Heart of Dankness

by Mark Haskell Smith

  He was also super articulate and passionate when it came to matters involving cannabis and cannabis breeding. Unlike self-taught breeders Don and Aaron, Reeferman has a bachelor of science degree in agriculture and worked as a researcher for the Canadian Department of Soil Science at the Agassiz research station in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. With his training, experience, and unapologetic love for cannabis (“I just love the way the plant smells,” he said. “I like the smell of it better than smoking it.”), it was only a matter of time before he turned his attention to full-time strain breeding and seed production.

  I was surprised to see him at the convention. I had heard rumors that he’d quit the scene and stopped producing seeds. He was supposedly in a self-imposed exile, his strains unavailable. The truth was much worse than the rumors. A couple of years ago, the Canadian police raided his Saskatchewan farm, confiscated his land and livestock, left his wife and kids homeless, and threw him in jail for illegal cannabis cultivation. He served four months of his sentence in the oldest, and worst, prison in Canada before being released.

  When he got out, Reeferman was left with nothing. He left Canada and started over in Mexico, finding the Vicente Fox administration tolerant of cannabis agriculture and commerce. When Felipe Calderón became president, his government expressed a less supportive view.

  Reeferman moved again, this time to Colombia to set up greenhouses. But South America isn’t a great climate for bear-like Canadians, so when the Canadian government began issuing licenses for legal medical marijuana growers, Reeferman saw it as a call to return to his homeland. He now has one hundred acres of agricultural land in a small town called Moose Jaw.

  Reeferman speaks with a soft, assured, and thickly Canadian voice. He admitted he doesn’t attend many conventions and wasn’t planning to come to this one, but it was “the first one in Canada and I wanted to be supportive.” He also had good business reasons. He was introducing a new line of high-end liquid nutrients called “Love Potion,” produced by his company, Maple Reef Plant Products, and he was at the expo with his new sales rep, a British seed distributor called Seedsman.

  I asked him if he was planning on entering the Cannabis Cup. He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got a strain called Cherry Haze that I’m thinking about entering.”

  There it is. A fruit flavor mixed with Haze. Coming from a breeder as talented as Reeferman, BC Bud has a good chance of causing an upset in Amsterdam.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sticky Fingers

  “Dude, do you know the pterodactyl?”

  Red rocked back in his chair, a large bud of freshly dried Island Sweet Skunk in one hand, a pair of small Fiskars scissors in the other, and a big goofy grin spreading across his face.

  “You mean the flying dinosaur?” I asked.

  Red’s face flushed. He shook his head and laughed.

  “No. No, it’s a …” He stopped short, his face glowing even brighter. “Guess.”

  Red giggled and blushed some more, rocked forward on his chair, and added the bud to a pile of freshly trimmed buds that lay on the table in front of him. Based on the fact that his face had turned tomato red, I made an educated guess. “Is it some kind of sex thing?”

  Red stammered. “It’s a … you … ha …”

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell me what kind of pterodactyl he was talking about.

  Luckily, one of the other trimmers in the room was happy to oblige. A portly young Latino named Chuva leaped out of his chair. “It’s like this, man.”

  He stood and spread his arms, like he was being frisked by the police.

  “You got one guy in front, suckin’ you off, while another guy comes up and does you from behind.” Chuva waved his arms, adding a flourish, then stood perfectly still like a gymnast who’s just stuck a landing, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. “The pterodactyl.”

  Chuva took a bow as Red erupted into a fit of laughter, cackling and rocking back dangerously, his legs pumping up and down in delight. Chuva smiled, pleased with his performance, and then plopped back in his chair, picked up a bud, and resumed trimming.

  So this was a trimming operation.

  It had been my intention to come back to the Sierra Nevada to help Crockett with his outdoor harvest, but the threat of thunderstorms on Monday had meant that he had been forced to pull all but a few plants early. That’s the gamble that outdoor farmers face: The plants were ripe, ready to be harvested, and yet another sunny day would’ve made them even better. Now, on Wednesday, the majority of the plants were hanging upside down on wires in a large, open barn, drying before being trimmed.

  Crockett, who’d been busy weighing the trimmed buds and sorting them into cardboard bins while the pterodactyl demonstration was occurring, looked at me. “You see why I don’t spend a lot of time in this room.”

  It wasn’t really a room. The trimming operation was set up in what might’ve been an old garage but was now a fine example of the architectural style know as rural slapdash.

  In addition to Red and Chuva, the trim team included Quay and R.J. They would be joined in a day or two by Cletus “The Dingo” McKlusky and someone named Shlev Dog. They were all young men in their twenties, hipster migrant workers, gypsy stoners, members of a loose fraternity of experts in the art of taking twelve-foot-tall cannabis plants and cutting away everything but the gleaming crystal-coated buds. To say that there’s a demand for skilled trimmers in California is an understatement. Between outdoor crops harvested in the fall and indoor grow rooms constantly cycling new plants, expert bud barbers can be as busy as they want to be.

  The plants hung behind them, upside down, like sides of beef, and the trimmers took turns breaking them down—stripping away the stalks and stems. They separated the buds from the stems and then meticulously manicured them, snipping off as much of the leaf as they could before putting the trimmed buds into special drying racks. Any part of the plant that wasn’t the dried buds was swept off the table and into a large clean cooler. It’s important to keep these excess leaves clean and dust free until they can be processed into hash. Nothing is wasted. The room was, for all intents and purposes, a cannabis abattoir.

  Individual work lights illuminated each man at his station, as they kept one eye on the task at hand and another on the flicker from a TV set that seemed to constantly play episodes of Beavis and Butt-head.

  Chuva tried to teach me how to trim. “Look. Keep the scissors in one spot and move the bud.”

  He’s an expert. His scissors moved in rapid-fire snips, like a sewing machine. He looked up at me without breaking from his rhythm. “I don’t even need to look. It’s all feel.”

  I sat down and tried it. The buds had more resin than I expected, gumming up the scissors and sticking to my fingers. It was like trying to eat pancakes and syrup with your hands. My first attempt at trimming looked distinctly like a squashed tater tot. I held it up for Chuva.

  “How’s this?”

  Chuva shook his head. “You’re too careful. You got to get in there.”

  He demonstrated, deftly buzzing off the leaves and reshaping my pathetic attempt into a perfect crystal-coated bud. I picked up another stem and tried again.

  A good trimmer can make two to four hundred dollars a day, depending on how much they trim. The work is paid by the pound, and an expert can churn out two pounds of bud in a tento twelve-hour day. There are trim crews that travel around, working together job to job—I’ve heard of a famous all-lesbian trim crew that does exquisite work—and then there are the ronin—masterless samurai—trimmers who wander the countryside with scissors in their pockets, ready to pick up whatever work comes their way.

  A harvest like the one Crockett had brought in, eighty to ninety plants, would take a team of trimmers a couple of weeks to process. It’s monotonous work, akin to gutting fish at a cannery, but the boredom is relieved by an unlimited supply of premium cannabis to smoke, by Beavis and Butt-Head, and by jokes about imaginary sexual positions.
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br />   The trimmers were all staying in the farmhouse and Crockett had hired a cook to keep them well fed and happy. There was even a snack table filled with cookies, crackers, gum, sodas, and beer, similar to a craft service table you’d find on a movie set.

  “I do whatever I can to make their life easy,” Crockett said.

  That’s because no matter how good the genetics are, no matter how much care was taken to grow the plants, if they’re trimmed to look like lumpy and deformed tater tots—if they don’t have “bag appeal”—then Crockett isn’t going to get a good price for his crop.

  Farmers who grow outdoors have to battle gophers, bears, the weather, mold, insects, DEA agents in helicopters, and just bad luck. To survive all that, harvest a bunch of healthy plants, and then have an amateur trimmer destroy the buds is unthinkable.

  This was what was on my mind as I mangled another bud. I looked over at Crockett. He was pretending not to notice, but I could tell that he had a calculator running inside his head, watching his profit margin diminish with every snip of my scissors.

  Chuva decided to take a break and loaded some dry-sift hash into a bong. He had scraped his scissors every now and then, collecting blobs of resin he called “scissor hash.” He looked at me. “You smoke hash?”

  I nodded.

  “You smoke weed?”

  “Of course.”

  Chuva shook his head. I had somehow disappointed him.

  “I don’t smoke weed,” he said.

  He flicked his lighter and ignited the hash, taking in a huge, if somewhat contradictory, hit.

  “Why not?”

  Chuva exhaled and jumped up from his chair shouting, “Because plant material fucks you up!”

  He put the bong down, sat back in his chair, and fixed me with a glassy look. “You know what I’m saying?”

  “Not really.”

  Chuva settled into his seat and adopted a professorial tone. “Take tobacco. It’s plant material.” He spread his hands out, palms uplifted in a questioning shrug. “What does it do?” he asked.

  “Give you cancer?” I said.

  He nodded. “It irritates your throat, irritates your lungs. Plant material fucks you up.”

  Chuva looked over at the other trimmers and cocked an eyebrow. “What is cancer?”

  He was asking the entire room. I know a rhetorical question when I hear one so instead of saying something about malignant cells, I just watched. Chuva waited, making sure we were all paying attention, and then continued.

  “I’ll tell you what it is. Cancer is an irritation that took on a life of its own. And that’s why I don’t smoke weed.” He picked up a bud and resumed trimming. “Plant material fucks you up.”

  The sound of a car crunching on the gravel driveway interrupted us, and Crockett waved for me to come with him. We were both happy for me to stop destroying perfectly good buds, so I followed him out and watched as Slim and his wife, Natasha, pulled up in their SUV.

  Slim uncoiled his lanky body, emerging from the car in stages. I’d forgotten how tall he is. Natasha said hello, then went into the house cradling a Crock-Pot. Slim and Crockett immediately set about rolling a joint. Crockett was worried that they needed more trimmers and suggested they bring down some people they knew from Humboldt County. Slim nodded thoughtfully; he was going to defer to Crockett on this.

  Red’s dog, a coyote-mutt hybrid, trotted toward us emitting a strange kazoo-like sound. At first I thought he was moaning or maybe he had a bone stuck in his throat, but then I realized that the strange sound was coming from the dog’s ass. Slim laughed and turned to me, explaining. “He snuck into the house last night and ate two big pepperoni pizzas right off the table. I don’t think he’s feeling so good right now.”

  As if to offer proof of his misery, the dog lifted his tail into the shape of a question mark and began to fart some more. The small pops and sputters bursting from the dog’s anus picked up momentum and the uninterrupted stream of canine flatulence lasted for almost thirty seconds. It sounded like a tire with a slow leak. The dog hung his head and whimpered.

  Slim chuckled and shook his finger. “Maybe that’ll teach you.”

  Crockett passed the joint to Slim and looked up at the sky. There was an ominous black cloud looming over the top of the mountains, and you could see gray sheets of cold rain draped along the ridge line. Earlier one of the park rangers had told me there was a small chance of snow or sleet—something that was not unusual for mid-October in the Sierras—and yet, oddly, it was warm and sunny where we were standing.

  Crockett scratched his beard. Was he willing to let it ride? Or was he going to yank the last few plants? With each plant capable of producing several pounds of high-quality bud, there were thousands of dollars at risk by leaving them out in a potential storm.

  Crockett turned to Slim.

  “Jerry thinks the plants could stay in another couple days, but I think with this weather, we might want to pull ’em.”

  Slim shrugged. “Let’s go take a look.”

  We walked down a dirt road toward a large stand of manzanitas that shielded the plants from high winds and snooping DEA helicopters. And, as if I were in some kind of recurring nightmare, Crockett told me to watch out for rattlesnakes as we moved off the trail and into the woods. I nodded. “Yeah, I heard it’s a bad year for snakes.” Slim offered this encouraging thought, “You never see ’em until you see ’em. I don’t know why that is.”

  I suddenly missed Red and his shotgun.

  We cut through the manzanitas and bear clover and reached a couple of large Island Sweet Skunk plants standing in the sun. The plants were easily ten feet tall, probably taller, with large colas—the Spanish word for “tail” that’s used to describe the long clusters of buds—jutting out in every direction. The plants were majestic, really, healthy and green. They had attained their peak expression.

  I was impressed by the plants, but what really struck me, something I hadn’t experienced in an indoor grow room, was the smell. The scent coming off the buds was rich and strong and delicious. It reminded me of a musky, ripe pineapple.

  Crockett and Slim examined the buds, checking the resin and looking for signs of mold. They decided they’d wait and see how the weather progressed. If it got bad, these were coming out right away.

  I followed them through some pines and poison oak—the leaves now yellow—to a couple of beautiful Super Lemon Haze plants. The leaves were a vibrant green and the plants looked like Christmas trees, each with a large dominant cola rising off the top. These also gave off an intense aroma, but the Super Lemon Haze scent was distinct, spiked with robust citrus overtones. The plants don’t smell sweet like roses or orange blossoms; cannabis fragrance has a different, deeper dimension. I finally understood why botanists Reeferman and Aaron of DNA say they like the smell of the plants just as much as the smoke.

  Crockett squeezed the buds, checking for density. “These are close.”

  Slim came over and examined the plant. “But it could use another day.”

  I asked them if their clients, the medical marijuana dispensaries in L.A., paid more for the Super Lemon Haze. Crockett laughed.

  “These aren’t for sale. These are personal use only.”

  Crockett is part of a continuum that stretches back in time for almost ten thousand years. According to author Martin Booth in his exhaustively researched book Cannabis: A History, “Quite possibly, the first cannabis farming occurred in far western China or Chinese Turkestan. The oldest existing historical records and subsequent archaeological evidence, though not extensive, seem to support the theory that cannabis was being grown at the dawn of Chinese civilization.”

  With the stalks used for fiber to make paper, fabric, and rope; the seeds used for oil and food; and the flowers and leaves used for medicinal and spiritual practice, it’s really no big surprise that this useful and versatile plant was cultivated by almost every culture in the world.

  It helps that cannabis is incredibly hardy an
d grows almost anywhere. It can thrive in tropical and temperate climates, in poor soil, and with minimal water. It grows in equatorial jungles and at altitudes as high as eight thousand feet.

  Cannabis is grown in the Himalayan highlands of India and the jungles of Cambodia; it’s cultivated in the arid mountains of Morocco and the lush forests of Malawi; in Canada, Jamaica, and throughout Mexico, and in Central and South America. It’s adapted to life on six out of seven continents, and where it’s too frigid or there’s not enough sun for an outdoor crop, the farmers move indoors and the plant adapts. Everywhere it grows, the U.S. government’s “war on drugs” follows, turning farmers into outlaws and making the germination of a seed a criminal act.

  It wasn’t always this way. At the time of the American Revolution, cannabis—or hemp as it was called back then—was one of the principal crops grown in the colonies. The fiber was used for rope, cloth, and paper. According to hemp historian Jack Herer in his book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, “Until 1883, from 75–90% of all paper in the world was made with cannabis hemp fiber including that for books, Bibles, maps, paper money, stocks and bonds, etc.”

  As cannabis activists are quick to point out—and never tire of saying—the original Declaration of Independence was drafted on hemp paper. Hemp seed oil was commonly used in lamps and was pressed into a nutritious vegetable oil. As medical science advanced, Cannabis indica became one of the most common ingredients used in pharmacology to treat a wide range of symptoms for both humans and domesticated animals.

  So what happened that turned the U.S. government against such a practical and useful plant? People began using it for fun.

  Isn’t that always the way? Once a party kicks off, some Puritan screams “Turn it down” and calls the cops. To make matters worse, it was “foreigners”—Mexicans and blacks—who used the plant for recreation.