosmonauts might farm on a space station.
Maybe it’s because the indoor lights give off an unnatural glow—which is strange because they’re supposed to mimic the full spectrum of natural sunlight—or the fact that the walls, floors, and ceilings are often painted white with silver Mylar–covered vents and ducts hanging from the ceiling and dangling off walls.
It reminds me of 2001: A Space Odyssey. You know, the scene where Dr. David Bowman floats through the guts of the machine to disconnect HAL, the renegade computer. I don’t know why, but whenever I’m in a grow room, I expect to hear some patronizingly calm computer talk to me.
It seems unnatural that plants could grow so vigorously in such a sterile, controlled environment. But they do. They grow like crazy. By providing optimum nutrients and constant, full-spectrum lighting, indoor growers have succeeded in coaxing cannabis plants to their fullest expression. A typical indoor plant will have dense nuggets of buds frosted with the tiny resin-laden hairs that go by the botanical name of “trichomes” but are more commonly referred to as “crystal” because they are clear and somewhat shiny. Trichomes are almost pure THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. People are always talking about how the “new marijuana” is stronger than anything they ever smoked before, and that’s due to the increased trichome production caused by indoor growing.
There’s a delicious irony in this because it was the U.S. government’s intensified “war on drugs” with its threat of “zero tolerance” and harsh “mandatory minimum” prison terms that caused farmers to move their crops inside. The DEA crackdown led to a boost in potency and a boom in demand for high-quality genetics.
Heart of Dankness Page 13