Marcus had driven slowly and cautiously onto the couple’s secluded property, located a half hour’s drive along a dirt road up in the hills above the small, Gold-Rush era community of Myer’s Flat in the heart of the Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt Redwoods State Park.
Four longhaired llamas munched at tall grasses that almost hid a herd of dwarf goats and some sort of small breed of fluffy sheep that were grazing in fenced pastures along the left side of the house. Dense wooded areas of Douglas firs, companion trees to the giant redwoods reached above the outer edges of the secluded homestead.
A fragrant scent of blue-green fir needles brought to mind the Christmas trees of my childhood. Each December the old man would cut down a suitable tree from the far reaches of the ranch and Bridget and I were given the job of decorating it with popcorn strings and childish homemade ornaments we’d made at school from corks and ribbon and hammered tin lids. These were some of the happier memories of my otherwise austere childhood.
Andres on the other hand, he’d hated the sticky residue of fir tree needles on a polished hardwood floor, depriving me, in turn of the simple aromatic pleasures of even the smallest of fresh evergreens. When he finally moved out, just as the holidays were approaching, I watched, somewhat bemused as he took with him a box containing the small, fake, tabletop tree he favored with its white lights and a monotone of matte silver baubles attached to the box in a clear plastic bag. Good riddance to that.
“Lori says you’ve been here a good long while,” I ventured, after we made our introductions. “Your own slice of paradise,” I said, focusing back in on the here and now. There’d be no shortage of fir trees to fell for a country Christmas on this property.
“Lizzie and me were among the first growers in the region,” Jack replied. “Counted ourselves a part of the eco-conscious homesteader movement after migrating up here in the late 1960s.” They were the embodiment of the Northern California cannabis pioneers we’d talked about with Bobby not an hour before his death.
There was no evidence in their place of peeling paint or any other signs of the dilapidation of the ramshackle McCleery homestead.
“We keep a large flock of heritage chickens and bees,” Lizzie followed my gaze to the basket of fresh eggs with an assortment of soft colors, pale blue, green, reddish, brown and white she carried. “No use of pesticides here. Any fertilizers we employ are natural by-products of the farm.”
Jack offered to take us on a tour. I was surprised by how upfront he was with us seeing as he had only just met us. “We consider this a way of life rather than a business,” he explained. “At first, we snuck a few cannabis plants in behind the tomatoes at the back of the chicken house to make ourselves some much needed extra money. None of us had any idea how the industry would eventually monopolize.”
Our hosts were of similar height and body type. If they hadn’t at first, they’d grown to look alike as they lived and loved and toiled the depths of the redwood forest all those years, their kind, weathered faces inset with two pairs of same-colored, watery eyes, the shade of robin’s eggs. They’d each tied their long white hair in the same efficient style of a pair of neat, thick braids that hung from the backs of their slim and sun-wrinkled necks.
“And is your grow organic?” I asked. Lizzie shook her head, explaining how they followed the concept of biodynamic growing over full-on organic. “Official government approved organic designation is not applicable to cannabis,” Jack explained as they walked us over to the now dormant outdoor grow behind their home, his strong, bony hands fastened on narrow hips. “No matter the state and local laws, cannabis is still an illegal crop in the eyes of the Feds,” he said.
Biodynamic cannabis, however, is grown outdoors, under the sun, throughout the full course of a natural growing season. “It’s the biodynamic element that allows for the full flowering of the plant’s healing properties,” Jack concluded, evidently proud of his stance on growing the really good stuff. “This makes our crop suitable for medicinal use,” he said.
As we turned back toward the house, he spoke of the new wave of growers who continue to arrive in the area to set up shop. “They’re all about the business of hydroponics these days, employing grow lamps and plant food for fast turnaround — indoor grows.”
Jack told us how these swelling numbers of indoor grow operations has heavily impacted their view of the night sky. “The glow,” he said. “It’s an abomination.”
I felt for them, for Lizzie and Jack, their gentle way of life, pretty much over and from no wrongdoing on their part.
“Damn, that’s a shame,” Marcus said.
“Those who’ve moved in more recently with their fancy new trucks are more motivated by their winter vacations in Costa Rica than their neighbor’s nighttime stargazing activities. And those are the good ones,” he said.
Lizzie estimated at least a third of cannabis grown in the state of California is produced indoors, today. “Can you imagine the impact? This is nine percent of the state’s electricity use we’re talking about,” she said.
“The green rush,” Jack explained, looking out at the horizon of treetops: “as it surely should be known as, is a direct result of too many cannabis growers cashing in before it is fully legalized.”
Lori had sent us to Lizzie and Jack as founding members of a group of concerned growers connected throughout the Emerald Triangle, known to be comfortable in taking matters into their own hands.
“We’ve heard of your service to your community,” Marcus said, broaching the subject. “I’d imagine there is strength in numbers when you’re dealing with such a changing landscape.”
“The main mission of our grower’s group is to encourage as many of the new arrivals as possible to grow a biodynamic crop, outdoors. For us, it’s a moral issue,” Jack replied.
“As a group, we’ve pooled our resources to help buy tanks to store water for the summer months,” Lizzie added. “It’s a big part of our conservation efforts.”
Inside their wood paneled, art filled home, we sat over steaming mugs of lemon verbena tea and a plate of Lizzie’s homemade oatmeal cookies, three of which Marcus inhaled in rapid succession.
“I learned to bake from necessity,” Lizzie said, chuckling. “Sometimes we go for a couple of weeks between trips to the store.”
I bit into one of Lizzie’s delicious cookies and an image of Mia, malnourished, deprived of anything close to the comfortable room we were cozied up in ramped up a sense of urgency of what we were doing there. My throat tightened. I swallowed hard, discreetly wrapping the rest of my cookie in a napkin.
I looked at Marcus. His jaw dropped as he scanned the gentle craftsmanship of the spacious redwood cabin with its substantial, handcrafted beams, its neat doors and window frames. The touch and feel of Jack’s artistry and expression in his carpentry was a calming tonic for the two of us. I understood how the beauty of the building’s construction and its unassuming decor might appeal to Marcus on some quiet and profound level.
“Like it? I built it myself,” Jack said, picking up on Marcus’ appreciative gaze as the older man slipped his heavy cotton stocking feet from his work boots. He extracted a small knife from its sheath on his belt and placed it onto a narrow shelf on a wall by the table.
Lizzie went back to explaining how moving north had been a cultural shift for their hippie crowd who’d come up from the city together. “It was the first time since the original homesteaders staked claim in the region in the late eighteen hundreds that any ranch land had come on the market. The larger properties were carved up for subdivision into smaller parcels,” she said.
“It was nothing to snap up a hundred acres, back then,” Jack added. Marcus looked out of the window, dreamily.
“How did you meet?” I asked.
Jack said: “We were law students at Cal, both of us in our mid-twenties.”
“Stewardship and conservation were part and parcel of the big shift north. We came here to raise our families, to leave
it all behind. To live the good life,” Lizzie added.
“Many of our early neighbors traveled to Mexico, Columbia and Jamaica, as far away as Afghanistan and Pakistan in the late sixties and seventies,” Jack said. “These were the growers who smuggled much of the early marijuana strains into the States.”
“I spent time in Iraq,” Marcus shared. “Kind of ironic. A lot of guys I served with were pining for some good California weed.”
Lizzie reached out and touched his forearm gently. “For us,” she said, “the heyday was the era of these first breeder/growers in the region. Strains were crossed to yield and shorten the growing season.”
“We took the ethos seriously and we did our own policing,” Jack added. “Volunteer sentries were posted on hilltops, they still are, today, to let the community know via CB radio when there is a stranger at large.”
“Most of the mom and pop grow operations such as ours are being forced to industrialize to compete with the corporations coming in and monopolizing the land,” Lizzie said. “We’re being crushed here by corporate takeover of the more remote, former timberland. Jack and me, we’re at the age where we’re close to being done with it. One or two more harvests, maybe, if we’re lucky.”
She talked of a honeymoon period if cannabis is ever fully legalized. “It’s our last hope that the real deal, the biodynamic crops such as ours, that they might somehow be the ones to hold their own against the mass-produced commercial grows,” she said, though the troubled expression on her face, I thought, belied the hopefulness of her sentiment.
“The same was said for the small, independently owned and farmed vineyards in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys,” Jack said. “Truth is, eventually, most of the boutique labels have been swallowed up by the big wine conglomerates.”
“Enough about us,” Lizzie said. “It’s time to talk about the real reason for your visit, your pressing need to find your niece.”
It was hard for me to keep my voice from quavering. Marcus took my hand in his. These warm and hospitable people never even knew we existed until earlier that day — me, Marcus or Mia. And now here we were at their table, discussing the inconceivable and hideous danger Mia was in. There was no more time for niceties.
“As far as we know,” I said: “Mia is being held against her will, degraded, forced into unspeakable acts.”
Nobody spoke. We sipped tea for a minute or two more, our eyes lowered.
“The cartels have destroyed our safe haven,” Lizzie broke the silence. “It’s extremely dangerous here in the forest, Maggie. I’m so very sorry that your niece has been caught up in what sounds to be the worst of it,” she said, reaching for my arm, touching it gently.
Jack circled back around to the subject of recounting their first few decades of farming in the days when a frontier-like attitude of independence had sufficed. “It’s grown completely out of control,” he said. “We’re tired of it, of being robbed and of the raids, a collective blind eye turned toward the missing and worse.”
“We’re not suggesting that it’s impossible to track Mia,” Lizzie reassured. “But you must know that it’s going to be extremely hard to find her given the circumstances.”
Jack spoke, as Lori had, of trespass grows guarded by heavily armed goons. “It started with the Mexican cartels, but it could just as well be an Italian gang, Chinese, or Bulgarian that we’re seeing around town in their striped leisure suits and heavy gold chains.”
Ukranian crime syndicates have also been staking claims on swaths of forestland and vast tracts of private land we heard.
Lizzie laced her slim, bony fingers. She looked around the kitchen she so clearly loved. “Humboldt is no longer the nonviolent place we’d dreamed of,” she said. “The powers that be, they have pretty much given up looking for all of the dead bodies buried out here in the wild.”
“Truth is, we didn’t fully grasp what we had started,” Jack confessed. “Some might say our cult, if you will, of individualism, however indirectly, may have led to this whole scene of unlawfulness that spirals now so utterly out of control.”
“That’s a big statement,” Lizzie intervened. “How could we have known?”
Marcus asked Lizzie how it was the cartels were able to set themselves up in the Emerald Triangle, given that the roads in and out are so remote and so incredibly hard to navigate.
“Think about it,” she said. “An interstate network of highways connects the western states. These highways filter in and narrow down into a vast maze of wilderness that provides the perfect place to hide out.”
“Is it OK if we talk about your trimmers?” I asked. I would need to get into Mia’s head — to think like her if I was to find her.
“Lizzie and me, we take great care of our crews,” Jack said. “Always have done. Each harvest season we set them up with tents, cots, clean sleeping bags, washroom facilities, fresh food, tea, coffee, wine, beer, musical instruments we’ve collected over the years, the regular evening highlight is a batch of Lizzie’s cookies.”
“Sounds good to me,” Marcus said. I tried to picture him in a tent in the redwoods close to rock bottom, isolated, self-medicating, emotionally shutdown. It was hard to reconcile that man with this.
Jack and Lizzie talked of how they’d hired the same all-lesbian crew from Idaho each year for the past few seasons. “They’re terrific workers,” Lizzie said. “They drive here in their own bus. No trouble at all. Good people, the best.”
“We’ve never hired off the street,” she said. “It’s not to be encouraged. It’s not safe for anyone concerned. Your family has unfortunately discovered this.”
“There is no smoking on the job,” Jack said. “It was a deal breaker some seasons in the past, hence the reason why we treat our compliant all-women crew so well.”
“Absolutely no meth, no heroin, no cocaine like you’ll find on a lot of the farms these days,” Lizzie added. “We don’t stand for it.”
They promised to call a meeting with their growing community the following morning to put urgent word out about Mia.
“Good news is, all sorts of folk other than the law are finally talking,” Jack said. “Environmentalists and loggers are now working together on the same side of the fence, first time in the region’s history in an all-out citizen-led effort to combat the cartels,” he added.
None of this was making me feel any more hopeful. It only served to speed up my anxiety to get started in our physically scouring the forest for Mia.
“The obvious crooks, they’re not the only ones who have to be stopped,” Jack said, veering back around to his main beef — environmental impact. “We’re looking for growers that clear-cut through the fauna, killing bears and deer and other animals for food, those who divert water and poison rodents and, in turn our region’s raptors. It’s an epidemic of destruction we’re facing.”
The owners of the region’s larger land properties, Jack explained have started teaming up to track down cartel grows with the employment of private militia. “What they’re looking for is the sorts of telltale signs of trespass grows — highly dangerous toxic mixes laying around in old Gatorade bottles, big volumes of debris and waste.”
“Don’t think for one minute the cartels are the only threat,” Lizzie added. “We expect the same sorts of problems to creep into the environmental crisis when the mega box stores start selling large-scale cannabis.”
After we’d helped clear the table of tea mugs and cookie crumbs, the two of them were back in the kitchen, readying a warming supper of Lizzie’s spicy lentil soup and a loaf of home baked whole wheat bread with butter. What is it about the smell of freshly baked bread? It’s surely the most universally best-loved aroma and Lizzie’s loaf, still warm on the countertop, filled the entire house with the most wonderful sense of home. I made a mental note to someday start making my own bread if life ever settles into any sort of normalcy. Imagine?
“Make yourselves at home,” Lizzie said, “go take a seat in the family room, relax for a
few minutes, you’ll be hitting the road early tomorrow morning, I assume.”
Marcus had his eye on a vintage acoustic guitar propped on a metal stand in the corner of the room next to a faded, green velvet couch. We sat side by side, nestled among a set of needlework cushions depicting California wildflowers. Jack had noticed Marcus eyeing the guitar.
“Go ahead,” he motioned. “You play?”
“Sort of. I learned a couple of songs during my time in Iraq,” Marcus replied. “Never had the opportunity to play before joining up and I haven’t had my hands on one since,” he said, standing up from the couch and extracting the guitar from its stand as gently as if it was a small child. He sat himself down on a side chair, strumming and twisting his fingers on the chords, sliding his hand to the higher frets.
“The heaviness of the wood feels good in my hands,” he said, wistfully. “Rosewood? Listen to these tones, man, they’re so rich and full.”
“Hey, not bad for a so-called beginner,” I said, the melody of his guitar playing calming, almost hypnotic in the fading light of the early evening. He’s a natural it appears.
Jack perched on the arm of the couch while Marcus sang along in a husky, slightly rusty rendition of Guthrie’s California Stars. It was the Billy Bragg and Wilco mix version, he explained, after our applause.
“You sing, too!” I remarked. I was impressed. “Jeez, Marcus, you sounded pretty darn convincing there, any other talents you haven’t told me about?”
“All will be revealed in time,” he joked. “Though, seriously, this song was a big favorite of mine and a lot of the homesick Californian dudes. We all had plenty of practice.”
“This here is a custom Martin guitar, out of Nazareth, Pennsylvania,” Jack said, as Marcus handed back the instrument to its owner. “Vintage, great surf guitar — I traded for it, wouldn’t you know, back in the mid seventies?”
I helped Lizzie as she set the table for supper, all the while thinking how I’m going to have to get my hands on a guitar like that for Marcus, someday. We ate by candlelight at the small, round, kitchen table looking out over the stark shadows of the bare winter orchard. We ate heartily, Marcus and me, not knowing where the next cooked meal would come from.
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