The Price of a Life

THE PRICE OF A LIFE SHELL, GOLD, CARBON NOTES & WEED: FOUR KINDS OF MONEY IN THE HUMBOLDT BAY / SIX RIVERS REGION

A HISTORICAL & PERSONAL ACCOUNT BY

DR LOON

“For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

FALL 2015

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THE PRICE OF A LIFE

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THE PRICE OF A LIFE

INTRODUCTION

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1. WHAT WILL WE USE FOR MONEY?

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2. A NATION MADE OF SHELLS

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3. HEART OF GOLD

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4. PULP: MAKING TREES INTO MONEY

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5. HEARTS AND MINDS AND MARIJUANA

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6. THE ECONOMY OF THE FLEA

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7. THE GOLDEN RULE

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8. COMPASSION AND COMMUNITY

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9. FOUR WAYS WE TAKE OUR MEDICINE

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10. OCCUPY MONEY

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11. CANNABIS AND THE COMMONS

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS & NOTES

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INTRODUCTION

This story begins several decades ago, with a question: How shall we live? The institutions that were supposed to help with the answers—family, school, community—had failed a generation.

They were told: Duck and cover. Cut your hair, get a job. Step forward when your number’s called. So they left all that, and came up with the best answers they could, often in remote places like Humboldt County. Then they had a hundred more questions, foremost among them: What are we going to use for money? No one imagined that the answer might be a plant.

Four economies have regulated human affairs in this region, represented by shells, gold dollars, carbon notes, and now weed. Each has a story to tell. Each has a lesson for an uncertain future. Because now, in addition to resource depletion and rural depression—the failure of carbon economics—we face the prospect of even greater uncertainty in everything from the climate to global finance. And now, with that greater urgency, we have to ask again, How shall we live? Our answer, including what we use for money, will have to see us through the changes that lie ahead.

We need to bring money back to earth—to talk about it the way we would talk about bread or pigs or heartbreak. Not just as a math problem, but a story, another strand of the narrative of living. The average person who uses money every day—all of us nickel-­‐and-­‐dimers who are the real economy—don’t have time to stop and ask what it is. If the groceries get home, leave the rest to the stockbrokers and Harvard professors. If it was important, wouldn’t they have taught us about money in school? Remember when you were a kid, how when you came into the room the grown-­‐ups stopped talking about it?

By telling the story of money, retelling its history in this remote colony, from its earliest beginnings to its present confusion, including my own miscalculations, I hope to encourage others to take up that conversation: to ask about money without having a license to do so, and to venture their own best answers. How has money, and our failure to control and understand it, brought us to this perilous moment in the human story? How are the people of this region going to pay to get through it? What will they use for money?

Shells? Gold? Carbon notes? Weed?

The use of shell money among the Native people of northwest California surprised the first Euro-­‐Americans who observed it. Their anthropologists took a while to figure out that this “primitive” economy was part of their own early history, and in many respects had worked better than the present system. The institution of wer-­‐geld—literally “man-­‐money”—settled blood feuds and prevented war through “payments” that we would call peace treaties. The custom governed tribal Europe for centuries, until the Holy Roman Empire put church and state in charge of collecting these payments—so you could buy divine indulgence for your sins, and pay your debt to society. But it was not what we mean by money, and the guiding principle of these ancient economies was not exoneration or even justice, it was reciprocity. The medium might change from shells to bronze or from beads to coin, but one basic principle prevailed: everything has to be paid for. Beginning with life itself.

This is the exchange that governed for centuries along this coast, up and down its rivers, around the foggy margins of Humboldt Bay. In many ways the shell economy was difficult to

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distinguish from the region’s ecology. Shell money took the same route as salmon, followed the same cycle as water, from river to ocean, then rain to river again. In that sense, it’s still here.

We no longer witness shell money being exchanged, but it lives on in the Native culture that used it as an adaptation to those cycles. Even when a coinage no longer circulates, its valuations persist in cultural understanding. Shell money was a social agreement, but also a contract with the spirits of place, and it’s still in effect.

Just as the shell economy survives in Native California valuations, the rush for gold is still powerfully alive in us more recent arrivals. The redwood forest was “red gold,” bits of bud are “nuggets,” and now water is being called “liquid gold.” This way of thinking came to northwestern California in 1850, every miner’s pack loaded with another long and forgotten history. Gold began as shiny objects, ornament, offerings that ended up in the custody of priests, then of war lords and kings, until it grew into a treasure hoard that shone into other lands with all the bright glitter and greed of empire. When the empire turned out to be unsustainable, gold was just a shiny thing again. Old coins for collectors.

Gold economics is not a cycle, but a pyramid. The miner takes what he wants, leaves a hole in the ground, mountains of rock and piles of rusted metal. He isn’t coming back—he’s moving up. The value of his discovery lies at the apex of the pyramid, in Rome or London or San Francisco, where he goes to redeem it.

But there’s another story of gold: of the miner who finds wealth in an unexpected place.

He lives on a claim that doesn’t “show” enough to stay around for, nothing but a shack on a remote river or mountain. But over the years he undergoes a transmutation that the old alchemists described: he discovers another gold, a treasure within that constantly renews itself.

Or maybe not—maybe he grows secretive and crazy. There are two sides to the coin of gold.

You can turn everything you touch into money, and eventually have nothing to eat, or you can be changed, and count your wealth in the currency of life.

Almost as soon as it began, the gold fever was over. Even at the time it was evident that the real gold was in selling supplies to the mines and the miners. The smart investments were in mules and trails and trading locations: transportation and real estate. Many of the prospectors quickly changed into speculators—an easy transition for a Yankee culture of transcendental tradesmen, with one eye on the horizon and the other on the cash register. The gold they sought was not the gold itself but a representation of wealth: it had to be redeemed in coin, or by words on paper. Carbon notes.

With gold as its totem—backed by a rare mineral and trust in God—notes made of pulp paper enjoyed the same freedom from place, the same liberty to make your profit, leave a mess, and move on to the next claim or killing. Any living or formerly living thing could be represented by words on paper: whether it’s wood or coal or oil or human life. At first I called them pulp dollars because the process was best illustrated by two mills on the outer margin of Humboldt Bay: chip trucks roaring down the highways by day and night delivering ground-­‐up pieces of forest to the smoking mills, there the entire truck and trailer lifted and the remnants of trees dumped onto enormous pyramids of wood fiber. That’s the economy of reducing things to pulp. But because this process will indiscriminately devour life in any form, I sometimes call them carbon notes. Besides forests, carbon economics grinds up fish and rivers and every kind

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of beast and bird, including human families and workers, all the while claiming to be performing economic miracles. Creating wealth, they call it. Almost like discovering gold. But with one fatal flaw: its costs of doing business are not counted. They are “externalized.” Carbon economics doesn’t pay its bills.

So the carbon dollar requires a continual state of war to keep it going—like an unsustainable empire, it has to constantly “capture” new resources and “free” markets from traditional restraints. It calls these conquests “growth.” And just like in war, the killing doesn’t have to be paid for. Thus, the carbon dollar reverses the original purpose of money, which was to pay for the damage we inflict on one another and our fellow creatures. It revokes the ancient contracts that restrained and regulated our indebtedness, the ritual and agreement that kept our social and spiritual economy in balance. As in the “Indian wars” of the past several centuries, the carbon dollar will go to any length to suppress those ancient valuations. The “drug wars” of the past few decades are just another front in that long campaign, aimed at a new bunch of undesirables.

They arrived in the late 60’s and early 70’s. They were ridiculed and feared, called long-­‐hairs, hippies, freaks, environmentalists. Their principal offense was bringing to the rural counties of northern California an alternative set of values. And a plant that appeared to represent those values: Marijuana. Mary Jane. Pot. Boo. Muggles. Weed. It was like their flag. Then it was like their money. That’s when law enforcement got serious.

The “war on drugs” had been used for decades to keep certain segments of the population in their place. The fact that these newcomers were mostly young white people, children of the middle class—some of them were even from here—didn’t seem to trouble the authorities. The methods were the same: guns, imprisonment, fines, and the usual forms of harassment—depriving you, if not of your life and liberty, of your driver’s license, your car, your livelihood, your home if you have one, your vote, even the custody of your children. The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting (CAMP) was only the most notorious of these efforts, and the most overtly military in its costumes and methods. But the soldiers of the pulp economy also arrived as social workers and building inspectors, sometimes in the uniforms of BLM, USFS, or in the plain clothes of more sinister government agencies. The battles were over housing and permits, land use and forests—and always about the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana— but the war itself was about values.

Instead of weakening it, this assault made the weed economy stronger. Forced to defend itself, it found ways to define itself through resistance. Not all of its actions were successful or wise. The new people struggled to dissociate themselves from the carbon dollar, but they’d grown up on the pulp fictions of pulp culture and sometimes embraced things as consumers. They believed technology would redeem them, shopped the Whole Earth Catalog, bought anything with the word “organic” on it, like children in a new green supermarket.

But the weed economy was also kindred to the shell exchange, and recognized it as the ancestor of its own valuations. It honored the great cycles, the seasons, and it worked and prayed for the return of the salmon. It said that wealth comes from the Earth, and that we belong to it, not the other way around. Resistance required that they act on these beliefs, by practicing reciprocity, by sharing, and by caring for people and places. Besides creating new social forms, this “alternative” community developed effective technologies for low-­‐impact

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living, for resisting further damage to forests and rivers, and for restoring what was left. The newly developing social and environmental ethic represented a way of giving back, and of fighting back, protecting what remained. It was a rural culture based on life, on growing things—not just marijuana.

The weed economy was here before anybody thought to grow it for money. At the end of the seventies and into the eighties, as law enforcement escalated the economic lifestyle wars into a full-­‐scale assault, their efforts instead drove up prices, created a brand, and opened a market that made it possible for the weed economy to more firmly establish itself. Weed money financed a resistance that ended the helicopter and gun show, and reduced at least a fraction of the prohibition industry’s power and arrogance. Beyond resistance, through legal battles and direct action, the weed economy also waged a counter-­‐offensive against the forces that were heedlessly turning trees into money and rivers into mud. The weed wars and the forest wars were just different fronts in a struggle that was essentially cultural and economic.

Now that the crusade against marijuana is winding down, it may be that the more serious threat to the weed economy—the real war—is just beginning. It’s been evident since the eighties, when a blizzard of carbon notes and cocaine blew through the backcountry, that the best way to destroy the weed economy would be to flood it with pulp dollars. Cops no longer needed to shoot hippies—give ‘em enough hundred-­‐dollar bills, hell, they’ll shoot each other. It was not what the original settlers, among them the first growers, had in mind.

As medical marijuana finds its accommodation with the pulp economy, grower/care providers may show us how to negotiate the bind between buying in and selling out. The healthcare model brings a strong and ancient code of ethics to the issue: do no harm. But the thousand ways of co-­‐option are the specialty of the carbon economy. It may be that small weed farmers and distributors will be put out of business by multi-­‐national investment companies. I just visited a county in rural Oregon where legalization has attracted a Chinese corporation with plans to construct many acres of marijuana greenhouses. Over 200 jobs, a business owner told me. There may not be enough available workers because all the young people leave here as soon as they can.

This could be our story. Allow me be the first to sound the alarm: the Chinese are coming. But the more likely danger to a successful local marijuana industry is just that—another local industry like timber or beef, brought to us by another set of good old boys and girls mining a resource and “externalizing” the costs. Pulp weed. This time they’re not cashing in on trees or grazing land, but selling the weed culture that brought it here. For a time there was a proposal to re-­‐open the rusting pulp mill to process hemp instead of trees—maybe even use that toxic liquor the last guys left behind. Who could not love the idea?

We’re fortunate to have precedent and example for this next stage of the weed wars.

The community-­‐building, environmental action, social and restoration work, the hundreds of cottage industries—all the infrastructure of forty years of weed economics—are in place to support and guide this transition. It will test our resistance to the global carbon dollar, and it will try our patience and our commitment to open process. To seeing that everything gets paid for.

These stories are offered in the spirit of that endeavor.

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1. WHAT WILL WE USE FOR MONEY?

It begins in the garden. The fog has burned off and the afternoon is almost hot. Barbara’s just come out from the house, the chicken-­‐wire gate closes behind her.

“Could I borrow a couple of dollars, babe?”

I lean on the cultivator, grateful for the interruption.

“Sure,” I say, digging into my pocket.

“So Peggy can get some bread and stuff for Maggie to eat while she’s staying there. Till Peggy gets her commodities.”

Like many of our clever devices—chainsaws, TVs, nuclear power plants—money can get us into serious trouble. We confuse it with wealth.

A dollar, like a swipe of your plastic, is nothing but a promise. Backing up that promise (you hope) is a bank account holding other people’s promises. Ultimately, behind all those shaky assurances, it’s not the government but life itself that pays the bills.

All wealth comes from the Earth, from its whirling molten core to the shaky crust we live on. With our labor we can change and refine that wealth, make it “worth more,” but that’s not where its value originates. Essentially, our money is an IOU to the sun. The laws of economics are the laws of physics: money is mostly energy. Every note of obligation, every “pay to the bearer,” circulates not only through our “economic system” but through the systems of life and death we call nature. Economy is a branch of ecology.

The more closely our money—whatever form it takes—aligns with these natural systems, the better our chances of staying solvent. Agriculture and coinage were supposed to insulate us from nature’s occasional catastrophes, but their virtues are also their deadly flaw: they allow us to believe we can transcend season and place. They encourage us to make promises we can’t keep.

The global dollar represents trillions of these unsecured promises. Like Bitcoin and other virtual currencies, the dollar is moving into the aether, where it exists (we hope) as more trillions of micro-­‐electrical impulses. But the basic problem remains: in that vast stratosphere of orders to buy and sell there isn’t much to eat.

It’s the first of September. For some reason the food stamps haven’t come. Between us we have six kids, two of them half-­‐time, plus a constant flow of friends and travelers, fugitives, immigrants more recent than us. It’s 1974. Nixon has resigned. Our new president, Gerald Ford, says the long American nightmare is finally over. We know that it’s just beginning.

The old farmhouse shelters not only us and the kids, but what I call our over-­‐extended family. Bill Smith, a teacher and organizer from Roxbury, black and gay and militant, has just moved in. He’ll live with us for a few months, then start teaching at the “free” school where the kids go (and we do janitor work to pay their tuition). John Ross, radical journalist and poet and activist, has found refuge here long enough to be known to the kids as Uncle John. Billy with no

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last name, a draft resister whose father is a Marine recruiter, has just moved up to Orleans to carry on a dangerous liaison with a Yurok princess. He may be back.

Last week a convoy of Diggers came through, also on their way upriver, to visit the commune at Black Bear where some of them formerly lived. A month ago several Black Bear guys stayed here because the women had thrown them out, apparently after a disagreement about goats, but there are other versions of the story. Another veteran organizer, Acorn, is in town with some of his southern Humboldt communal family, like us, waiting for food stamps.

They survive on occasional city gigs, seasonal farm work, and tree planting, on a collective budget as tight as ours.

The house is open to all, both table and floor. This openness will eventually prove unsustainable and I’ll have to flee our little farm to save my sanity, but at this point I can still comfort myself with the words of social critic Paul Goodman: ventures like ours are supposed to fail.

The rejection of money was an essential part of the political and spiritual revaluations that brought us here. We wanted to live without it, to get closer to the wealth it referred to. It was a resistance to illegitimate authority—The Man—and the mediated lives he had laid out for us. Some of us had read Marx or Adam Smith or Hamilton, but we were guided more by anarchist and ecological principles and by our contemporaries: the Situationists, the Provos, the Red Rockers, the Motherfuckers, and of course the Diggers. Money, they all agreed, is the illusion that keeps the social spectacle in motion.

“Here.” I’m holding all I have: a five, a twenty, two ones. “This is for the rent, too. Is that enough?” (Even with welfare scams, it’s hard to believe that we lived on such small amounts of money.)

“Do you...?”

“It’s all I’ve got. But I don’t need it today.”

Times are hard. 1974 America remains in deep recession. The Arabs have ended the oil embargo, but gas is up to fifty-­‐five cents a gallon—too expensive for the millions of unemployed to drive around looking for a job. Decades of a rising standard of living and an expanding middle class have come to an end. The last troops are home from Vietnam, and President Ford is talking about amnesty for draft dodgers, but the nation remains bitterly and deeply divided.

Like most of our visitors and friends, we’ve taken leave of that nation and of our former lives, including our jobs. I spend a lot of time reading the recently published Stone Age Economics, learning what other cultures have used for money. I make notes about money, think constantly about it, my views wonderfully sharpened by its absence. As if to prove how little I understand, I’ve taken to writing an economics column for a local alternative newspaper.

The dollar in my pocket is wrinkled and used. It’s passed through many hands and is a far dirtier and richer thing than the Secretary of the Treasury imagines. Filthy lucre.

Money is shit, the old traditions say. Defiling, and at the same time fecund. Rich. A fertilizer that makes things grow, it retains the “dirt” of every transaction it’s been through. The touch of the people who use it, that’s what invests it with whatever

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currency it has. Not Wall Street, not State Street. Ragged as it is, it has the value of the acts between us, a token of their occurrence and passing.

As capitalism with its “free market” tyranny discredits and devalues this piece of paper till it’s just so much pulp, we will have to find other tokens of exchange.

Something alive and current. More plural. More green.

Of course at this moment I don’t actually have one of those dirty dollars in my pocket. I do have a part-­‐time job, a few hours a week at the bookstore in town. Babs works as a cocktail waitress on weekends, AFDC covers some of the rent, and we eke along. But in this depressed region, we have plenty of company. Forests and salmon runs depleted, lumber mills closing, the fishing fleet mortgaged to the gunnels, our little towns feature rusting teepee burners, empty lumber lots, and vacant storefronts. Housing is scarce, yet rents are low, while everything dependent on oil is expensive—these are the strange contradictions of rural depression, what economists are calling stagflation.

We were lucky to find the old farm at the edge of town. Friends remember the woman who lived here, selling milk and pies after her husband’s heart gave out one day when he was feeding the pigs. The present owner is a real estate appraiser, a small-­‐time capitalist who makes his real money from finder’s fees and cheap properties like this. He’d be a lot wealthier if he didn’t put so much into alimony and lifestyle, but Jack’s an okay guy. He likes to visit and show off his hippie tenants to his mistress and chief accomplice, a flaming redhead who walks around the barnyard in high heels clutching her little white poodle. Jack gives me lectures on economics, trying to get me to understand the principle of leverage. He probably doesn’t have a nickel of his own money in this place, but he collects the rent. The poodle’s name is Hump.

So we don’t actually consider ourselves poor. We’re learning how to live in a kind of economic exile—without US dollars, that is. But I make budgets and list every expense, worry as if I had millions.

Meatloaf sandwich

$1.

Loan to John S. (he’ll never pay)

2.

Northcountry Constitution

free

Two beers

.80

PG&E

24.85

Gas for truck

2.

More beer

1.20

The Great Law of Peace

.60

2# honey

2.00 & a gift rec’d

2 fingers of shake

“Never mind,” she says. “I don’t need it.” She gives me back the two dollars. She knows how I am.

“I won’t go to the store,” she says. “I’ll give Peggy the money I have. I can make something out of what’s here.”

“Omelets, maybe?” We spend a lot on chicken feed, but even at the end of summer our little flock is returning handsome dividends.

“Sure. Yeah.” A little doubtful. We eat a lot of eggs.

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I hand her the two dollars back. “Why don’t you just go to the store if you need anything.”

Money. From the name of Juno Monetas, the goddess in whose temple the Romans struck coins bearing her likeness. The mint. Later she would be replaced by the image of Caesar.

She takes the two dollars, then changes her mind again. “No, here. I’ll just keep the rent money. I can go to the store. I’ll write a check.”

A lot of our food comes from this garden, reclaimed from the willow and blackberry that were taking over the place. Some of our meals come from the chickens, both meat and eggs, and some from the rabbits in pens under the old willow. The bunnies. Part of our sustenance comes by trade, and some by gift, which I’ve come to understand is the root of all money.

Beginning with the gift of life.

“Are you sure you have enough?” I’m holding the dollar bills again.

She stops at the garden gate. “Yeah. I don’t know.” She looks at the twenty and the five in her hand. “I’m confused.”

Almost anything can be money. Axe blades, bars of soap, blankets. Coca leaf, corn.

Feathers, gold, jade, LSD. Musket balls, obsidian. Opium, pork, rum, and salt. Sea otter, sugar, and of course shells.

Shells: the most ancient human counters of wealth, circulated along this coast and up the rivers. In this region, the economic equivalent of salmon.

Gold: the refined metal coinage of civilization and centralized rule; but also freedom from place, the wandering prospector, the disinherited son who might be king.

Carbon notes: the prospector turns into a speculator, uses notes on paper made from the ground-­‐up pieces of other economies. Pulp.

The money could be anywhere.

I put the paper dollars in my pocket, go back to digging wood ashes into a row of broccoli. But now I’m also confused, and after a few minutes I stop and lean on the cultivator again. Summer is turning into fall and the garden is abundant. Carrots and cabbage, potatoes and peas, lots of green tomatoes that probably won’t turn red. In a few weeks there’ll be a crafts and music fair in town, a farmer’s market. Maybe a place to sell some of it.

Back behind the tomatoes, in a corner of the garden partly shaded by alders, a half dozen marijuana plants are transpiring in the warm afternoon. Each little zephyr carries their sweet-­‐sour aroma. They’re as tall as I am, but very skinny. They’d do better in full sun, but then they’d be more visible. Overhead a hawk circles, keeping an eye on the chickens.

A lid of dirt weed presently goes for five to ten dollars, depending on how bad it is.

Panama Red, Thai sticks go for more. The Mexican is rasty brown stuff, broken up from kilo bricks, lots of stems and seed. I planted some, mostly as a way to save money—to avoid money, as I’ve been doing with some success. Now here it is, growing in Humboldt County.

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Weed: a vegetable money that goes up in smoke, leaves a residue of alternative valuations. May sustain a sense of place and community. Or it may be turned into pulp.

A quasi-­‐sacred regard came with the plant, carried by the early pioneers who introduced its use and cultivation to the region. Their sense of community and communion was cherished, in retrospect somewhat exaggerated—but they were united by their resistance to a nation that considered them outlaws, and they embraced that status along with the stigma that still lurks beneath prohibition. They were Hipsters. Beats. Rasta. Marijuanos. Mujadeen. Some kind of people they didn’t even have a name for.

Ritual and fetish attended the ceremony of smoking, partly because of their poverty and its cost and scarcity, partly because of the heavy penalties for use. A stack of LPs on the hi-­‐fi, some pinners rolled, roach clips in readiness, the doobie went around the circle, with rules about passing it on. Held-­‐breath voices remarked on taste and provenance. Sativa? Indica?

Michoacán? Hindu Kush? Redwood Valley? Usually there’d be a half gallon of Cribari in the circle, for which dollar bills and change had been collected, and it also went around.

It’s easy to laugh now at their silliness, and their tendency to forget what they were talking about, but a great deal was somehow happening: communes coming together, homes being built, institutions created, businesses established, and political alliances formed. Many of these things have persisted. The attachment to community and bioregion continues to be part of these undertakings, and so does the spirit behind them—but not without a price.

In the fall of 1970, about the time I arrived in Humboldt County, an Eel River farmer discovered two four-­‐foot marijuana plants growing in pots along the banks of the river near Ferndale. He immediately called the sheriff. Marijuana at the time posed an absolute but mostly theoretical danger in the eyes of rural law enforcement, their knowledge of the subject, if any, based on factoidal documentaries like Reefer Madness. Aside from drunken loggers and a small population of winos and junkies, local cops had little actual experience with drugs.

Opium had been relatively scarce since they kicked out the Chinese in the 1880’s. Marijuana was known to be used by Blacks and Mexicans and degenerate jazz musicians, but aside from a legendary Billy Holiday visit to Eureka in the 1950s, after the drug police had driven her to the ends of the known world, such people were extremely rare.

Two sheriff’s deputies took turns staking out the crime scene. On the third day a couple of local men came upon the plants as they were walking the riverbank. One of them, Patrick John Berti, knelt down and broke off the tip of a branch. Marijuana? In Humboldt County?

Deputy Larry Lema approached with his gun drawn. Berti stood up and turned toward the deputy, whom he knew from high school, but the recognition wasn’t mutual. Deputy Lema saw instead a dangerous drug fiend, a subversive—one of those deviants Governor Reagan wanted us to get rid of. “If it takes a blood bath, let’s get it over with,” said the state’s highest elected official. Before Berti could speak, Lema shot him in the chest. As he lay on the ground he said, “Christ, Larry, you’ve shot me.”

Lema continued to behave as if the marijuana were a greater threat than the sucking chest wound. He handcuffed Berti’s friend, who kept telling Lema they should go to the

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farmer’s house to call for help. By the time they returned, Berti was dead. Lema told a grand jury he thought the sprig of marijuana was a gun. The jury called it justifiable homicide. A couple of months later a Vietnam vet admitted that the plants were his. He’d brought back the seeds from Nam.

Then there was another drug war killing, just last year. One of the deputies who staked out Berti’s plants, Mel Ames, tipped the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs about a big meth factory in the southern Humboldt hills. Federal agents descended in an army helicopter, broke down Dirk Dickensen’s door, and Agent Lloyd Clifton shot him in the back as he fled toward the woods. There was no drug factory. A Times-­‐Standard reporter who’d been brought along to witness the big bust wrote in his notebook: “Looks like an assault on an enemy prison camp in Vietnam.” Clifton was indicted for murder, released, tried, and found not guilty.

When nobody pays for killing, you know you’re in a war. And you need another kind of money.

2. A NATION MADE OF SHELLS

Stephen Powers covered the Civil War for a Cincinnati newspaper and afterward, abandoning his former life , he walked west for two years. His travels took him through New Mexico and Arizona and eventually to San Francisco, where he published an account of his journey. Then, with no formal training—anthropology hadn’t been invented—he began walking up and down California using his reporter’s skills to describe the Native tribes. His articles were published in San Francisco’s Overland Monthly and called attention to the effects of disease, violence, and oppression and provided some of the only descriptions of disappearing cultures.

He was the first Euro-­‐American to describe the use of shell money among the people of northwestern California.

For money, the Cahrocs make use of the red scalps of woodpeckers, which are valued at $5 a piece; and of a curious kind of shells, resembling a cock’s spurs in size and shape, white and hollow, which they polish and arrange on strings, the longest about $2—the value increasing in a geometrical ratio with the length. The unit of currency is a string of the length of a man’s arm.

He then tells us, with evident surprise, that “the murder of a man’s dearest relative may be compounded for by the payment of money.” The price of an average Indian, he reported, was one string of shells. Some thirty years later, in 1900, the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber confirmed this custom, but was informed that a common man’s life was worth ten strings. For the killing of a man of standing, his family might demand as many as fifteen. It looks as if the value of a life had increased, perhaps due to the improving effects of civilization. But actually

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we’re witnessing inflation—that is, the devaluing of one currency by another. In the Euro-­‐ American view of money, the shells weren’t worth much, and consequently neither was an Indian’s life. Because of this misunderstanding, the old social bonds were already failing when Powers arrived.

When the Americans first arrived in the country, an Indian would give from $40 to $50 in gold for a string of it; but now, it is principally the old Indians who value it at all.

Dentalium (for its likeness to a long sharp tooth) is a species of mollusk found along the Pacific coast in colonies of mixed age and size, with their pointed ends rooted in the seabed, their open end upward. They prefer deeper water and are easily accessible only along the western edge of Vancouver Island. From there they were traded eastward (they show up in an 1833 Karl Bodmer painting of a Cree woman on the upper Missouri) and circulated southward into California as far as Cape Mendocino. Near their source, strings of shell were sold by the fathom length; inland they were ordinary trade items.

But as they were exchanged down the Pacific coast the shells grew in value and occupied a larger role in economic life. Among the Nutka a debt slave could be purchased for five fathom lengths of strung shells. By the time the currency reached northern Oregon, you only needed one string to buy a slave. In northern California the price was also one string, but the shells were worth more and the string was shorter and measured with greater exactness.

Those who frequently engaged in shell transactions had the measurements tattooed on their hands and arms.

They were measured in increments as small as a sixteenth of an inch, the shells’ value increasing geometrically with length. Threaded on fiber or sinew, five different lengths of shell qualified as money. Strung with their points together, eleven of the largest shells made up the most valuable string. The least valuable, fifteen of the smallest, made up a string. Shells of lesser length were called “young man’s money.” Smaller than that, they were considered necklace beads.

But even the smallest of the five money shells, a little less than two inches long, was extremely valuable. One shell would buy a woman’s cap full of tobacco, the Yuroks’ only cultivated plant, prized for its powerful effects. Two strings of the smallest, thirty shells, might buy a carved redwood boat. With three twelve-­‐string shells, you could buy a house.

As Powers noted, woodpecker scalps were also a medium of exchange, but they were used principally for dance regalia and headbands, and had a public function. Shell money had a more private life. Shells were sometimes adorned and kept in carved elk-­‐horn purses, but this was as much to honor their value as to increase it. They were not carried or worn, nor exhibited at dances where other wealth was displayed. They were more like treasure than something to “spend.” They were not money, yet they had no other function than as money. Those who used them understood the difference.

When Alfred Kroeber arrived upriver in 1900, he found the shells were disappearing from use, but the Yurok could still provide an exact exchange rate between their dentalium and American dollars. Kroeber estimates that since contact the shells had lost half their value against the dollar, but he more than doubles Powers’ valuations of thirty years earlier, so he may be mistaken when he estimates that a large shell was originally worth $5 American, or that

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a twelve-­‐shell string was worth $10. It’s more helpful to know that one such string could buy the rights to a fishing place, or a tract of acorns. And it’s essential to keep in mind that these transactions were always negotiated. For another shell or two you might get more acorns, or better fishing. Doctors’ fees could be high: one to two strings of good money, depending on your wealth and status and the nature of your affliction.

These transactions are surprisingly similar to our way of paying for things, so it’s easy to overlook some crucial differences. Beginning with the obvious: until the establishment of pack trains and trading posts, there was no market-­‐place, no “shopping,” none of what we call buying and selling. Only after decades of white influence did some families sell food, and it was such a breach of good manners that people said it spoiled the World Renewal ceremony.

And then there are surprising things that shells would buy—a wife, for instance. If she’s from a wealthy family they might ask ten or more strings. That’s five hundred and fifty dollars American—serious money in 1900. Again, it appears very different from our custom, while in some ways it’s familiar: it favors wealthy males, and declares women available for a price. It does at least have the virtue of being straightforward about the terms. And it’s important to note that a woman often brought with her a dowry of comparable wealth, so again we’re witnessing a ritual gift exchange, not the sale of a commodity. In the event of a divorce, by the wish of either party, everything had to be paid back. Kroeber notes that women had full rights in all matters of wealth and law.

The shell economy also carried some serious liabilities for men, most of them woven into the texture of daily life. Dozens of taboos and infractions could cost a guy money. If he spoke to a married woman. If he got a girl pregnant. More money would be required if his family wanted to keep the child. You paid if you fished in someone’s fishing spot. Or if you said the name of a dead person. Any of these could cost you money. But the greatest debt you could incur—so that you might be in debt slavery the rest of your life—was by taking someone’s life.

According to a Yurok story transcribed by Kroeber, the creators of the world gave human beings their wealth for a very specific reason. “We make all these, dentalia, woodpecker crests, because if people have them they will think much of them and will feel satisfied. They will not want to be quarrelsome, for they have property.... They will not want to kill, for they will think much of what they have, of their dentalia and other things, that they will not want to pay them out in settlement.”

Winning a war, or eliminating an enemy, could cost a lot of money. After a small skirmish among the Yurok, what outsiders thought was a war dance turned out to be a dance of arbitration and negotiated settlement. So here again is a society strongly characterized by money, yet very unlike our own. You could live without it. The difference was mostly in status: you would be a person of less worth. You would not be hungry or homeless, but there could be other consequences. You might not have a desirable site for a house. If you were sick, you wouldn’t consult a doctor. You would hunt, fish, and gather in the less abundant places. Even the path to the other world diverged at the river crossing: the poor went one way, presumably to after-­‐lives of less account, and the rich went to the downstream end of the world, where the money came from and the wealthy sponsored dances all the time.

In this light, again, the shell economy appears oppressive and biased toward males and wealth. Debt slavery seems barbaric. But then again, the system is not that different from our own, and is at least straightforward. Debt slaves were not seized by war or violence, but

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because by some misfortune they had incurred an unpayable obligation. To work it off, their services were “bought” by the household they served, and they wove baskets or nets and performed ordinary tasks like another family member. It appears, in fact, that there were more constraints on the rich than on the poor. Members of aristocratic families were expected to be models of correct behavior, exemplars of charity and generosity. Noblesse oblige, it was called in the Euro-­‐Americans’ own lost history. It’s crucial to recall that every “purchase” of services was personal, reciprocal, and an opportunity for negotiation. As with the great dances and ceremonies, each transaction sought to maintain balance. (The older word for what we call the bottom line.)

There were ways to wealth besides being born to it. Shell money followed power, so a woman might acquire wealth if she became a doctor. If a man was good with a bow he could acquire the prized red woodpecker scalps. Or if he was skilled with an elk-­‐horn adze he could carve a boat. He might then make a down payment on a wife, and instead of her coming to his house he might move in with her parents and work for them until she’s paid for. If he worked hard, gathered wood for the sweat house, thought constantly about dentalia, the shells would come to him. Shell money was thus a conservative force that rewarded and encouraged stability, yet allowed for circumstance and adaptation. It has a number of lessons for us, and the first might be this: money is a social contract.

Native people of northwestern California had little need for formal governing structures.

Fish and game were abundant, the climate moderate, the winters comparatively mild. Any necessary collective action, like war or weir-­‐building, was organized by family or by “town,” usually a dozen or two autonomous households. The largest and most prosperous towns were located on rivers, bays, and lagoons that brought natural wealth to their doors. No treasury department or bookkeeper kept track of its distribution. While they lived with many rules that we might find onerous, there was apparently only one unspoken law: everything has to be paid for. “This is anarchy,” said Alfred Kroeber, with equal measure of horror and delight.

Much of what the anthropologist saw among the people of Native California was hardship—spiritual, material, and social—mostly brought by the culture he carried with him.

Both he and Stephen Powers admired the values of the dentalium-­‐exchanging tribes, and at the same time praised their assimilation. Powers observed with some satisfaction that after twenty years of contact the same work ethic that once brought shell money to Yurok men now earned them American dollars—carving and selling canoes, providing river transport and ferriage, running pack trains, mining, working the woods and sawmills from Crescent City to Arcata. To the Anglo-­‐American observer it was a real success story, a tribute to personal and familial character.

But what most deeply interested them, I think, was the shell economy’s profound resistance to assimilation, which was both cultural and institutional. Native people readily adopted the use of American dollars instead of shells and feathers, but in essential ways they continued to adhere to ancient customs and values. If a family felt that someone who’d died during the past year had not been “paid for”—that is, their grief not adequately recognized and compensated, as was customary—then all public ceremony came to a standstill. The payment could be made in dollars, or a combination of money and trade goods, but the old law prevailed: everything had to be paid for. The dances were crucial to community and spiritual well-­‐being, but the debt could not be ignored—and the individual person or family could not be

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overruled. This is what Kroeber described as anarchy, adding with obvious affection: “But then the Yurok are an anarchic people.”

By their use of money, the tribes of northern California were able to maintain a well-­‐ regulated anarchist society. There was no central authority to make and enforce laws. No separation of spirit and object, so no need to separate church and state. No church. No state.

Amid great natural abundance, they lived well below the carrying capacity of the land. Their prayers went up with drumming and singing and the smoke of angelica, and were answered by daily providence—or not. Deer came to hunters who had treated them with respect. Salmon returned to wealthy houses where they had been honored guests. The separate fields we call ecology and economy, all the institutions we distinguish as religion and government and law, were permutations of a single principle: everything has to be paid for. They worked it out with shells.

It was blessedly simple, and although interpersonal litigation was frequent, especially after white contact, it worked. It was no more perfect than any human devising, but like the public dances and ceremonies the shell economy strove to achieve balance in all of life’s transactions. It required no formal structure of government, and it guaranteed the individual complete and utter liberty. It was in fact an ancient and forgotten model of our own society, older than the Phoenician traders who carried beads, ancestor to the rosary beads that people use in prayer. It may have been what attracted wandering Euro-­‐Americans like Powers and Kroeber to this region, and it exerted a strong pull on their own culture. In the years between their visits, researchers and scholars were discovering more of this economic story, finding their own past and their own lost valuations through the study of other societies. Calling it “ethnographic studies” made it seem less like a desperate spiritual hunger.

How Things Got Paid For

The same year Tribes of California appeared, another amateur ethnographer, Lewis Henry Morgan, published Ancient Society. An upstate New York lawyer, Morgan spent years collecting materials for a book about his neighbors, the Iroquois or Longhouse People. In the course of his study he developed a social and economic picture of pre-­‐European America that sharply contrasted with life in nineteenth-­‐century Rochester.

Sometime in the 1400s an Onondaga prophet, accompanied by a Mohawk spokesman who “translated” his visions, went among the warring nations of the Iroquois with a message of peace. The prophet carried several strings of black and white shells gathered from a lake of rare beauty. Here, he said. Take these. Instead of endless blood feud, instead of vengeance leading to vengeance—take these shells. They are the price of a life.

The shells evolved into beads and a way to offer condolence for other kinds of loss.

Strings of wampum beads not only “paid” for a person who’d been killed, but on the death of a chief or clan mother they could restore another in their place. The beads “bought” life back from death, in a ritual of succession that underlay the Iroquois Confederacy, which for three centuries governed a territory as large as the American colonies. Strings of black and white beads were carried by runners and exchanged as part of every agreement. Woven together into wide belts, they created mosaic pictographs to record treaties and laws.

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The Longhouse People were governed by a council of chiefs, chosen from the five fires of the five nations, nominated by the clan mothers, who also had the power of recall. All this was kept in a constitution made of beads, a binding agreement among nations that left the individual a free agent. The Americans adopted it for their own constitution, with some fatal differences: they put in a chief executive, and they left out the clan mothers. The colonists thought the beads were money and began to manufacture their own, first using the labor of poor immigrants, then a wampum factory in north Jersey that did as much to destroy the Iroquois League as the new nation’s first president, known to them as Town Burner.

Washington paid off his revolutionary army with Iroquois land.

So long before anthropology could invent itself, the need for it was there. In a society that had lost touch with its origins, Euro-­‐Americans “discovered” the disciplines of economics, biology, folklore studies, linguistics—all the fragments of our missing past returning like flashes of memory to an amnesiac. Although each discipline would come to jealously guard its departmental boundaries, they were all part of the same field of inquiry, a response to a shared sense of loss. A dozen years after Morgan’s work, Friedrich Engels published Marriage, Private Property and the State (1889), much of it derived from notes made by Karl Marx on Morgan’s Ancient Society. And although they tried to include the clan mothers in their theory, they couldn’t imagine workers without bosses.

It’s a story we’re still trying to recover. How did we once govern ourselves and still preserve our liberty? How did we see that everything got paid for? All the evidence seems to say that it was done with shells.

The traditional stories say that Big Money—we would call him a demi-­‐god—came to our coast and rivers from the downstream end of the world. As if the Eel River, the Mad, the Klamath didn’t end when they emptied into the sea but continued to the western horizon. Out to the other side of the ocean, where they have dances all the time. This is the story told to Alfred Kroeber by a Yurok man from the coast.

Big Money and his companion, the next longest shell, stop frequently as they travel along the coast and then upriver, discussing whether to visit this town or that. Naturally the villages where they stop become wealthy, its people live in well-­‐built solid houses, have many redwood canoes, enjoy an abundance of salmon and eel and natural provision. They host dances because they can afford to pay for the people who’d died the previous year. They can compensate the bereaved families, not just for their loss but for the pain of being in mourning and watching others celebrate, dancing for renewal and balance.

Big Money and the other dentalia were also said to come from upriver, and that’s also literally true—some strings of shells were traded inland along the interior valleys and came downriver following the current. Big Money, very much like salmon, circulated both upriver and downriver. He was currency itself. He stopped at the places where the great weirs were built and was received as an honored guest. In the first salmon ceremony he was welcomed as an honored guest, even as other salmon were making their way upstream. So his spirit as well as the literal fish continued upstream, where they fed those who observed the traditions and adhered to the rule that everything should be paid for.

Like salmon, shell money followed the contours of the natural world, reflecting the wealth of place and biotic process. At the same time it was part of a supernatural exchange—

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though this is a distinction brought by anthropologists. Big Money is both a spiritual being and a symbolic object, a demi-­‐god and a string of shells. He inhabits the spirit world as well as the material world, and doesn’t draw a line between them as modern accountants are scrupulously trained to do. Imagine money with soul.

The larger shells were customarily carved and wrapped in the skin of “money snake.”

Kept in a carved elk horn purse, they were too precious to be displayed except in the most solemn of life’s transactions. In an animate world—where “things” and other beings also have souls—the money shells embodied the spirit of wealth. Not only standing for so many dollars, they were value itself. Not just representing the value of life, but alive.

Big Money likes to travel from place to place, going to the dances, seeing good things happen. He enjoys the villages and houses of people who live right. He spends time with the young man who gathers wood for the sweat house, goes with the young woman who acquires doctoring “pains” and uses them to cure people and free them from witchcraft. Then as now, he enjoys the company of those who dream and think about him.

But not only about him. Big Money brings along the smaller dentalia, the kind worn in necklaces and dance regalia. And he brings more than shells with him. Although he travels in a well-­‐crafted redwood canoe, he belongs to a wider world than our rivers and coast. Following the flow of trade goods from other regions, he brings along red woodpecker scalp, white deerskin, blades of obsidian. He travels with other kinds of shell: strings of olivella or magnesite beads made by tribes farther south, and especially the strings of clamshell discs made by the Pomo. Kroeber says the clamshells were never money, but when I asked Jack Norton, a Yurok college professor, about dentalium and he was discussing it at length, his wife said: “Don’t forget the women’s money.” Those necklaces of clamshell still show up at the dances, many strings of them, heavy and musical as they sway and click together with the movement of the dancing women. They remind us that beauty and wealth are a coin, and that male anthropologists and their male informants see only one side of it. And we, the men and women who come later, who knows how much we’re not seeing?

At the Downriver Brush Dance

It’s late afternoon when I turn off the coast highway to follow the Klamath road a mile or so toward the mouth of the river. I pull into a dirt lot where a couple of dozen vehicles are parked at the old fishing camp. My moss-­‐green pickup with its moldy plywood camper fits right in.

Back from the river a ways, a tent and some tables have been set up. Somebody’s making coffee on a propane burner, and some guys are starting a fire with evenly split pieces of fir. I get a cast-­‐iron pot out of the camper, carry it over to one of the tables. Introduce myself, set the pot down. “Rabbit stew.”

I’m so proud of my stew recipe that I don’t realize till that moment that I’ve committed a breach of etiquette. Like most Americans brought up under the law of the dollar (do unto others before they do unto you), my only alternative model, the potluck, was a misunderstanding of the potlatch ceremony, or what the anthropologists call asymmetrical prestation—in its popular misconception, “Indian giving.” Just because it’s a gift, as Native people have tried for centuries to explain, doesn’t mean it won’t be paid for. Nothing is really, as you hippies say, “free.”

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But my Yurok hosts are too well-­‐mannered—too cultured—to say this. They thank me and set the pot aside, assure me it will feed the dancers during the night. But it won’t be part of the feast on the following day. That will be their gift.

A few dozen people are standing in small groups, greeting one another, talking, waiting for things to start. I see friends I haven’t seen in a while. Rusty, who married a Yurok woman— their daughter will be dancing her first dance tonight. Ann, a frequent customer at the bookstore where I work, is a cultural resource specialist. She and her Pomo partner, Doug, regularly help the tribes interface with white culture and government agencies. Ann says she hopes the dance won’t be ruined by drunkenness, like last time. The no-­‐drinking rule seems to be working so far. I didn’t bring any alcohol, no weed, just the stew.

Gradually we begin finding places in the bleachers alongside the dance pit. At one time they say the Brush Dance was performed in the pit of a house, with the redwood roof and siding removed for the occasion. Here a large pit has been dug, two or three feet deep, long enough for people to walk down a gentle slope, wide enough for a half dozen dancers plus the doctor and the child she will hold in her lap. The fire keeper is already in the pit tending the flame.

Eventually the doctor and a young girl come in and sit by the fire. After a while a half dozen men and women walk into the pit and stand shoulder to shoulder behind them. Almost casually, still wearing their everyday clothes, they move in a rhythmic single-­‐step dance, as if tamping down the earth. Like they’re putting something into place. The doctor holds the girl, brushes the fire’s aromatic smoke toward her with a fan. The scent of angelica faintly in the air.

A man steps from the line, dances in a half-­‐sitting posture as he sings. The voice rises and falls, ends with a series of forcefully exhaled descending notes. The dancing stops, and the men and women leave the pit. After quite a long time another group comes into the pit and the pattern is repeated. This is how the night will go.

The costumes are hardly noticeable at first: a necklace, a feather, a headband. Between dances there seems to be nothing happening. Smoke from the fire. Long spaces of waiting.

Occasionally the quiet is broken by an outburst from a drunken man up in the bleachers.

Someone asks a tourist to put away her camera. “Are you Yurok?” one woman asks me, maybe because my hair is in a long braid. When I say no, she says, “Oh, I thought you could tell me what’s going on.”

Many hours later, the intervals between dances seem to get longer. The ocean fog has settled down for a long bone-­‐chilling night. The crowd has thinned out, groups huddle here and there on the bleachers. The only action is among a group of old women bundled in blankets, sitting in lawn chairs in the front row. They’re chatting away, fueled by gossip and thermoses of coffee. I go out to the truck to get myself a blanket, on the way back stop at the kitchen for coffee and a warm-­‐up by the fire. Off to one side, under the trees, dancers are resting and talking.

When I come back another group has begun dancing. Accompanying their song is a new note, a soft swishing and clicking sound like a rainfall of tiny pebbles. And there’s a new light: reflecting the fire, the fluttering iridescence of strings of polished pieces of abalone worn by the dancers, skirts of shells.

Among the men, buckskin has replaced street clothes. Feathers appear, and necklaces of small dentalia. And then another long time of waiting. At a certain point the night becomes

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indistinguishable from dream, then sleep. The old aunties are still awake and gossiping when I crawl off to my truck.

I sleep longer than I meant to, get back to the dance grounds just before first light. The singers and dancers have completed their outward transformation into costumes of shell and bead, deerskin and feather. Their voices and movements are also transformed, displaying a force and energy that doesn’t seem possible for people who have been dancing all night. When they return the last time, their singing comes like the morning light through the forest, a note from some other world. And now we’re in that world, like the child who is just awakening.

The Brush Dance is not considered one of the “great” dances, but for the sponsors it was always a considerable outlay of time and work and money. Now it’s even harder. Only in the last few years have the Yurok recovered some of their dances that were prohibited. Among the dancers was the man who had invited me after I picked him up hitchhiking on Highway 101.

When he got out he introduced himself, told me where the dance was, said it was okay to just show up. Merkie Oliver would distinguish himself in the coming years, not only as a great dancer, but during the Salmon Wars and the recovery of traditional culture, as an elder of great courage and determination. The wealth of Native people is much diminished, along with the salmon runs, the rivers, and the forests, but the invitation was generous and characteristically modest . This was not a World Renewal dance—to cure one child was its humble goal. But of course we were all recipients of the medicine. Lord knows we need it.

As we began the feast later that morning—salmon filets grilling on sticks beside a long bed of coals—it was evident that we and the Earth had undergone a revaluation of some kind. I saw none of the money shells. It wasn’t that kind of transaction, and I’m not an anthropologist.

But a society’s economy is more than handing objects back and forth, or issuing orders to buy and sell. It can best be understood in its ceremonies. What I witnessed, in clamshell and abalone, feathers and buckskin, smoke and dancing and the human voice, was an ancient source of wealth reopening.

The gambling was intense that afternoon, energized by the drumming and singing that accompanies the stick game. The betting was heavy, the stakes way too high for my pockets.

They say that in the old days a man could lose his house, everything. As if the constant calculations of wealth and obligation could be thrown off momentarily for this “game” that recognizes a deeper set of rules. The shells—along with all the dance regalia—came out to sing and dance, and we and the Earth were healthier and richer for it.

Imagine. Wealth that’s good for you.

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3. HEART OF GOLD

It’s a rush. Free money, waiting to be picked up. It could be anywhere: along that river bar, up that creek. Pay dirt. If you find it on public land, you can claim it as your own.

“All it has to be,” said a prospector I met, “is enough to support a ‘prudent’ man. Look it up,” he said. “1872 federal mining law.” I knew the US Forest Service and some federal judges had other interpretations of that law, but Lew was expressing the prevailing view among the newest generation of gold-­‐seekers to come to this region.

I picked him up hitchhiking out of Blue Lake, back when the Trinity Highway ran through that little logging town. He loaded his enormous pack into the camper and climbed in the cab.

We introduced ourselves as we headed up over the coast range. He was going to the North Fork of the Trinity, he said. Hey, so was I. We were even going to the same trailhead. He said he had a claim up there, intended to do a little panning.

Leather slouch hat, long hair, and bushy beard, Lew was the picture of a California prospector. As we came up over Lord-­‐Ellis and started down into Redwood Valley he brought out a little rock attached to a fine gold chain around his neck. He held it up, lumpy and glowing, turning it till it caught the sunlight. I was holding the gearshift, trying to keep it from popping out of second on the steep downhill. I could smell the brakes. We almost went over the edge.

There was a popular pamphlet we carried at the bookstore where I worked and did a lot of my research: Gold Fever and the Art of Panning & Sluicing by Lois de Lorenzo.

A placer is formed by natural erosion of lode ore from alternate periods of summer heat and winter cold which causes the exposed gold-­‐bearing quartz to expand and contract until the rocks give up their treasures. Then the winter rains, snow, and spring floods rush the noble metal down ravines and sweep it into tumbling waters of streams and rivers.

This is the gold that carries the germ of Gold Fever, because it’s there for the taking. It is Free Gold.

(You can hear in her excitement that Lois has a touch of the fever herself.)

It is a fascinating thought to realize that this ancient metal poured from veins from the earth’s interior and was formed in its present state somewhere between two million and ten million years ago.

It is eternal, and is not affected by time, air, water or most corrosives.

It is malleable and more ductile than any other metal. It has been hammered into sheets as thin as 1/250,000 of an inch. A one-­‐ounce piece has been drawn, without breaking, into a 35-­‐mile wire.

It can be dented, scratched, or flattened with a knife blade.

It is heavy: 19.3 in specific gravity. It is soft: 2.5 in hardness.

It is lovely and obtainable. There is nothing so bright, so lustrous, or so astonishingly heavy.

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Lovely. Obtainable. Heavy. The thing driving me to the mountains was hardly as pure as Lew’s desire for gold, and I wasn’t even sure it was obtainable. It was Dog Days and a marrow-­‐ chilling fog had covered the coast for two weeks. Everyone I knew was crazy. I was seeking a little clarity.

Lew said: “And you know why it’s legal to possess this nugget?” I admitted I didn’t. “You can thank Gerald Ford.” Forty years after FDR signed Executive Order 6102 forcing every American to turn in their gold to the government, Ford made it legal to own gold again. Lew put the nugget back in his shirt, gave it a couple of pats.

“Didn’t Nixon take us off the gold standard?” I thought I remembered that, probably in a note somewhere.

“In ’71. What he actually did was devalue the dollar. So the price of gold, which was officially $32 an ounce ever since 1933, started going up.”

“So it took more worthless dollars to buy an ounce.”

“Exactly. And do you know what that ounce is worth now? Today?” I didn’t, but I knew that a lot of people like Lew mistrusted the idea of paper money backed by gold and had no faith whatever in government guarantees. They followed the world gold markets very closely.

“A hundred and thirty-­‐three dollars and seventy-­‐seven cents.”

That was a chunk of change in those days, at least in my circles. Lew’s nugget must have weighed in at a couple of ounces. But clearly he wasn’t in any hurry to exchange it for dollars.

He preferred the real thing.

We rode in silence through Willow Creek and Burnt Ranch and the little settlements along the Trinity. It wasn’t till we turned off for the North Fork that Lew seemed to feel at ease again.

“I’m really bothered,” he said, “by the question of where money comes from. I prefer to take it right out of the ground.”

It wasn’t much of a living, he admitted. He picked up a little here, a little there. He had some scraps of brass tucked away, and might sell those. Maybe it wasn’t his karma to make a big strike. But living in the city and working for money, he couldn’t do that again. He was learning to find more wild foods.

“I read in the Vedas that you should only eat what grows on the land around you.”

Lew was trying to get closer to the source, maybe a little crazy on the subject of money.

It made sense that we were going to the same trail.

After several miles of Forest Service road, I pulled into a turnout under the shade of some oaks. From there the trail zigzagged steeply up the mountain and over to the other side, where there was a remote little campground beside the river. I’d stayed there once when life was more peaceful.

Lew didn’t say exactly where he was going. He brought a half a doobie out of his pack and we talked about money and listened to the mountain quiet till a green Forest Service truck went by in a swirl of dust. Lew swung his huge pack onto his shoulders, said so long, and was up the trail and gone before I even had my gear together.

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My Great Grandfather’s Gold Mine

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A gold economy is democratic at its base, a narrow point at its top. The pyramid, emblem of kingship and empire. Gold empowers a remote central authority. It does not tolerate competing forms of money, and destroys them as reflexively as it wipes out alien cultures. Gold has always been California’s real economy.

When I was growing up, gold was taught in public schools, celebrated in popular story, and reenacted at every opportunity. For the 1949 Gold Rush Centennial, my dad and tens of thousands of straight, clean-­‐shaven citizens grew beards and became as hairy as the ’60s. It was an astonishing spectacle of mass belief. The religion of California gold allows no other gods, and no other life.

It must have been about the time of the Centennial that the legendary Golden Spike came to the southern California town where I lived. It was touring the state in a moving van that had been converted to a bank. A uniformed guard, brass buttons and leather straps and a big revolver on his hip, directed us kids down a dark corridor and there at the end of it, in a dimly lit room behind bulletproof glass, in its own halo of bluish light, sat the spike that completed the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Actually, that spike or one like it was dropped into a pre-­‐drilled hole, tapped with a symbolic silver hammer for the photographers, then put on display at Leland Stanford’s university. It was pure spectacle. Like every good Californian, I believed any fable that invoked the power of gold.

Especially the power of finding gold. Along with comic books (especially Donald Duck and his rich Uncle Scrooge), I saved back issues of Harry Oliver’s Desert Rat Scrapbook. A broadsheet folded to the size of a booklet (“the only newspaper you can read in the wind”), the Scrapbook was an assortment of tall tales and desert lore describing lost mines, fabulous fortunes, and Harry’ s adventures with his burro in the desert country east of San Gorgonio Pass.

Like many California families, ours had its own gold stories. My mother’s grandfather, she said, had come to the California gold fields from Spain—with some training in geology, she thought. It was a couple of decades after the discovery of gold, but Joaquin had an eye for mineral formations that others had overlooked. He was successful enough to marry and support a family, who sometimes lived with him near the Sierra diggings and kept a more permanent residence in one or another Hispanic town. Their youngest son, my grandfather, was born near Santa Clara in what is now Silicon Valley.

When Porfirio was a year old the family moved south to San Bernardino, where my mother said they owned property and rode horses with saddles and bridles trimmed in silver.

Later, he and his two older brothers accompanied their father back up to the Yuba River country, but mostly they prospected in the nearby San Bernardino Mountains. In the Holcomb Valley, above Big Bear Lake, southern California’s richest placer deposit had been discovered more than a decade earlier, but the mother lode had never been found. My great grandfather hit it. The Rose Mine proved to be the richest in the valley.

But it came to nothing. The mine produced gold, my mother said, but it was repossessed

by Joaquin’s supplier. A Jew, she said, with the poignancy of someone who had married one, then lost him to the movie business. But the glitter of Hollywood must have been hard to

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distinguish from California’s other gold, and her stories have come to seem a little like the movies.

According to my mother, Joaquin purchased supplies from Anker’s Mercantile, buying on credit and paying occasionally in gold dust. Despite his wife’s warnings, he saw no reason to ask for receipts until the day the sheriff came to evict them from the Rose Mine. This was a common misfortune of Spanish-­‐speaking miners. Most of them from Mexico and Chile, they knew mining and geology better than the Yankee gold-­‐seekers, but they were at a serious disadvantage against California’s official language and its Greaser Laws.

The theme of dispossession was part of my mother’s movie long before the gold mine. It began in Spain, after Joaquin had a violent disagreement with his father and was disinherited.

According to my mom he carried the scar of his father’s sword, a detail right out of a Zorro movie, probably starring Tyrone Power in a wardrobe by my father. Except that census records indicate that Joaquin was actually born in Mexico, in Hermosillo. Another of my mother’s stories, about Porfirio when he was young, says that he and a friend discovered a cache of buried Spanish gold, only to be frightened away by ghosts. It must have been the Indians who’d been forced to dig the hole, then murdered. It was a common practice, she said. Maybe the story is true, but even as a kid it seemed a stretch to me.

In her telling, even my mother’s brother, probably the least lucky member of our family, once found gold in a field in San Bernardino. But he’d been chased away by a man who claimed to own it. The property wasn’t even his, she added, but then it sounded like she was repeating a story her brother had told her. He had sometimes gone with his father to prospect in the mountains, just as Porfirio had gone with his father. The romance of prospecting may have also nourished in my uncle a belief common to gold-­‐seekers that a thing of great value, lost long ago, would soon be restored. It was a belief my mother shared, though I don’t think she ever went near a mine. “I always loved the mountains,” she would say. I have no idea which of her stories is true.

It is as if my family, true believers in gold, lived in some other country, not what California had actually become. For older Hispanics this was literally true, the Yankee dollar like another foreign language. My grandfather was plagued by debt all his life, and in his old age his children still teased him about being hounded by bill collectors. He once owned a good chunk of downtown San Bernardino, my mother said, but lost it because he failed to pay the taxes. Like his father with the Rose Mine, he couldn’t understand why his creditors didn’t trust him. My grandmother never forgave these losses, nor Porfirio’s addiction to gold. She referred to him as Señor Lamia-­‐Piedras: Mister Rock-­‐Licker. He might have gone to the mountains just to get away from home, which has always been part of prospecting’s appeal.

It must have been around the time of the Gold Rush Centennial that an older cousin and his wife decided to take me and my grandfather up to the Holcomb Valley. Maybe he was also trying to figure out what parts of our family story to believe. I told friends I was going to see a real gold mine. Somewhere in the mountains above Big Bear, after a long drive through the forest, we came to the end of the road. We got out of the car and followed my grandfather among the second-­‐growth ponderosa, looking for the mine. We walked beside long cairns of piled rock, moss-­‐covered now and half buried by pine needles, where an ancient riverbed had been dug up and sluiced by the time Joaquin arrived. He had the idea of going to the source—

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sink a shaft straight down, then tunnel into the mother lode. The idea worked brilliantly, until it didn’t.

When we finally found the mine, there wasn’t much to see. A dark opening in the ground, white and rose quartz around its edges, a stream of clear water flowing out of it. So maybe, after all, it wasn’t the Jewish merchant that drove them out of the mine. They’d hit an underground river. Cold and bright, gushing from the rocky ground, flowing down the mountain toward the land of dreams.

Like my mother’s story, the delusions of gold didn’t begin in California. “Rich as Croesus,” she used to say, and in this case her history was right. The Lydian king of fabulous wealth issued the first gold coins around 550 BCE, though the Chinese were using a money of brass shaped like cowry shells some centuries earlier. The coins were forged of electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, and stamped with the image of a lion or bull. Lumpy and of irregular size, they look like something between a nugget and a coin. Later, weight and shape would be standardized, as we expect of money, but it’s not certain these first coins were used in commerce. The largest quantities have been found in temples, where they were an offering to various gods.

For centuries the image of a sacred animal was stamped on gold coins, from the Athenian owl to the American eagle, but gradually the creatures were replaced by personified gods, then the faces of emperors and kings, and finally presidents. The value was in the image.

It made the deity or emperor (and the empire) appear more real. God or Caesar: wherever you went, there he was in your pocket. Silver coinage was actually more practical for commerce, so gold tended to be reserved for transactions of great symbolic value—like an urgent appeal to the gods—or of immediate practical value, such as financing wars. Sometimes, like the railroad spike, gold pretended to serve both functions at once.

Gold represented something more than human, then it facilitated trade, then the trade routes were used by the armies and navies of empires. But an empire requires a constant intake and expenditure of wealth, both for sustenance and for the display that makes it credible, so in a remarkably short period the Mediterranean empires squandered their gold on wars and luxuries. At one time so much gold was flowing east to China that Rome tried to outlaw silk. It paid its soldiers in brass coin till even that was worthless. The fable of lost birthright is a self-­‐fulfilling narrative, and not just for individuals. Gold economics also turns nations into prospectors.

The siege of Troy, despite Homer’s epic poem, was less about recovering Helen than seizing Priam’s gold. When the Romans conquered the Bronze Age tribes of southeastern Spain it was with the aim of establishing mining colonies, which supplied Rome with tin and copper as well as gold. Centuries later when those mines were exhausted, Columbus established a mining camp in the New World in 1494, knowing that part of his mission was to refinance Europe.

Wealth confiscated from the Jews of Spain provided the seed money for that voyage, and returned astronomical dividends in the century that followed. Spain’s treasury received about 750,000 pounds of gold—enough, as it trickled into the royal coffers of other nations, to underwrite the Renaissance.

So again there are two sides to the gold coin, the near at hand and the far away. There is prospecting, and there is speculation. Having an eye for terrain, and keeping an eye on the

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markets. Gold seekers and gold traders: one representing radical individualism, the other the servant of empire. This again is the deep contradiction of the gold economy, often found in the same person. Think of Lew heading off to the wilderness, yet tuned into the daily index of the world gold market. Both here and there. Gold is the heavy metal, its purity measured by the assayer; but it’s also the idealized product of the alchemist, who would transmute the “base” world into an ideal purity. It’s solid as rock, but it’s also the dream of something from nothing, and requires slavery (human or some other form of carbon), control systems, monopolies, and fraud because it can never pay its bills. The gold rush brought this contradiction to our region, and it has not yet recovered.

The Prospector and the Speculator

Beaver was the gold that first attracted Euro-­‐Americans to the rivers of northwestern California. It had been the coin of the frontier for more than two centuries—even using ingots cast in the shape of a beaver—but by the mid 1800s trappers in the Northwest were competing for a diminishing resource. Pierson Reading, usually credited with the discovery of gold in the region, first came up from Sacramento looking for beaver. The rivers were already trapped out, but when he returned to Sacramento the Gold Rush was in full force and the diggings reminded him of river bars he’d seen on the Trinity. He outfitted a work force of Indian slaves—“for a mere trifle, you can secure their services for life”—and went back for another look. He did find gold, but word of the discovery traveled fast and by fall of 1849 the Trinity River bars were elbow-­‐to-­‐elbow with miners. By 1851 there would be ten thousand of them, with the competition for claims getting violent. When miners from Oregon strongly objected to his use of slaves, Reading had the good sense to take his profits and return to Sacramento.

Many other forty-­‐niners left the river and headed back to civilization when the rains began and supplies ran low, having discovered as my great grandfather did that there’s less money in prospecting than in selling picks and shovels and supplies and the animals to pack them. When upper Trinity Natives told some of the gold-­‐seekers about a bay only eight days’ travel to the west, a new business idea began to form. Instead of hauling supplies up the central valley and over the mountains, why not bring them from the coast? It couldn’t be more than forty miles away. A trading company there could take in merchandise from San Francisco with one hand and gold with the other, and pocket a good percentage of it. More than two dozen miners pledged themselves to the expedition. Named after its two principals, they would be known as the Gregg-­‐Wood expedition.

Prospector and speculator share a conflicted love for the near-­‐at-­‐hand and the barely possible, and Lewis Keysor Wood was both by turns. He’d come west from Kentucky with the Gold Rush then settled down to something more practical: buying and selling lots in San Jose.

But when he learned of Reading’s strike on the Trinity, he was off to the gold fields again. Later he would be return to real estate, selling building sites on the bay they eventually discovered.

Josiah Gregg was an almost purely speculative creature. Sickly and introverted, he grew up in western Missouri where he taught school for a time, then studied law, then medicine.

When his health failed he was put aboard a wagon that would take him to a drier climate and a more active life. In Santa Fe he worked in the offices of a trading company, and as his health

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improved he became a trader himself, traveled throughout the southern plains and into Chihuahua. In 1844 he published Commerce of the Prairies, two volumes of mercantile advice and travel stories, including the botany, geology, and customs of the region. The book was immensely popular back east and in Europe and went through ten editions.

Once in motion, Gregg developed an appetite for distant horizons that wouldn’t let him continue long in one activity. He left the trader’s life to enroll in a Kentucky medical school, but then the following spring he joined a wagon train leaving from Independence. In mid-­‐journey he veered south to volunteer for the Mexican War, where he served as an interpreter and correspondent.

After the war he joined a medical practice in Saltillo but soon abandoned it to join a botanical expedition to western Mexico and Baja, where he identified twenty-­‐three species of plant that now carry the attribution greggi. He was writing up his botanical notes in San Francisco in the summer of ’49 when he abandoned them to join the rush to the gold fields.

Gregg was older than most of the miners and argued most strenuously for the expedition to the coast. He had mapping experience, his mule carried instruments for surveying and navigation, and he became the group’s de facto leader.

As they waited for the rains to let up, their numbers dwindled along with their food. On November 5, the date they’d determined to leave, the weather turned even uglier. Only eight men were willing to go, estimating they had enough pork and beans and flour for about ten days. But their Native guides refused to start out in a driving rain. The ground was saturated, the rivers would soon be impassable, and it was snowing at the higher elevations. Only Gregg’s visionary arrogance and Wood’s Kentucky grit can explain their starting out that day. And their ignorance of what lay ahead of them.

They soon lost the established trail as it began to snow heavily. Under Gregg’s compass direction they headed straight west instead of following the northwesterly ridges and rivers.

Horses and mules and men labored up steep frozen slopes, then slid into muddy gulches where they hacked brush and climbed again. After five days, already low on food, they decided to follow the Trinity’s south fork and soon arrived at a Tsunungwe town. The inhabitants had fled across the river or into the woods, no doubt having heard of the foreigners who came looking for yellow sand and took whatever they wanted without paying. In that regard, the exchange might have been more reciprocal than they expected.

Having failed to induce the Indians to return, and observing that they had considerable quantities of salmon in their huts, which they had obtained and cured for their subsistence during the winter, we helped ourselves to as much as we wanted, leaving in its place a quantity of venison that had been killed by some of our party a short time previously, invoking as a justification for so doing the old adage 'a fair exchange is no robbery,' and pressed forward on our journey with all diligence.

Wood’s narrative, the only account that survives, describes a second transaction at their camp that evening when they were visited by a group of about eighty warriors. Fortunately, two members of the company had brought beads and trinkets, the frontier survival currency that had accompanied the fur trade, and they quickly began distributing their goods. Along with a demonstration of rifle shooting the next morning, the gifts purchased the lives of the

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travelers. They were warned, however, that if they continued downstream they would encounter people more numerous and less friendly, who might not be so generous.

So Gregg headed them due west again, insisting that they had to stay close to 41 degrees latitude if they wanted to come out in the vicinity of the legendary Trinity Bay, into which the Trinity River flowed. When they came to the crest of Bald Mountain, half frozen and starving, they debated turning back, but Gregg’s observations said they were closer to the coast than the mining camps. He also said they were covering about seven miles a day.

On the eighth day, having eaten only a paste of flour, they went to bed without dinner.

Two of the horses were so weak they were abandoned. From some nameless creek, a member of the expedition brought a bucket of drinking water that contained gold-­‐bearing sand. They’d struck it rich, but no one had the strength to do anything about it. Only the discovery of an occasional prairie, where they killed and ate several deer, an elk, even a grizzly, kept the party from dying in the mountains.

It took them a month to reach the coastal redwoods. But now, almost to their goal, the situation was even more desperate. There was no game among the huge trees and dense understory. The terrain was treacherous for horses and mules, with enormous tree trunks fallen in every direction. Where they could not dig under they had to saw through, or cut steps to climb over. Then, one gray December morning, someone thought they heard the ocean. That afternoon, two scouts came back to confirm it. Only another six miles. Three days later they emerged from the forest at 41 degrees, near Little River.

Gregg directed them north, still looking for Trinity Bay. At Big Lagoon, forced to turn inland but too weak to cut through the forest, their only option was to return south down the coast toward San Francisco. At Trinidad Head, by gift or trade they obtained mussels and dried salmon from the Tsurai people. As usual the party waited for Gregg to take his readings, then waited again while he carved his observation on a prominent spruce: Latitude 41°8’ 30” Barometer 29°86’ Ther. Fah. 48°at 12 M. Dec 17, 1849.

J. Gregg This also marked the end of the group’s patience. Later that day, when two of his mules became mired in a coastal bog and Gregg demanded help, the party’s tenuous social contract came apart. In Wood’s words, “One and all declared they would no longer lend assistance to man or beast and that from this day forward each would constitute a company by himself, under obligations to no one and free to act as best suited his notions.”

Here is the individualism of the gold economy at its radical extreme: they were a party of Robinson Crusoes.

Wood wanted to remain in Trinidad. His horse had died, he was too exhausted to walk, and he feared his companions might turn to cannibalism. He negotiated with the Tsurai to allow him to remain, promising to earn his keep as an elk hunter. Essentially, he would have lived as a debt slave. But despite their recent declaration of individualism, the others objected. Their only safety lay in numbers, they said. They finally resolved this breakdown of the social contract with a strictly cash deal. A member of the party agreed to sell Wood one of his two horses for a hundred dollars.

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We know about this agreement because, amid all their suffering, Wood recorded every transaction—date, amount, nature of the expense or debit, and a regular summation of accounts payable and receivable. His original journal was lost, but years later he could still dictate the details of these transactions from memory. His attention to the mundane was equal to Gregg’s obsession with celestial reckoning. Assayer and alchemist, at the far edge of the Golden West.

The horse transaction didn’t bring peace for long. A few miles farther south, after the company had negotiated with a group of Wiyot to be carried across a large river—among the northwest tribes, free ferriage was the rule—Gregg again made the group wait while he took observations. Finally, as they were about to leave him, he clambered through the mud with his instruments and fell into the canoe, his angry tirade giving the Mad River its present name.

Until I read this story I thought it referred to the other kind of madness, and I’m still not sure that’s wrong.

Wood’s journal gives only a brief account of discovering the bay they’d set out to find.

Once again, fortune arrived in a bucket of drinking water. Gregg spat it out. “Salt,” he said, then demanded to know where it had come from.

On Christmas Day they camped near a spring overlooking Humboldt Bay, a little east of what is now Arcata’s plaza. Their dinner was an elk’s head, the only part they hadn’t eaten. Too weak to stake out the claims they’d come all this way for, Wood’s account is almost exclusively about food: a gift of clams from a Wiyot head man; baskets of eels taken from two men fishing in the river now bearing that name; more eels traded for pieces of Wood’s iron skillet.

Two economies: one predicated on abundance, the other on scarcity. One piece of iron bought three dozen eel.

The final and most essential transactions came after the party had broken in two. Half the expedition agreed to follow Gregg down the coast, a journey that neither Gregg nor his diary survived. Wood and three others continued up the Eel, so desperately hungry they attacked a group of eight grizzlies. They felled one bear and ran, Wood climbed a small tree, and the other bears retreated. But then the wounded bear revived, knocked down the tree, and when its companion returned they tried to tear Wood in half. When they finally lost interest, he was miraculously still alive.

Too severely injured to ride, his companions too weak to carry him, when a group of Native people showed up Wood said he wanted to stay with them till he could walk. They made an agreement, or thought they had. The head man gave Wood some herbs, then asked for all their remaining beads and trinkets, everything but their essential utensils and blankets. When they complied, he and his people walked off into the woods. By nightfall it was evident they weren’t coming back.

Wood’s account says this was the result of “reposing too much confidence in a race of beings known by all experience to be totally unworthy of it.” Of course he’d forgotten their recent experience with the Wiyot, who had welcomed and fed them only a few days before. It’s impossible to know whether this exchange was bad-­‐faith bargaining or a failure of cross-­‐ cultural understanding. Sadly, that question would characterize much of the next 150 years.

But there was one more transaction, and it redeems some of that history. It did not involve money—the four men were reduced to the economy of basic survival. For twelve days

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after the bear encounter Wood lay on a pallet, unable to walk, in too much pain to be moved.

They were still ten days from the Sonoma settlements. He advised his companions to leave him and turned his back while they made their decision. At length he heard Isaac Wilson exclaim, “No! I will not leave him! I'll remain with him, if it is alone, or I will pack him if he is able and willing to bear the pain!"

Thomas Sebring agreed but said to Wood, "We cannot pack you, for you have never allowed us to touch you even; how then can you bear to be placed upon a horse and packed?"

"You are not to consult my wishes in the matter," Wood replied. "Much longer delay in this place and at this season of the year may prove fatal to all; self-­‐preservation, therefore, must demand an immediate resumption of our journey, if it be at the risk, and even expense of the life of one."

Here we are back at the social contract. It’s a long way from their original business partnership, but still based in the economy of the gold camps. In its collective form, throughout the western boom towns and mining camps, gold-­‐seekers were capable of the worst violence and cruelty imaginable. Scornful of social norms and opposed to any law but the complete liberty of the white male individual, it was a culture that might look leniently upon a man being shot but summarily lynch anyone who stole his horse—or in any other way threatened his mobility and independence. The price of his life, then, was less than the price of his property.

Writ large, it’s what we call free-­‐market capitalism.

But however awful in its mob form, the faith among individual miners (and within their unions) could be rock-­‐solid. As Wood and his companions agreed: all for one, and one for all.

Scratch the surface of a prospector and you’ll find gold. That’s a sentimental truism, but true nonetheless. Of course I am, by heredity, a carrier of its delusions.

Where Gold Resides

Now it’s a hundred and some years later. It’s the Fourth of July, and the Denny Miners Association is celebrating their independence. People are gathered down by the banks of the New River, steelhead baking in buried coals. Homemade spirits and intoxicants have come out of cabins in the hills, people from town have brought cold beer, junk food, and some Mr Natural blotter acid. The woods are a tinderbox, but people are nevertheless talking about fireworks. There’s a strong sense that something dangerous could happen. A few hundred feet from our celebration is the former site of New River City, a gold-­‐rush mining metropolis following Reading’s discovery, not even a ghost town now. It all burned down, I heard. The only more recent building, a US Forest Service ranger station, has also burned to the ground, under suspicious circumstances. We can still smell the ashes.

The government has raised the ante on the prospectors. Too many people are moving in and staking bogus mining claims, USFS says. I think the real beef is that some of the newcomers are beginning to interfere with timber sales, complaining about herbicide spraying and making life scary for federal employees far from back-­‐up. Some of the threats are political theater, like the drama teacher who has a vacation cabin up here, driving around with a stage prop machine gun mounted on the cab of his pickup. Or my friend Goldie, who has generously invited us to this party. An advocate of communist revolution, he likes to say Denny is Angola.

I can sympathize with the Smokies. They have a real problem on their hands.

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Following passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, even long-­‐ established mining claims must submit to “validity tests.” Which the miners find doubly insulting because at the moment the entire nation’s economy is of doubtful validity. Jimmy Carter is fighting inflation and losing badly. The US Treasury, trying to restore credibility to the dollar, will soon be selling gold at $200 an ounce. The federal minimum wage is $2.30 an hour.

It doesn’t require a lot of gold to support what the law calls a “prudent” man.

Nevertheless, eviction actions have commenced against forty miners. It’s alleged that some miners passed the validity test by salting their claims, and Forest Service inspectors are retesting and choosing sites at random. One inspector was roughed up and another suffered what was described as a superficial bullet wound, so now they are accompanied by heavily armed US Marshals. Local sheriff’s deputies travel the backcountry only in pairs and in unmarked cars. It’s rumored that some of those cars are DEA, looking for marijuana gardens.

The Forest Service has begun aerial spraying of the herbicide 2,4,5-­‐T—a timber management tool, they say, but everyone knows what it’s really meant for. Officials are talking about bringing in the National Guard, assault vehicles, automatic weapons. A full-­‐scale invasion.

The Vietnam vets among the miners are not liking this, nor are the old Wobblies. Some of the party-­‐goers are packing side arms. Target practice and festive shooting are the order of the day.

There’s a little breeze, but by mid-­‐afternoon the New River canyon is plenty hot. People are either in the river or in the shade. There’s more tree cover on the other side, and some people have crossed on the cable car slung across the canyon. I’m sitting under a small cottonwood drinking home brew and talking to friends. As my grandfather might have told me, next to the opportunity for solitude, the chief benefit of the miner’s life is hanging out with wild people in wild places.

Redwood and Trillium live in a miner’s cabin over on the Salmon River. Their baby, born this spring, is sleeping on a blanket in the fluttery shadows of cottonwood. Their claim belongs to two brothers who’ve been up here since the ’30s. Redwood says they’re both communists.

They let them live in the cabin for nothing.

“Actually,” Trillium says, “one of them is a political communist and the other says he’s a spiritual communist.”

“They argue about everything,” says Redwood.

They agreed to let the young couple start a garden down on the river bar. Instead of working it for gold, Redwood and Trillium intended to grow food and trade the surplus for whatever they needed. They wouldn’t need money.

“They were totally behind it,” says Trillium. But then one of the brothers found their little marijuana patch and a week ago they were evicted. They’ve come over to Denny to stay with friends while they figure out what to do next. They might join the commune up at Black Bear, where they could show people how to grow things.

My friend Goldie comes over and refills our glasses with a dark brew that has been settling and cooling in the river. It’s heady stuff, and the Mr Natural begins to expand.

Goldie Bigfoot has been up here a couple of years now. I know him mostly from his town visits, hanging out at the bookstore or the organic grocery. He’s another academic dropout, a student of Marxist revolution who decided to permanently devote himself to field study. Like Lew the hitchhiker, he carries a small token of the gold economy, a tiny glass vial

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filled with water and flakes of gold he’s panned from the river. When shaken, it shimmers like a summer rain.

Next day before leaving, Barbara and I wade across the river, head up to the ridge trail for a serious walk and talk. We’re facing an eviction similar to Redwood and Trillium’s, except that we’re doing it to ourselves. Our breakdown is along the lines of the two old brothers: the politics and spirit of our joint venture have lost their agreement, and we can’t seem to get them back together. Like the brothers, we argue all the time.

We were exhausted when we got here and should have just gone to a motel and slept for two days. Besides our overextended family farm, we’ve burned through several non-­‐paying jobs, including a regional almanac that we wrote, edited, published, and distributed, then abandoned just as it was about to make money. After a year and a half we just couldn’t do it anymore. We co-­‐managed the bookstore for a year while the owner took a well-­‐earned break— from us, I think, as much as the work. I’d recently quit that job and was apprenticing to be a carpenter, while working nights as a doorman at the community tavern. Barbara is going to school to become a therapist. These life changes have left us seriously in need of respite, but this ain’t it. After an hour of hiking, it’s too hot to go on.

Coming back we meet a young man who says he came down the mountain for yesterday’s barbecue. He’s lived up there a year and a half, would have been one of the last draftees to go to Vietnam, decided on the mountains instead. He hunts and gathers, pans a little gold, grows a few plants, enough for himself and trade with friends. He’s taken a new name from the ridge where he lives: Bake-­‐Oven Beaver. He smiles brightly, says so long, and heads up the trail.

We decide to take the fast way back. One of the miners shows us how to hold and then release the brake on the cable car, a precarious little box suspended from a rusty pulley wheel far above the river. We climb in, sit on narrow benches facing each other, swaying with the cable suspended between the cliffs. I let the brake go and suddenly we’re soaring outward and down in a great swooping arc above the river, whitewater and rocks dizzyingly far below. Above us the pulley squeals loudly as it rides the steel cable, the little wooden box carries us flying through the air, then slows as we rise toward the other side and up to the landing. We secure the car, set the brake, step out onto solid rock. Part of us—the part that isn’t going back to our former lives—has stayed on the other side.

When gold is your currency, it’s more than something to buy stuff with. It‘s that precursor to money—treasure—whose value is what the true alchemists sought: a source, not a substance derived from something else. A thing of such great price, however, is not easily found. Constantly sought after, it lives mostly in the heart.

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4. PULP: MAKING TREES INTO MONEY

Lewis Keysor Wood, making his way down the gangplank with the aid of a cane, returned to Humboldt Bay in September of 1850. His companions had packed him southward through the coast range for another hundred miles, arriving at the old town of Sonoma in early February.

They arranged for his care, then left him to recover while they hurried to San Francisco to spread the news of California’s newest landfall. By the time Wood got back to the bay he’d discovered, nearly all the buildable land adjacent to the water had been claimed. A new rush was on, in real estate this time—vacant lots for the trading houses, stores, and saloons through which the gold would flow.

But once again, Wood’s friends had taken good care of him. Among the first arrivals in April, they’d formed a development company and claimed and laid out lots around the spring where they’d spent Christmas Day. Union Town, they called it, to honor their united action. The Union Company entered L.K. Wood’s name in its records, in recognition of his suffering and courage, along with a large chunk of what is now downtown Arcata—“that he might benefit from that same spirit of enterprise from which we hope to reap a rich harvest.” He wasted no time in solidifying his investment.

Tuesday the 10th got Mr. Joshua Inman to put me up a pre-­‐emption cabin. Commenced to board at Parson A. White’s Tuesday, September 10th, 1850, at Supper, at $12 per week.

September 11th paid for washing, meals and candles $10. Paid for sawing $14. Paid for cutting a tree $16.

Josiah Gregg was not so fortunate. The King Range forced his party inland, where they encountered all the hardships of winter travel in an unfamiliar and rugged terrain. Exhausted and starving, near Clear Lake in northern Mendocino County, Gregg fell from his horse and never regained consciousness. In the pursuit of his pure geography, the surveyor-­‐alchemist had refined himself into a lifeless abstraction.

But L.K. Wood was also transformed by his ordeal. What he had sought in gold, he now found in notes and deeds: paper fictions granting rights of possession and pre-­‐emption. Wood became the first Humboldt County Clerk. He married and raised a family on a Bayside farm which he named Kiwelattah, after the Wiyot head man who had fed the starving explorers. He never completely recovered from his injuries and died in 1874 at age fifty-­‐five.

From L.K. Wood to Wafer Wood

The redwood forest, those arboreal giants that nearly swallowed the Gregg-­‐Wood expedition, turned out to be another kind of gold mine. Small logs went back to San Francisco on the first schooners to visit the bay, and within a year milled lumber was being shipped on a regular basis. Gold’s flash-­‐in-­‐the-­‐pan quickly settled into the economics of carbon extraction.

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It took some ingenuity to work out the technology and financing that turned massive chunks of coastal redwood into a commodity for San Francisco and other towns undergoing a land and building rush. The ‘06 earthquake and fire helped revive the market when it lagged, as did the financial bubble of the ’20s. The forests got a few years of respite after the ’29 crash, until the post-­‐WW II housing boom and tractor logging dragged the Pacific Northwest out of the Great Depression. The boom years of the 1950s and ’60s removed enormous swaths of Douglas fir and redwood, hauled out over hundreds of miles of newly cut roads, so the next depression cycle was accompanied by massive landslides and flooding as well as the usual rural poverty. By the time the environmentalists arrived, ninety percent of the old growth was gone.

A little more than a century after he and Gregg stumbled onto Humboldt Bay, L.K. Wood could have seen the fruits of his ordeal already beginning to rot, abandoned mills and warehouses, decaying docks and pilings along the waterfront. From a peak of 400 lumber mills in 1900, only a couple of corporate giants and a handful of smaller outfits remained. They were still churning out millions of board feet of redwood, but more and more of it was second growth, of the lumber marked by knots and immature pulp wood. They had to make up new grades as the quality of the wood deteriorated. What had once simply been redwood became “architectural” or “garden” grades, which then ranged from Clear All Heart down to Deck Heart to Merchantable Heart, down to the Merch they once threw in the burn pile.

In the early 60’s two pulp mills were constructed on the outer edge of the bay, alchemically transforming wood chips into vats of cellulose destined to become the clean white sheets we use for writing and wiping. For Georgia-­‐Pacific and Louisiana-­‐Pacific it was another step in the history of paper: from hemp and rags to wood fiber, and then from New England hardwood to Southeastern pine and now the Pacific Northwest. Wood pulp was the final step in the marketing of smaller and smaller pieces of cellulose, from lumber to stakes to shingles to wafer wood (also known as OSB, oriented strand board, glued-­‐together chunks of wood pressed into four-­‐by-­‐eight sheets). Pulp is the perfect expression of carbon economics: take a raw resource, cook it down into a medium of exchange, then move on. In the ’80s and ’90s the big corporations continued their migration, closed their local mills (G-­‐P sold their pulp mill to Simpson Timber) and moved to tropical countries where life and labor were cheaper. They did this with such success that the price of wood pulp has been depressed for years, but it’s still the cheapest way to turn forests into money.

That is, unless you count the damage these industrial giants neglect to pay for. In their prime years the two pulp mills were sending some forty million gallons a day of toxic effluent out into the Pacific through a half-­‐mile pipe, and calling it good. After years of industry denial and foot-­‐dragging the EPA definitely established the presence of dioxins and said the dumping had to stop, but it wasn’t till the 1990’s that a lawsuit by Surf Riders Foundation led to action. L-­‐ P simply closed down. Simpson added another half mile of pipe and changed to a less toxic bleaching process, but it was still a potent mix that washed up as yellow blobs along the beaches. That mill, too, eventually closed, unable to compete with cheaper global pulp, but it left a toxic legacy of thousands of gallons of caustic liquid, still on site, slowly eating through its steel containers. Now it’s the property of the Humboldt Bay Harbor District, which is still calculating the public cost of cleanup.

These debts are seldom acknowledged or mentioned, so forgetting them wasn’t hard.

The most obvious cost of living with the pulp mills was a malodorous toxic cloud that for years

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told travelers they were nearing Eureka. One of its mayors, Fred Moore, who had lived there all his life, used to say he’d never smelled it. Well into the 1970’s, besides the pulp mill’s bouquet of fog and sulfur, the remaining lumber mills kept a dozen or so teepee burners smoking day and night, consuming pieces too awkward for the chipper, and producing a steady drizzle of ash and particulates. People referred to it, if at all, as “the bread and butter.”

As for the people themselves, all the artisans and workers in the woods and on fishing boats, all their collective wisdom and skill was also abandoned and they were left in the unemployment lines, their descendants left to sell each other meth or move to another town.

All those promises, like the acid-­‐bleached paper they were written on, like the pages of those millions of books that turned brown and brittle and broke into pieces. The rush was over and the pulp economy moved on, those costs never accounted for.

Other long-­‐term costs may never be added up. Across the bay from the mills, one of the nation’s earliest and dirtiest nuclear power plants supplied 63 megawatts of power that churned out the pulp and lumber. U-­‐235. A new kind of money. A deeper gold than gold, discovered in the catacombs beneath the economy of carbon. “Enriched” uranium, burning with the dark light of the sub-­‐atomic underworld: so bright, so lustrous, so astonishingly heavy.

It’s the ultimate transmutation of matter into the commodity we call “energy.” Here again, the curse of Midas turns life into its opposite. The economy of gold, at its carbon-­‐extracting terminal end, is a vast undertaking business, transforming living things into dead commodity.

Pulp. The Redwood Empire.

Like all empires it was unsustainable. The commodity forest turned out to be just another gold rush—strictly cash and carry—with the gold industry providing the model.

Capitalized and mechanized, with innovations like hydraulic mining, the California gold business turned over mountains and buried rivers beneath the cast-­‐off mud and rock. The refining of gold-­‐bearing ore left a residue of mercury that is still cycling through the food we eat. Again, gold provided the model, and paper money—carbon notes, portable and free of attachment to place—carried it to another level. as it transformed forests into board feet of lumber and tons of wood pulp.

During the peak years of logging, the region’s watersheds experienced the equivalent of thousands of years of natural erosion. Landslides, silt and mud, the run-­‐off of herbicides, the destruction of habitat and salmon runs—none of it was accounted for, let alone paid for. Like the thousands of gallons of wood preservatives still cycling through local seafood restaurants, it doesn’t show up on the bill. Like the bread and butter falling from the sky, it’s an “externalized cost”—off the books. The pulp economy runs on unpaid bills on a scale vaster than my grandfather could have imagined. When we adopt this economy as our own, when we use its money, we unknowingly agree to pay these undisclosed costs. It should carry a warning label: You and Your Descendants Owe the Earth. One Pulp Dollar.

Weed in the Woods: The Environmental Wars Begin

Now that it’s mostly gone, we see that the “base material” of the Humboldt Bay region was transmuted into dollars at an astonishingly discounted price, especially if you consider that the forests represented millennia of “growth” and “investment.” The nuke was a typical product of

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this sloppy bookkeeping. It would run forever, PG&E said. It would be nearly-­‐free electricity, too cheap to meter. Instead, its thirteen-­‐year lifespan was marked by several radioactive leaks into the bay, at least one near meltdown, and years of denying there was any danger posed by the earthquake fault directly underneath the facility. Only after years of public outcry was all this finally acknowledged, and when the plant shut down for refueling it never reopened. Taxpayers and utility customers are still bearing the cost of the cleanup.

The decommissioning of the nuke was a historical event, certainly for the downwind residents and the children of South Bay School, but it had another long-­‐term significance. It publicly announced the arrival of another spirit of valuation in the Pacific Northwest, a different way of accounting. It had taken a decade to find its voice, but now the message was unmistakable: the weed economy was here.

By weed I mean a lot more than marijuana. Any right-­‐wing nut will tell you that environmental politics is only one of marijuana’s effects—and another good reason to criminalize the plant. And he wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Except that weed economics is nothing new. It’s been the practice of human beings, in urban ghettos and rural villages, since the invention of cities and agriculture. The drug laws are only the most recent way to keep a thumb on this segment of the economy.

Some environmental activists will resist this association with the dope-­‐smoking underclass, and swear they never touch the stuff. That’s fine, and probably true. But it’s crucial to remember this: the thing that got called “environmentalism” is itself a weed—that is, a thing not belonging to those in power, growing without permission, and by definition where it’s not wanted. According to Emerson’s definition, a weed is just a plant whose use has not yet been discovered.

The weed economy also has a common root, and a kindred spirit, in the shell economy.

It pays its respects to the Earth and its great laws, it strives to achieve balance, to pay back what it takes, and acknowledges the principle of the gift. Not that it’s always worked, or always will. Civilized people easily confuse gift exchange with Free!—the constant cry of those advertisements where we learn our economics. It’s going to take time and painful experience to understand its corollary: everything has to be paid for.

The weed economy also allies itself with the economy of the natural world, another connection it hasn’t always gotten right. But despite misappropriating the names of animals, and sometimes their fur and feathers, up to the mid 70’s it had stayed faithful to the idea that economics is not exempt from the laws of ecology. We should have protested loudly the first time this spirit of valuation was called “environmentalism.”

But it can be difficult to argue nomenclature when you’re a long-­‐haired hippie surrounded by angry guys in hard hats and red suspenders.

It was 1977. The Democrats were briefly back in power. Jimmy Carter had named Cecil Andrus to be Secretary of the Interior. Congressman Phillip Burton proposed to add 74,000 acres to Redwood National Park, and Andrus was considering it. In April Burton announced that he would hold hearings in Eureka, where his legislation was portrayed by the timber industry— which included most of the county’s business establishment and its government

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representatives—as economic apocalypse. Men without jobs. Women without groceries.

Children without shoes.

On the day of the hearing every logger, truck driver, and mill worker was given the day off. Eureka businesses closed their doors and in a mile-­‐long parade through downtown, owners and employees marched as one. Afterward, chip trucks and log rigs lined the streets around the municipal auditorium. The crowd out front had the air of Paul Bunyan Days, or a public execution. There were rumors of axes in the crowd.

Redwood National Park was about forty miles up the coast and had already been expanded, years ago, in response to the much-­‐hyped discovery of The World’s Tallest Trees. But the trees were on a gerrymandered strip along Redwood Creek, and the rest of the watershed, still privately owned, was being ravaged by clear-­‐cuts. As an isolated parcel, the Tall Tree Grove was not going to survive.

While the government was deliberately and slowly acting to protect the public interest, Arcata Redwood was chopping down old growth as fast as it could, basically liquidating itself and expecting a big payoff at the end. Meanwhile it was telling workers that the hippie environmentalists and the government were killing their jobs, their babies, and American Values. For years a quiet war had simmered between the loggers and the longhairs, mostly confined to bar-­‐room scuffles, but now the timber industry and its allies were actively stirring this antagonism into violence.

The axes were mostly theater, and a lot of the demonstration around the park hearings was just redneck bluster and name-­‐calling, but there were a number of guys openly brandishing knives and they looked real enough. A small contingent of eco-­‐freaks had arrived from Arcata, where environmental activism had sprung up like a mushroom in the years following the first Earth Day. At the center of their group was a little old lady, Lucille Vinyard, fierce and far-­‐ seeing, pushing forward through the hooting and hollering loggers. She had come to speak, on behalf of the Sierra Club, in favor of park expansion. There was a large contingent of cops and deputy sheriffs, but they didn’t seem to be there to protect people like Lucille.

In another small group, many of them his former students, Professor Rudi Becking of Humboldt State’s forestry department was also there to testify. Rudi had founded the Emerald Creek Committee, which included these young naturalists who’d covertly hiked into the threatened watershed and documented the destruction taking place there. Becking had received several death threats, and he got a few more as he made his way through the crowd into the auditorium. His friends intercepted most of the spit aimed at him by tobacco-­‐chewing hard hats, but some of it got through.

Surprisingly, everyone survived that day. The park got expanded and the tallest tree was saved. But I hadn’t seen such hard-­‐hat anger since the “backlash” orchestrated against the anti-­‐ war movement. I can only guess who paid for all the bumper stickers and yellow ribbons, but they were in evidence for years along with the anger and resentment they sowed. This is how the pulp economy fights its wars. Its enemy is the accurate disclosure of costs, and as in any war the first casualty is truth. The grinding up of nature begins with human nature, reduced by miseducation and money to its most docile form: the company town. It used to be they hired Pinkertons for this kind of bullying—now the workers are happy to do it themselves.

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President Carter eventually signed the Redwood National Park bill, $190 million for 48,000 acres, a high price for logged-­‐over land, three quarters of it described by a park official as looking like an active war zone. Besides signing taxpayers up for millions of dollars of restoration work, the government was buying back land that had never been its to give away, the ownership based on dubious pre-­‐emptions and courthouse paper-­‐shuffling which probably did not include a bill of sale from the Chilulah people. Arcata Redwood cried all the way to its corporate law firm, which turned it into a profitable media company that bought up newspapers, printing companies, and the like.

The pulp economy tells its workers and customers that this conversion of our common heritage to private profit is good business practice. Common ownership, the very idea of the commons, is its constant adversary. In this light, we see that stealing Indian land was just an early stage of America’s war against communism: “They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common,” proclaimed Senator Henry L. Dawes of Massachusetts. His 1887 General Allotment Act gave to every unassimilated Indian 160 acres, and the rest went to his friends in the railroad, timber, and oil businesses. The tribal way of life had to go: “There is no selfishness,” he said, “which is at the bottom of civilization.”

Turning public wealth into private commodity is a kind of state religion, sold to us and repeated in relentless advertisements till it’s an article of human existence. Here’s General Colin Powell, speaking in 1996 before a Business Leadership Summit, illustrating how we make this pitch today: “If you give 1.3 billion Chinamen access to home shopping on television, communism is over. There is no way communism can compete with a salad shooter for $9.95.”

Once exposed to our way of life, like American shoppers the Chinese will buy anything that’s cheap. Of course this is the guy who sold the invasion of Iraq to the United Nations.

Or to put a more credible face on it, here’s Warren Buffett, the multi-­‐billionaire investor known as the sage of Omaha. “Opportunities abound in America,” Warren wrote in his 2013 annual letter. The nation’s GDP has quadrupled over the past six decades, he said. “Throughout that period, every tomorrow has been uncertain. America’s destiny, however, has always been clear: ever-­‐increasing abundance.”

Warren’s words carry a lot of weight. The law of pulp economics—all things are commodity and all people customers—overwhelms even the laws of nature. There is no answer to such pronouncements, no opportunity for rebuttal. The success of pulp economics is mostly due to the volume with which it trumpets the news. No other way of thinking is possible.

The weed economy resists this sales pitch, but In public argument it often loses, and its own experiments don’t always work as we hoped. Its alignment with nature assures us that it should prevail in the long run, but in daily practice we are sometimes more persuaded by the old commercials in our heads. Weed economics is routinely suppressed by a dysfunctional political system and corrupted institutions, but it isn’t defeated only in courtrooms or elections.

We carry money in places deeper than pockets.

The Carpenter and Indian War

I was removing a bedroom window from the old house above the river. John and Dennis were jacking up the front porch, getting it almost level again. Aryay was putting baseboards in the

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other bedroom, which had just gotten new lino. Mike and Paul had gone back to camp to get lumber.

The July afternoon was hot, but the house was shaded by oak and madrone, and a little breeze was coming up the canyon. Down below us, the Klamath River kept a steady undertone, like the wind only deeper. We were a little way upriver from the ancient Yurok village of Pecwan.

I’d read that when someone died in a traditional redwood plank house, the body was not taken out through the entry opening. Instead, a plank was removed from a side wall. The door was for the living. Even in spiritual matters, the Yurok maintained a scrupulous double-­‐ entry bookkeeping.

Of course the house we were working on wasn’t that old. A typical frame construction two-­‐bedroom, it had endured some serious living. But behind its current occupants was another generation, and before this house, another house. There was a sense of that presence as we worked on the ordinary gabled box with its multiple openings. If some soul wants out, I thought, now’s its chance.

I wasn’t hired for my carpentry skills, or only partly for that. I’d been working as a wood butcher for about five years, and usually I liked seeing what I’d done for my money at the end of the day. Not that my years at Northtown Books hadn’t been rewarding. It had been the best work I could have imagined at the time. For one thing, I was unemployed when its owner, Jack Hitt, showed up at our farm kitchen one evening and said he needed someone, just a few hours a week, to pay bills. Sure, I said, both of us knowing I was the world’s most unlikely candidate for the job. I did learn how to pay bills (when I had a bunch ready go I asked Jack if he wanted me to drop them at the post office—Jesus Christ, he said, no, don’t mail them) but what I really got was another lesson in leveraged capital and how to make pulp economics support weed economics.

The book is the ancestor of pulp artifacts, and its 500-­‐year evolution from sacred text to mass market paperback told the history of modern capital. To get credit for unsold copies of the cheap bestsellers (we didn’t stock many of them) we ripped off the covers and sent them back to the publishers. We were supposed to then destroy the books, but instead put them in the free box by the front door. The bookstore was a public service pretending to be a business.

One night at the bar Jack tried to give it to me but I refused, offended that he would attempt to corrupt my economic integrity.

But after decades of laboring over books and texts, I needed to employ some other parts of my being, and maybe carry a little of the bookstore’s radical content into some kind of practice. When a good friend and carpenter offered to take me on as an apprentice, I said yes without hesitation. At first I pictured myself pounding nails by day, then writing about it each night, so I had to be cured of a few romantic delusions. But I found I had some affinity for doors and windows and could usually get them to open and close snugly, or even make them appear where there had been no opening before. I just had to watch out for the thought bubble between the measuring tape and the saw.

On the other hand, some of those air-­‐ball ideas turned out to be useful, and that was the other thing that got me hired. Like the rest of the crew here, the guys around and under the house—we were activists.

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It was the early ’80s and there was plenty to be active about. Ronald Reagan was president, and a lot of our activity was directed against the Central American wars that were the centerpiece of his foreign policy. But mostly we represented local and regional struggles.

Some of us were veterans of the Redwood Park battles, some were still working to decommission the nuclear power plant. Others had helped to stop the G-­‐O Road—the Forest Service’s Gasquet-­‐Orleans highway that would have carried log trucks through the high country sacred to several Native tribes. Several of us had organized to ban the spraying of herbicides on forests by the good old USFS, then by Cal Trans along state highways, and now by Humboldt County along its country roads. For years “No Spray” signs had been sprouting up on roadside properties, a request the County had finally agreed to honor. Soon there will be so many signs they’ll go back to mowing.

All of these were defensive moves, keeping bad things from being worse. When asked what we were working for, it was a little harder to say. But the models we were developing, the thing I’m calling the weed economy, clearly amounted to a different way of doing business.

Resistance might still be a good name for it. What we were defending was an ongoing and unfolding experience, a legacy of experiments that added up to a culture. We had instituted and practiced, in every aspect of our lives and sometimes to foolish extremes, alternative forms of just about everything. Most of these efforts shared an allegiance, however shaky, to a few basic economic and ecological principles.

What goes around comes around, we said, and it was both trite and true—from the way we conducted meetings, sitting in a circle, to the way we passed a doobie, the same, to the ways we talked about watersheds, the way we served food and provided services, in circles and cycles again, including a literal recycling center. It also included cooperatives, collectives, and non-­‐profits on behalf of every imaginable cause, from the environment to health to families and social justice. And it included the way we thought about houses. We even did that in circles for a while—in yurts and teepees and domes that leaked—but this work for the Indians is strictly frame construction.

I think one or two of us might have worked production carpentry, swinging a framing hammer all day on concrete slabs in a subdivision, but for some years now our sustaining work, in ones or twos or as many as the job required, was the remodeling of old houses, with the occasional new addition or garage. I’d mostly worked with my friend Jay, who’d taken me on as an apprentice, but I’d also carpentered with all the others, in a sort of non-­‐union union. Need a window in that dark room? A way out the back? We didn’t think that food or people or the natural world should be treated like a pulp commodity—and neither should houses.

Our work on the Klamath was part of a plan to bring these separate commitments together, to unite carpentry and environmental and social justice—with money. When I came on the job, things were already in progress. As nearly as I could tell, the idea had come from the only one of us who actually had a contractor’s license. Steve bid on a BIA contract to rehabilitate Wiyot and Yurok housing, and he came in low. Like the rest of us, he didn’t think making a bundle of money was a high priority. In retrospect he may have underbid the job, but his plan included a few thousand dollars of profit going to various non-­‐profits and good causes.

Eventually it would grow into its own organization, a funding source that improved houses and supported the community. HumNet, Steve called it.

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There were personal, political, as well as practical difficulties—but they basically came down to money. Steve had launched his vision by taking on two partners. Aryay, a mainstay of the Herbicide Task Force, was a long-­‐time organizer who had supported himself by home repairs since Berkeley in the ’60s. John was a Vietnam vet, a staunch supporter of Central American Solidarity, and a gifted fabricator of things large and small, from houses to jewelry.

Aryay and John would help Steve plan and coordinate the work, enlist other workers, and have a say in the good works of HumNet.

But apparently Steve had never taken on a job of this scope, and hadn’t worked with partners. He was doing all the planning, buying the materials, and organizing the work. And of course he was exhausted. When things started to go wrong he began to talk to his partners like they were his employees, and since the absence of arbitrary authority was a prime motive of our lives, this wasn’t well received. Without seeing the contradiction, Steve had brought together an anarchist collective, but continued to think of himself as its boss.

My first day on the Pecwan job had been a micro-­‐drama of what was to come. Steve had six of us along one side of a fifty-­‐foot mobile home, putting up posts and beams that would support a roof to shelter the aluminum box from the summer sun, and from the rain that would probably leak in after we’d walked around on it. To get out of the crowd, I went to one end and started setting up supports to hang the ridge board. Aryay and John had cut pattern rafters, which they were holding at either eave. This is the stage of building I like best, where it looks like you’re making something out of nothing. After a couple of trials we had a fit, and I was tacking the ridge support in place when I heard hammering from the other end of the mobile home. Steve was starting his own ridge board, already working our way. At a glance I could see that the two ridges were not going to meet.

The Yuroks were generous, and I’m sure found us entertaining. But not everyone was amused. Down on the coast, where the Wiyot were another part of the HumNet project, homeowners were overtly hostile. That contract was officially ending when I was hired, but we had to drop the Pecwan job and go back to the coast because the Wiyot were complaining about the quality of the work and materials. The BIA was refusing to cut a check. A lot of time and money was at stake.

The Wiyot had plenty of reason to be unhappy. The descendants of Kiwelattah, the people who welcomed and fed the Gregg-­‐Wood expedition, had been displaced, murdered, enslaved, and finally allotted a few acres on a windy bluff at the south end of Humboldt Bay. Because it’s so picturesque—the marsh below is a federal wildlife sanctuary—I wasn’t prepared for the kind of squalor we encountered there. I thought slums only happened in cities. Most of the repairs had been done as prescribed by the BIA contract, yet it was clear they were a cosmetic patch on the real blight. The worst conditions had been improved, but some of the work was done by guys who were better activists than carpenters, and Steve had bought materials of the cheapest sort. Flake board, basically formaldehyde and sawdust, had been used for bath and kitchen floors, where the first leak would turn it back into pulp. Trim boards didn’t meet at corners. Doors didn’t close. All these things were correctable, but for the Wiyot they only confirmed the deeper and older wrongs.

Explaining HumNet to the Wiyot would have been difficult. Beneath the pulp materials lay a kind of pulp thinking, an unconscious missionary zeal that short-­‐changed Indian housing to

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raise money for white folks’ charities. Even after the best improvements, there was little outpouring of gratitude. When a tribal matron asked John and Mike to do some extra work on the side, they cheerfully put in another week on her house, then she stiffed them for their time and materials, acting as if they deserved it. John and Mike considered it payback. “Custer all over again,” they said.

Back at Pecwan, after weeks of buying our own materials and working without pay, when the BIA money finally arrived Steve refused to write us checks. HumNet needed a $5,000 surplus, he’d decided. When pressed, it turned out he didn’t actually know how much was in his personal checking account, which he was using for the two jobs as well as HumNet and his own affairs. The divisions deepened between him and his partners, then between him and the radicals his partners had brought in. He responded by hiring members of his family, friends without much carpentry experience, who would follow his orders. The anarchists saw them as liberal lackeys and Steve as the illegitimate authority they’d never give in to.

Creating a new economic model requires a revision of our social contract, which in practice requires a new and improved model of ourselves. When this proves difficult, it’s easy to fall back on what we know. Part of our breakdown was a division we brought with us, along the line between mostly white middle-­‐class environmentalists and multi-­‐ethnic working-­‐class social activists. And maybe part of the anger, on both sides, was a recognition that each had something the other needed. As money and morale diminished, our group became more bitter and intransigent; Steve, with the support of his subordinates, grew more authoritarian and rigid. It was like revolutionary melodrama. We even had work songs, like the popular one that began, “I’m an Activist and I’m Okay.”

By June the division was intolerable, and our group moved out of the bunkhouse we were renting from the neighbors just downriver. We set up camp by the river, had a fire in the morning and sometimes into the night. Now we had our own center, and were literally outsiders. One morning in early July, Steve threatened to fire all of us if we didn’t come in for one of his meetings, where he recently lectured us on the need to change. Instead, we stayed down by the river, sitting around our own fire drinking coffee and composing the first of several manifestos. From that point forward, the two groups communicated almost entirely in writing.

To the Yuroks, we must have looked like the Gregg-­‐Wood expedition.

By afternoon I had the new window in, held by temporary stops. The trim would have to wait—this was our last day on the job. For part of the morning I’d worked on a list of what remained to be done. It wasn’t much, but we were sorry to be leaving before our obligation to the house and household was finished. Remodel carpentry gets inside people’s lives as well as the walls of their houses. We’d gotten to know the family, talked to the children while we worked. The young boy wanted to know the names of our tools. He wanted to hold them and see how they were used. The older daughter asked harder questions, like where we were from, why we were here, and why houses fell apart. I wrote down some of the children’s questions, and they became the first poem about carpentry that I thought worth saving.

Talking to the kids was part of the work, as we had redefined it. We each kept track of our hours, bought materials of good quality, and we were generous with our time. We brought in other workers for their carpentry skills, and for their personal politics rather than their

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political affiliations. My old friend and teacher, Jay, got us through some tricky structural problems. John recruited his neighbor, Davis, who was a genius at hanging sheetrock over gnarly places where old and new materials came together. His skill gave rise to the frequent mantra, “Davis will save us.”

The idea was to give the house—including the household—whatever it needed. We may have overdone it, in reaction to Steve’s stinginess. He’d actually stood over one group of workers with a stopwatch. I felt sorry for him. Some old need had taken over his soul, a set of valuations deeper than HumNet. The more he tried to control things, the more they fell apart.

There was a real possibility of financial loss, but with his confused accounting there was no way anyone could know. He looked terrible, his face grim and colorless. The situation was taking its toll on his health. When I tried to talk to him he said, “Change or leave.” He had to know I wasn’t going to change.

So on this last day we were trying to finish what we could. We were tired and probably a little crazy. The outsiders had stayed up late with our landlords, celebrating our imminent departure. They were aware of our conflict, and maybe even enjoyed the little war going on between the white people who’d come to save them from the problems of living in white people’s houses. Their own two-­‐story house was in great shape, and their lifestyle didn’t fit our preconceptions of reservation life. I think we smoked weed with them, which must have been theirs because we were being so scrupulous about not bringing it to the job site. I know we finished off a quart of their E & J brandy, and did lines of coke they’d scored in Oakland, which they spoke of as if it were the next town downriver. We played poker till they’d won all the money we had on us.

The morning of this last day had begun with a hangover, sitting on our bunks by the river drinking coffee and composing a final manifesto. It began with our grievances and ended with a list of broken promises. The idea of profit-­‐sharing and social responsibility had been overwhelmed by the default habits of pulp economics. Because it is short-­‐term, unsustainable, and doesn’t keep balanced books—whether practiced in the name of communism or capitalism—inevitably it falls back on authoritarian ultimatums. We weren’t lined up against a wall and shot, but this time we really were fired.

Or were we? Our Declaration of 26 July included a list of demands: to finish this house we were working on, to be laid off when the job was done, and get paid within two weeks. We rejected the original agreement that divided profits between the three partners, the workers, and HumNet. We wanted to be treated like the other outside suppliers, and be paid for materials when they were paid. No profits should be declared till we were reimbursed for our weeks of food and travel expense. And finally, we declared that if we had been Steve’s employees all along, we should be treated according to the state’s labor laws. We would file for unemployment compensation. We also had reverted to the pulp economic model.

But to honor the spirit, if not the victory, of anarchism, we added one last demand: “Two goats, tender and of good quality. We intend to cook them, eat them, and be done with all this.” In Solidarity, we signed our names.

At lunch that day, sitting on the almost-­‐level front porch with the local newspaper, I read an interview with Bessie Tripp, a tribal elder and grandmother of the house’s owner. It put

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our work and our little human comedy in some perspective. “Nothing is here for long,” she said.

“But whatever goes away, always comes back again.”

Those words, written in carpenter’s pencil on the back of a BIA work order, also went into the poem. Then one day, twenty years later, after I’d read it at the local college, a young Yurok woman came up to me. She’d read some wonderfully strong work that afternoon. She said, “I’m the little girl in the poem.”

It was the privilege of a lifetime to work with all my compadres that spring and summer, to forge that solidarity of task and principle. And it was nice to get unemployment checks in the mail. But best of all was that late and unlooked-­‐for return, an accounting that goes below the bottom line.

Another Way of Counting

Among the many documents passed around during our little labor uprising was an article by a linguistic anthropologist, “California Counting.” It describes a remarkable diversity of counting systems among Native California tribes, including some deeply local and circumstantial ways of reckoning. A list, “15 Different Ways of Counting to 3 in Yurok,” describes separate ways of accounting for Human Beings, Tools, Houses, Days, Animals and Birds, Arm Lengths (depth), round things (rocks and dollars), flat things, trees and sticks, and the length of dentalium shells.

John gave me the article with a note: “The cash flow problem at Pecwan is of a different order.”

Despite a couple of centuries of conflicting theory, capitalist economics is as simple as a wrongly added balance sheet. Its encounter with shell money was mostly a failure to understand this, until it was too late.

“Living in the Indian country is a costly affair,” reported Mary Arnold and Mabel Reed, school teachers who preceded us on the Klamath by some seventy years. They describe many of the adaptations to American money that Alfred Kroeber and Stephen Powers had observed, except that Mary and Mabel had not come to study the Yurok. They were expected to live among them on a very small budget.

“When an Indian paddles you across the Klamath, you pay him four bits (fifty cents).

When Eddy goes to Somes [Bar] for your mail, you pay him two bits (twenty-­‐five cents). If you offer Eddy ten cents for any small chore, he politely refuses it because ten cents will not buy anything in this country.”

Acculturation, brought by miners and school marms, had caused everyday life to become even more monetized than it had been traditionally. The price of that life had also increased dramatically. “Killing people in this country is very expensive,” the schoolmarms reported. “You have to pay twenty-­‐five dollars just for shooting at someone. If you hit him, it costs you fifty dollars. And if you are unfortunate enough to kill him, his relatives demand one hundred dollars.”

While this looks like another big increase in the value of a life, in fact the murder of an Indian by a white man was of little consequence. The Yurok and Karuk suffered numerous killings by whites without anyone being called to account. On the other side, because there was no shell valuation attached to the life of a white man, killing him would also appear to cost nothing. But in fact such a killing—even killing a white man’s cow—justified a hugely disproportionate retaliation. Often the violence was also very profitable. Down on the coast,

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where real estate was flat and had access to water, the Wiyot were the object of a far more systematic extermination.

The 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, contrary to its title, legalized and set the terms for the custody of “apprentices,” who were de facto slaves.

Sometimes outright massacre brought bounties from state and local governments, but usually survivors were profitably sold into servitude. Either way they were removed from the real prize, which was their land and anything that might be extracted from it. Five members of the infamous Kelsey party, a particularly desperate gang that liked to boast of killing Indian babies, signed on as members of the Union Company. They shared in the profits along with L.K. Wood and the others, and should be included among the pioneering spirits who got their start in Humboldt Bay real estate.

At the same time, for Native people assimilated into the new economy, the price of an Indian’s life had actually become more affordable. The school teachers, who lived in a torrent of gossip that rivaled the Klamath River, tell of a young member of the Pepper family who went on an errand to the woods with a neighbor, Barney Schenck, and subsequently caught cold and died. His family demanded from Barney $100 American, which he didn’t pay. Barney’s wife and child and grandmother then died, their deaths attributed to witchcraft—for the right price a bad doctor would hex your enemies. But mediators between the two families couldn’t agree how much this should subtract from what he owed the Peppers.

Meanwhile, the Peppers offered $150 to a friend of Barney’s to kill him, but instead the friend took the money and warned Barney, who turned himself in to the sheriff. He was released when the Peppers refused to press charges against him for the death of their kinsman.

We aren’t told what became of the $150. It might have been the cause of further dispute and dissension. In an anarchist economy, small claims court is open twenty-­‐four hours a day.

There were also liberalizing influences that came with the new money. The gold economy takes people to foreign places, then the pulp economy frees them from place altogether. They lose the connection to culture and tradition, and the land itself—even the way to the spirit land—but they’re free of superstition and witchcraft and debt slavery. As we see in Barney’s story, death by magic was something to fear, and it persisted along with other remnants of the old life. Elders still carried tattoo marks with which they measured dentalia strings. Their strings of wampum, as the whites called it, were still used in ceremony, though men now bought their wives with gold. “Indian marriage” was still the established custom when the school teachers lived on the river. But here again the old bonds were loosening. They tell the story of Essie, who gave her husband’s money back: “And now Essie, she don’t belong to anybody. And the Indians don’t like it because a woman ought to belong to somebody like they always have.”

But the women’s freedom from ownership was already being lost to another master. It began with the metal pot, a milestone in Native women’s liberation. No more heating rocks for cooking, no more tedious weaving of cooking baskets, which became as outdated as women’s facial tattoos. But at the same time these traditions were disappearing, there arose among the nation’s middle class a growing passion for anything that evoked the image of the Vanishing American. Eastern tourists, whose own surviving Indians lived in abject poverty, got off the train in Santa Fe, Los Angeles, and Pasadena, eager to buy primitive artifacts.

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Alexander Brizard, a keen businessman, kept a three-­‐story brick emporium on the Arcata plaza. By the time of Stephen Powers’ 1870 visit, Brizard’s upriver trading posts were transacting business in their own currency. He made a good return on merchandise carried by pack train up to his trading post, but they often had to dead-­‐head back without a pay load. He knew of the Southwestern curio trade, and he was also aware that many of his neighbors collected (and sometimes grave-­‐robbed) Native artifacts. They especially liked baskets that improvised on traditional themes, and they were considered art objects suitable for display or hanging. Brizard observed in 1901 that “a basket of medium quality has a market value, a work of art almost priceless.”

Fancy baskets—to distinguish them from traditional baskets made for daily use—rapidly changed household relations. Some women became famous for their innovations to the traditional basket patterns. As Brizard foresaw, this created a huge surge in their price and popularity. In 1903, five thousand baskets were shipped from the upriver country to be sold in southern California curio shops. The baskets, which had been living parts of the household—at the literal oikos of economics, the hearth—were detached from everyday use and refined into “beauty,” a thing said to be for its own sake, and so fetches a higher price.

“I am an artist,” K’ayum said. “As long as they pay me for my art, I will continue to paint and make sculptures.” In The Last Lords of Palenque—later in the same century, in the Lacandon rainforest of southern Mexico—Victor Perera and Robert D. Bruce document a similar commercialization of daily necessities. K’ayum had once farmed an allotment of land, his milpa, and he had hunted with a bow and arrow. His father, Chan K’in, laments the change in his offspring: “My sons make bows and arrows to trade for bullets and batteries for their phonographs. They sell our sacred drums to foreigners. They are very interested in money.” At that time K’ayum had not worked in his milpa or made arrows for three years.

A couple of years after our job at Pecwan, Reuters reported a similar phenomenon in Tanzania. “The cultural aloofness of the Masai nomads is a thing of the past,” said their agricultural advisor. The tribe of 150,000 pastoralists was renowned for its resistance to change, refusing to wear trousers or adopt Western ways. Their cattle were their wealth—not just their “economy” but their cultural identity. Then market and ecological forces dictated smaller herds of improved breeding, and the cattle became a means to wealth rather than wealth itself, and they began to be sold for money. Now the Masai use the money to buy fashionable shoes, electronic watches, and baseball caps.

The stories are ancient and ongoing. I clip and save them because they document the consistent pattern by which pulp economics uses money to kill other economies. To kill other people. It’s less brazen and bloody than the gold economy in the way it achieves its ends, but that only makes it harder to resist. To see its present-­‐day manifestation, read a story like Sherman Alexie’s “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.” A hopeless drunk, a Salish man living on Seattle’s waterfront sees his grandmother’s dance regalia in a pawn shop window. It was stolen fifty years ago. He tries to redeem it, but of course doesn’t have the money. If you can’t find the story, go no farther than downtown Eureka, hang out at Court House Liquors.

Lest this be seen as just another indictment of late capitalism (something that is always justified), look at the process that makes it so effective. I give capitalism another, less dignified

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name because of what it does to us. It reduces things of great value to grist for the mill—pulp.

We’re all just carbon units, scrabbling around and trying to save some of the pieces.

Putting Something Back

The following October our crew of outsiders got together for another job. While we all could use the money, it was mostly a kind of ceremony, intended to purge some of the bad feelings the failed HumNet enterprise had brought upriver. It was also a small piece of a larger payback, on a century and a half of wealth extraction. It was a restoration job.

John must have had contractor’s papers by then, but the job was arranged more by artistic license. He had secured a Forest Service restoration contract on Horse Linto Creek, about an hour and a half from the coast. Restoring watersheds, with the goal of bringing back forests and anadromous fish populations, had been a rapidly developing art and science since the expansion of Redwood Park. Even the US Forest Service, an agency that for decades had devoted itself single-­‐mindedly to getting out the board feet, was grappling with the concept.

Mandated by Congress to come up with management plans for federal forest lands, it struggled to digest the new reality: “In planning for the future, the Forest Service must consider the relative value of those resources that provide no dollar returns, in relation to those that do.” It turned out those no-­‐dollar resources were in pretty bad shape. Restoration was suddenly in fashion.

When I left the farm in the late ’70s, I moved into a coastal watershed still bleeding after a century of rapacious logging. My neighbor, one of Rudi Becking’s natural resource students, saw that replenishing salmon populations would be the keystone of the emerging science of watershed restoration. Bob Wunner had a contract to stop a blue clay slide that was blocking the creek. I watched people moving rock and planting alder all winter, going at it with hand tools and shovels because they didn’t want to employ the same methods that had caused the damage. A noble idea, but on this job and dozens of others it soon became clear that the scale of the problem, and the human body, called for more leverage than you can get with a pry bar.

Now chainsaws and backhoes are the tools of choice, and their operators are the artists of a hot new discipline.

But there were also social innovations, which are overshadowed and forgotten amid the myriad technical fixes. Radical political experiments were an integral part of the first restoration work, and community-­‐building was inseparable from the earth-­‐moving. My creek-­‐restoring neighbors were also part of a new community group, seeing it as a natural accompaniment to fixing the creek. “Salmon lead everywhere,” Bob said. Over in the Mattole Valley people were forming a restoration council that would become a model of watershed organizing, documented by Freeman House in Totem Salmon, the bible of fish and community.

Farther north and inland, tree-­‐planting groups like the Ents and the Hoedads were developing highly functional cooperative models, based on the idea that healing nature was also going to require some work on human nature. They not only reforested thousands of acres of clear-­‐cut land, they developed anarchist models that followed nature’s way of working. They were politically, economically, and sexually egalitarian. They were well organized, well informed, and brutally hard-­‐working.

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On our little creek restoration job we hadn’t set out to follow these developments, or to imitate their forms. It was part of a spirit of the time, a constellation of bio-­‐centric valuations that people were collectively developing. It just seemed to make sense, to work the way nature works: cooperatively, and without bosses. In all these ways, the Forest Service grant was payback.

We arrived about mid-­‐day, packed our gear and food to a campsite near the creek, ate our lunch, moved the bear scat and scorpions from where we planned to sleep. Then, like ants invisible beneath their load, we carried large flat rectangles of folded cyclone wire fencing balanced precariously on our heads, occasionally letting go with one hand to wipe the sweat out of our eyes. For the rest of the afternoon we hefted them from the pile where USFS had dumped them, schlepped the half mile to our campsite /worksite, then went back for more. At the end of the day we unfolded one, wired it together into a large 12-­‐foot-­‐long rectangular basket with a lid. We looked again at the plans, which told us to anchor them at specified locations along the creek, then fill them with large rocks, which we would mostly take out of the creek. We had brought boots and gloves and an assortment of wire-­‐cutters and pliers. It was mid-­‐October. We would need to keep a fire going all day to revive our hands and feet. It would be the same fire we’d had beside the Klamath.

We didn’t exactly know what we were doing, but that could also be said of most of the remodel carpentry work we had undertaken. After all the estimates and planning, you never knew till you dug into an old house what surprises it was concealing. But John had meticulously organized the work, we could all read a contract and follow specs, and we adapted our collective experience to the job. Mike had tied rebar on New York skyscrapers and showed us how to twist and cut wire without wasted motion. Aryay had been organizing “actions” of all kinds since the ’50s, and in many ways this was another demonstration. Dennis had practiced exactly this kind of rural technology in the Peace Corps in Central America. Dwight knew about rivers and all things aquatic.

And so on. Seven to ten of us, coming and going but mostly living in tents by the creek for a fortnight of frosty mornings. We’d hang around the fire drinking coffee, then pull on our boots and wade into the bone-­‐chilling water and move big rocks around. Every day two guys took the afternoon off to cook, and we all took turns at the different parts of the project. It required strong backs and the organizing skills of both politics and the building trades, but we did it, cooperatively and without any bosses.

Gabioneros, we called ourselves, and made up songs to go with the work. The bid, the price of materials, the hours, everything got accounted for. The ledger was where everyone could look at it. The work was harder than I expected and we wore out several pairs of pliers and at least one pair of gloves apiece, but in the end everybody felt fairly rewarded. When the job was done, wives and kids and girlfriends came up from the coast for a picnic. We were starving.

We heard afterward that the weirs washed out, and Gabion’s restoration methods had fallen out of favor. Later that summer, we heard that a young man who briefly joined our crew had drowned in the Klamath, scuba diving for gold. Counting the unemployment, less the 200-­‐ mile round trips into the mountains, disregarding my last communication from Steve offering to

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pay me off at minimum wage ($2.65 an hour at the time), I don’t know if this restoration job offset the losses of the Pecwan job. He did finally pay what we’d agreed to. When I heard a few years ago that he’d died, I was sure that summer on the Klamath had hastened his end. You could easily persuade me that our profits were pretty much wiped out by the losses.

But during that summer of carpentering together, and during the rock moving that fall, more than a house and a creek were being worked on. The compensations remained long after the money was gone. What we thought would be permanent turned out to be another of those things that were supposed to fail. Or by another way of counting, it didn’t fail at all. Our labors were probably nothing so high-­‐toned as a new economy struggling to be born within the old. It felt more like an ancient economy searching for roots in the present.

We never expected it was going to be easy. You have to remember, there was still a war going on.

5. HEARTS AND MINDS AND MARIJUANA

I’m following the pack ahead of me, using a shovel for a walking stick. On my own back I’m carrying a bundle of empty feed bags. Every once in a while I look up at the October sky. Blue and empty. The trail stays well below the ridge line, winding beneath the canopy of oak and madrone. Downslope I get glimpses of the creek, barely a trickle now. The bundle ahead of me stops. Last in line, I stop.

One eye on the trail, the other on the sky, I was thinking about the day before. Thinking how they divide our hearts and minds.

It’s my first year of employment as a marijuana worker. Carpentry has been fairly steady, even at my low end of it, as the local housing market tries to catch up with the boom of the early 1980s. I can charge ten bucks an hour now, way below union scale but respectable pay for around here. Sometimes twelve-­‐fifty, if I’m supervising and the customer can afford it.

But now I have a job that pays better, and sometimes I can work at home. Last winter, the customary lean time for carpenters (my partner is working for a weatherizing outfit), we got fifteen an hour for sitting around the kitchen table clipping bud. Weed was brought to our door, we trimmed and manicured it, our employer picked it up and paid in cash. It was more money than either of us had ever made, including our brief teaching careers. I’m making the same money this fall, standing on a trail in the Humboldt hill country watching the sky.

Of course the price of living is also jacked up on all sides. I know it’s not possible, but it seems like half the population of the county is selling real estate to the other half. And flipping houses is only the hottest of the all-­‐round hot commodity action. The hyper-­‐heated market will inflate for another half dozen years before it bursts spectacularly with the Savings and Loan Crisis. But for now, despite these little signs of stress, the federal government is stoking the fires of inflation with massive deficits. And a lot of that huge spending is going into the newly revived War on Drugs.

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“We’re running up a battle flag,” says President Reagan. Alarming drug statistics (they eradicated more marijuana last year than was supposed to exist) renewed Ronnie’s hatred of his old nemesis, those northern California commie degenerate drug users—only now they’re growing the shit. His presidential wrath has taken the form of CAMP—the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting—a consortium of law enforcement agencies led by the state’s Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement, but really driven by US DEA and the White House. Nancy Reagan says Just Say No, and she says it with war surplus helicopters and guns. CAMP also gets personnel and support from our old friend the US Forest Service, as well as BLM, State Parks, Fish & Wildlife, the National Guard, and local police and sheriffs from throughout California.

Naturally, this has caused the price of weed to soar. The lives of rural hippies, even the friends of rural hippies, are getting a share of the broader prosperity. Humboldt Homegrown has become a brand name, associated with high-­‐quality sinsemilla, a word brought from Mexico and soon to be introduced to America’s living rooms by Harry Reasoner on 60 Minutes.

Including my old friend Acorn on national TV, telling the children of the middle class how to grow quality bud. And Harry describing southern Humboldt pot growers as ordinary people: “Little League coaches and good neighbors.”

The market was given another boost by the feds’ crackdown on imports, although Thai and Colombian are readily available and cheaper than homegrown. The flip side of this dual prohibition is that the business methods of US foreign policy have come to our domestic lives.

Just as the Reagan government invested heavily in counter-­‐insurgency among our more left-­‐ leaning Central American neighbors, now huge amounts of legal and military weaponry have been assembled to put down this little weed rebellion in the three-­‐county area of northwestern California that is now re-­‐branding itself from Redwood Empire to Emerald Triangle.

The arrival of the feds has not been greeted warmly by our more traditional rural population, and it’s even provoked a political reaction from the normally conservative County Supervisors. Angered by reports of armed forces descending on people’s homes, a majority voted to turn down an offer of federal anti-­‐drug funding. Eventually, told that CAMP would be coming anyway, the county decided to take the money. As a resource colony, losing wealth to outside interests is our business, and we depend on welfare from Washington and Sacramento to keep the whole thing running.

Naturally, CAMP has been welcomed by the law enforcement sector of the economy. As the acronym suggests, under the guise of fighting crime it’s a summer rec program for southern California cops where they can dress in combat gear, fly around in helicopters, and re-­‐enact Rambo movies while depriving non-­‐conformist citizens of their illicit income. It also includes a contingent of local cops wanting to get in on the big guys’ action.

But the war is real enough. The guys get to carry automatic weapons, and they’re loaded with real bullets. And the economic effect is real. If you can’t make your land payment or afford to replace your truck—all backcountry roads lead to the junkyard—then you can’t live in the hills and think dissident thoughts and refuse to contribute to the pulp economy. With a little coercion, you’ll see things our way. This is counter-­‐insurgency at home.

In the long run they’re losing this war against a plant and the culture it represents—but that doesn’t seem to affect their thinking. Narcotics Intelligence Estimates reports 1983’s domestic marijuana production at 2,000 metric tons, unchanged from the year before. They say

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four-­‐fifths of the total available to US tokers is still coming from places like Colombia, Jamaica, and Mexico, but their intelligence may not be entirely reliable. I hear of a Humboldt County dealer who supplies at least one of those metric tons to Silicon Valley. Like generals following the logic of a previous war, federal law enforcement is hopelessly behind, still talking brand names like Panama Red and Acapulco Gold. The villain of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, drug agent Brock Vond, is a creature of these times: flying around Humboldt County in a black helicopter, totally out of touch with the ground, fucking with people’s hearts and minds.

Down here on earth, as CAMP acknowledges, their actions continue to reward the enemy: domestic production has increased, prices are high and certain to go higher, currently at about $2,500 a pound. Which is why, along with a few of their friends and family, I’m in Rob and Darcy’s garden.

The sky is still blue and clear, no sound coming over the ridge. Looking down, I push the blade of the shovel into the earth, working it under the roots of the seven-­‐foot stalks. Other workers have lopped off the branches, heavy with long sticky colas, thick-­‐bodied and sparkling.

They carry them out of the garden, gently put them into feed bags in the shade under the trees.

Later a more orderly trimming will take place, but there’s no time for that now. The stalks need to also come out because they’ll draw unwanted attention to the garden, a prime location on a south slope at the edge of the tree line, with a creek nearby. The soil where they grew will be replenished for next year’s crop.

It’s like digging up a small tree. I work around the stalk, loosening the roots from the soil, talking to it under my breath, muttering thanks for her bountiful gifts, including this job. I don’t want to be violent or in a hurry. But in my head I can still hear the heavy percussion of the helicopter that came over yesterday. Hwomp. Hwomp. We need to get a move on.

Others are working steadily, pruning off limbs, bagging them, at the same time keeping ears and eyes to the sky. I pull and push, pry again with the shovel, until with a soft tearing sound she comes free of the earth. I shake the soil from the roots, carry the stalk to the pile under the trees, to be brought out for burning in the spring. Then I move on to the next plant.

It’s a beautiful morning, getting warm. The portable radio is playing Glenn Miller.

I haven’t had a garden of my own—a grow, as they call it now—since leaving the farm.

I’ve never had the botanical obsession of the best growers, and the idea of buying and selling it brought out all my unresolved issues with money. Mostly it’s given to me by friends. At one point I tried a little attic garden, bought a used copy of the classic, Cultivator’s Handbook of Marijuana, read the chapter on indoor growing, hauled dirt and carried buckets of water up a ladder for weeks. But the poor pale things weren’t really marijuana. My green thumb was never very gifted; that far off the ground it was clueless.

My parents had a WW II Victory Garden, although I don’t think either of them ever wielded a shovel before or after. Later, when my mom remarried to a man who’d grown up on a west Texas ranch, wherever we lived there was a garden with several rows of chilies and tomatoes. “Organic” gardening was another thing I had to relearn at the end of the ’60s, although in practice it differed little from the 1940’s. In principle, however, it placed the gardener’s attention less on the fruits and more on the building of soil. One of the most useful

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lessons was a “class” at a local organic farm where I dug and weeded and turned an enormous compost pile in exchange for vegetables and information and a chance to get my hands dirty.

Tony and his wife had a kid in the same hippie free school as ours, and on my carpool days I’d end up there and stay to work in the garden. Or if it was raining too hard to dig, we’d drink mint tea and talk about dirt and books: Harnessing the Earth Worm, Farmers of Forty Centuries, Worlds in Collision. But Tony was years ahead of the market for organic foods, and their little heartbreak farm barely supported them. He invested months of work and their last money in a crop of Jerusalem artichokes, a little-­‐known and highly nutritious tuber. Then, a week after the first shipment, news came back that those who ate them had experienced extreme flatulence, and after that he couldn’t give the damn things away. As a school, the farm was a perfect agricultural college. As a business, it was the wrong time, and the wrong plant.

Meanwhile, the right plant couldn’t be grown in public. And a lot of the stuff that was being grown, like my little patch behind the garden, nowadays you couldn’t pay people to smoke it. But during the decade I didn’t grow weed, the organic gardening movement had flowered into successful farms that sold their fruits and vegetables at public markets, and less publicly, the loving attention of farmers who radically changed this mongrel plant. The introduction of seed stock from central Asia, the development of new growing practices, depriving females of pollen and the males that once grew with them, improved techniques for regulating light, sophisticated blends of nourishment, all these and a hundred secret and magical tricks created a hybrid product the world had not seen before: sinsemilla bud. It was highly desirable. It was forbidden. It was worth a lot of money. And it changed people’s hearts and minds.

In the complex symbiosis of gardener and plant, weed altered not only the individual grower but the community of growers. With creative anti-­‐establishment entrepreneurship, the plant and the people changed each other. The gardener had a vision, and the community developed a product that would support that vision and build a stronger community. To a great extent, that’s what happened. But there was a further part of this process, in which the natural enemies of the plant—and the community—also evolved.

The heavy beat of the helicopter is coming from over the ridge. I’m working around the gleaned stalk, prying with the shovel and then pulling, prying and pulling. No, wait—the sound is coming from across the valley—over the ridge. Looking up, I see only madrone leaves and blue sky.

Two of us keep digging out stalks while the rest of the crew is carrying bags out of the garden and up to the trail. Our get-­‐away packs are near the garden gate, we know which trail to take, and where a helicopter can’t land. We know they’re not supposed to shoot us, but we’ve witnessed the past twenty years of our government’s foreign and domestic policies. The CAMP guys are flying a Bell UH-­‐1, a Huey, familiar from years of Vietnam war footage. We haven’t forgotten that war, and many of us believe that this is its continuation at home. We remember Kent State, and the willingness of the powerful to kill their own children. We remember the Panthers, how the FBI murdered Fred Hampton in his bed. We remember Wounded Knee. In their eyes we’re pulp for the criminal justice industry that provides a comfortable living for its workers and gives unmitigated power to the bosses who make law and deny fact.

Looking up, pulling down, I hear the shovel handle crack.

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It began with the Mexican connection, old guys in southern California cholo neighborhoods growing a plant or two in their yard. Every once in a while one of them would get busted, a momentary scandal, maybe jail time, no big deal.

It began with the young Mexican guys from East LA. Also black kids from Compton. Sent out to our little ’50s backcountry town to live with grandparents and relatives.

It began with the Beats, who brought it from the underground jazz economy into the full daylight of the ’60s. Along with the plant came its roots in the sierras of Mexico and the indigenous people who grew it. Often the connection was very direct. John Ross, who lived at our hippie farm and later became a pre-­‐eminent Mexican journalist, used to read aloud his tales of life among the Zapoteca in the highlands of Michoacán. On the run for draft evasion, he told how he and his wife and child were adopted by the local community, how he was included in the circle of elders who grew marijuana and regarded its daily use as a sacrament. Back in the East Village, where John grew up, he’d also sold cheap lids to jazz musicians. The story often came from more than one direction.

The story followed the weed. A photography show in San Francisco introduced California cultivators to los sembradores—the sowers and seed scatterers, as the new generation of Mexican growers called themselves. They were indigenous farmers who inherited marijuana’s traditional uses, but now also grew it for the American market. The Mission Street gallery had a steady flow of visitors: tokers, growers, a few anthropologists like myself, gazing at Angel de Valle’s sharp black and white images on the walls. Farmers beside huge marijuana plants. Farmers on horseback, armed, riding through remote villages like Emiliano Zapata’s army. People could see our own little war from that perspective. Only we weren’t like that yet.

The sembradores defended their gardens fiercely because they were also protecting cultural and spiritual interests. Sacrament was essential to the story of the plant. De Valle’s photo documentary, like Jerry Kamstra’s Weed published about the same time, revealed a world of ritual attending the plant. The garden site was chosen by a curandero, a spiritual doctor, who also supervised the planting and oversaw its growth. At harvest time the curandero returned, walked through the garden dressed in clean white cotton, and judged by the resin on his clothing whether the colas were ripe for cutting. The gardener was both priest and botanist.

We weren’t like that yet, either.

The weed also brought a domestic story. Like my great grandfather’s mining venture in the San Bernardino Mountains, the sembrador’s entire household moved to a remote location in the Sierra and shared in the cultivation and protected the crop from intruders. In this task they were aided by the land itself, and by its other inhabitants. A cigarra, a species of cicada, would be brought into the garden to sing for a bountiful crop. There was nature, family and community in the story. And there was a story of political resistance.

The mission of the DEA was to change this narrative. The Drug Enforcement Administration, originally created by a consolidation of drug agencies under the Nixon administration, began providing the Mexican government with planes and $30 million a year for the aerial spraying of chemical defoliants. The program accomplished several goals: eradicating the plant, reinforcing the authority of the central government, and suppressing rebellious mountain communities.

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The DEA story had the usual unintended consequences. Sembradores figured out that paraquat’s biocidal action depended on exposure to sunlight, so as soon as the spray plane was gone the plants were cut down, wrapped in blankets, dried and packaged in the dark, and sent north to be smoked by the youth of the United States. The program was ended when this became public knowledge, but the lesson reinforced what we learned from Angel del Valle’s photographs.

The misnamed War on Drugs was designed to preserve the valuations of pulp economics, and to destroy any competition. To kill the community as well as the plant, to eradicate ritual and sacrament, and even the cigarras. It was a war against values—political, spiritual, and natural. Against anything that valued life more than profit.

I hear the heavy hwomp-­‐hwomp, unmistakably cresting the ridge now, and forget about talking to the plants. I take cover under the trees where the stalks are piled, turn the radio off as if someone might hear it over the throb of the unmuffled engine bouncing off canyons and ridges. A-­‐hwomp. A-­‐hwomp.

The sound is a beating heart. As I start running with tools and bags up the trail toward the ridge, it’s pounding so hard you wouldn’t think anything could stop it. Then it stops. They must be overhead. We stand motionless under the tree cover, hearts still pounding. Then they move on, back to the other side of the valley. They shake our world, shake it to the spiritual core, where this war is really taking place.

Up near the ridge we feel as visible as they are. Waiting and watching, we take turns with the binoculars, as if bringing them closer reaffirmed the distance between us. The sound is loud again, then gone as the green Huey drops behind the opposite ridge. After a while we go back to the garden, resume our work, stop when we hear them again. We take cover under the trees when we see the Huey rising from a saddle on the mountain across from us. A couple of guys sit in the open door of the helicopter, legs hanging down with cowboy nonchalance.

Behind, on a long cable, a large green bundle soars over the mountain to where they’ll torch it.

They’re in no hurry, making sure we see them. They have their harvest.

The federal penalty for cultivation is fairly stiff: fifty plants can get you up to five years and a $250,000 fine. More than a hundred plants or kilos, you’re looking at five to forty and up to $5 mil. And the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1983 is threatening to raise the stakes even higher—or maybe it’s a whole new game. Sponsored by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, famous for his opposition to the Civil Rights Act, it will permit authorities to confiscate any property associated with “drug crime,” including vehicles and homes.

If you’re lucky enough to be prosecuted under California’s Uniform Controlled Substances Act, cultivation (any amount) only gets you sixteen months to three years in its crowded prisons. Like the feds, it classifies marijuana as a Schedule I hallucinogenic substance, but since 1976 possession of an ounce or less for personal use or to give away has been a simple infraction, punishable by a $100 fine. Identify yourself, sign the ticket, they let you go.

(If you refuse to identify yourself, as I did, you go to jail. “Just tell them your name, Jerry,” said my lawyer by phone. I did, but the ounce-­‐or-­‐less rule was still an affront to basic liberties, so I asked for a jury trial. Surprisingly, their deliberations took almost an hour. One of the jurors, a mill worker, told me afterward that he was the holdout. He agreed it wasn’t any of

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the state’s business. Thank you, I said. In the heartland of America—Ohio, for example—that little show of principle could have got me twenty years.)

Generally when a garden is busted, workers take off into the woods and aren’t pursued.

Of course if the grow is on your property you can also flee, but you’d better not come back without plenty of cash and a good lawyer. Friends of mine, homesteaders with a little patch of a dozen plants, disappeared into the brush when the CAMP helicopter landed, but their sweet-­‐ tempered Tibetan mastiff went out to greet the cops. “We’ll shoot the dog if you don’t come out,” said one of the CAMP crime-­‐busters.

It couldn’t be more clear: if you try to make money and we don’t get a piece of it, it will cost you dearly. It’s really surprising how many people grow it anyway. Shows you what crazy things we’ll do for money. But I have to believe there’s some motive at work besides profit.

Some other kind of money: call it a weed certificate, say it brings long-­‐term prosperity and expresses the community’s spiritual and natural values. Say it also recognizes that marijuana— like any cash crop—brings short-­‐term risk and serious costs, and so owes the community a special debt.

PAY YOUR DUES, said a full-­‐page ad in last winter’s So Hum alternative news. Share the Wealth, it added, then listed twenty-­‐eight organizations, from National AIM, Audubon and Earth First! to local volunteer fire departments. It included a half dozen alternative schools, a community center, tree-­‐planting and salmon restoration collectives, environmental and legal groups that challenge timber harvest plans and herbicide use, people who assist at births, and people who attend the dying. The beginning of a culture, though it might be too soon to say.

Much of this might have happened without weed, and some of it was happening well before weed became a cash crop, but the ad leaves no doubt as to its intended reader. In the middle of the page, a drawing of a marijuana leaf with dollar signs superimposed on it.

These developments have not escaped the notice of another community, older residents of the backcountry, who seem tolerant and even downright curious about the hippies’ wacky tobaccy. Shopkeepers in town are saying maybe this weed thing ain’t all bad. It’s bringing a new prosperity to struggling rural communities, raising the value of real estate, and at the same time providing a way to pay those county taxes. Thanks to the feds’ intervention, cultures that were deeply divided by the timber wars are beginning to find a common interest.

But the new prosperity also means a flood of pulp dollars, and already people are wondering if the old back-­‐to-­‐the-­‐land ethic will survive it. The Star Root ad could be a sign that the War on Drugs has already won, driving up prices and flooding the weed economy with carbon notes and a gold-­‐rush mentality that has no regard for community or paying its dues.

Around this time of year, harvest time, it’s common to see bits of bud lying on the sidewalks of Garberville and Arcata, fallen out of farm workers’ hair and clothing and pockets. Nugs— pronounced “noogs,” short for nuggets—money waiting to be picked up off the ground.

The success of the weed economy—and the weed community—will be judged by whether it pays those dues. That is, by how strongly it maintains its own integrity and resists the carrot while it’s warding off the stick. At this moment in the early ‘80s, social bonds are holding. By next year’s harvest the Southern Humboldt Civil Liberties Monitoring Project will be dogging CAMP’s every move, using a new radio station to alert residents to raids, seeking

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injunctions, and suing their butts. Nothing seems to mobilize people like armed foreigners flying around in black helicopters. The request for injunction reads in part:

In connection with their request, plaintiffs filed approximately seventy declarations from residents primarily of Mendocino and Humboldt Counties, the two main portions of the so-­‐called Emerald Triangle. These declarations document continuing misdeeds by the CAMP forces, including buzzing of homes and innocent people by helicopters; invading curtilages—our yards, in a word we had to learn from medieval law—and homes without search warrants; detaining people illegally; stopping people on pretexts on public roadways; disrupting court business; and other acts which make it clear that in spite of the Judge’s Preliminary Injunction, CAMP continues to believe that it is above the law.

Each time they come back for another bundle they cruise this side of the valley. They can’t see us, but they know we’re here. We stop work, move under the trees, return when they’re gone.

In spite of the interruptions the branches are all cut, and while they’re being bundled a couple more workers come help with digging out stalks. One person pries with a shovel while another twists and pulls, and when it tears free of the ground they move on to the next. Somebody holds the stalk while someone else beats soil off roots, another carries the stalks out of the garden. All the fear and anger of the day working in our bodies.

In the long afternoon shadows, the last worker in the garden runs with a wheelbarrow of cola-­‐laden branches toward the cover of the trees. It tips, he catches it, then runs back to the garden. Through the woods the crack of another broken handle. Hysterical cursing. Then jokes, tense laughter. When the helicopter finally comes directly over, the garden is gone. They fly off in the direction of town. We climb up to the trail and hurry along with our tools and packs and heavy bags of green. Once we’re in the full cover of the woods we can slow down, but our bodies are still running on adrenalin.

No one has energy for cleaning that night. Tomorrow will be a full day of pulling shade leaves, rough trimming, hanging up the colas in the drying shed. We celebrate the fruition of seed put in during spring training, watch the Phillies take the Orioles in the fifth game of the World Series. Along with the video recording of the game, news has come from town. Where the bust was. Where they might be tomorrow. How many plants. How greedy people are getting. How we’re not like that yet. Laughter.

When I bed down in the back of my van I feel all the shove and pull of the day in my bones. When I close my eyes I don’t see images of ground or sky, it’s just very dark. Then I hear the pounding again. I open my eyes and it stops. We have our harvest.

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6. THE ECONOMY OF THE FLEA

“But to proceed with my statistics.”

—Thoreau, Economy

Down a long and rainy highway, I’m riding the dog. Somewhere below me, in the Greyhound’s baggage compartment, is a suitcase containing a few clothes and personal effects and four pounds of medium-­‐grade marijuana shake.

As soon as I handed over the bag at the depot I wished I hadn’t. But it was too big to carry on, and the bus was my only option. Some sharp-­‐nailed vandal had pried the registration renewal sticker off my license plate, and I didn’t want to be on the highway without it. The old Chevy panel cries out Probable Cause even when it’s parked. The lady at DMV said it would be seven dollars to replace it. Fair enough, I said. “Would you like to make an appointment to fill out an application?” No thanks. I have to meet my connection tomorrow.

“San Francisco,” I said. “One way.”

“That’ll be twenty-­‐nine ninety-­‐five,” the clerk said.

Or two to four. That’s years. Possession for sale is a felony in California. The feds would want five years, plus a quarter million dollars. It’s 1984. Ronald Reagan’s just getting into his second term, re-­‐elected by a landslide. They’d probably confiscate the bus.

It was still half an hour before departure, so I went back to the parking lot behind the depot and sat in the truck and watched it rain. Travel is always time-­‐travel.

Now we’re somewhere in northern Mendocino, following the upper Eel on 101. In the back of the bus two young women are singing Grateful Dead songs, joined occasionally by a young woman across from me who’s stringing beads. One of them does a credible Judy Collins solo. They try to teach a Dead song to a young black guy, but he isn’t getting the words. They talk for a while and he tells them he’s been working on a CCC flood-­‐control project, now he’s on his way to another job. That’s very cool, one says. “We’re environmental studies majors but they don’t let us actually do stuff.” He starts talking to them about physical and spiritual nature, then goes off into Pentecostal awakening and the girls go back to singing.

It’s raining harder. The river is violent and muddy, surging against its banks below the highway. In several spots the road has slid out. Other places, dirt and rock have come down and partly blocked one lane. The bus slows frequently. Last month 101 was closed for a week.

We’re going to be very late, at best. Just so the bag and I get stranded in the same place.

At our lunch rest the driver leaves a passenger behind, then almost loses two more at the dinner stop. Who knows what he’s running on. Hopelessly behind schedule, a hammering downpour on a treacherous highway, forty-­‐some unknown quantities behind him in the dark.

When the missing passengers get back on the bus, wet and breathing hard from their run, one of the young women says, “It’s lucky there were some hippies in the back of the bus to speak up for you.”

A young woman comes back and sits beside me, bums a smoke. She says she’s on her way to Berkeley. She goes to school there. One of the singers leans forward across the aisle and

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asks her a question. “Does she want a cigarette?” I say. “No,” she says. “Marijuana.” “Oh,” I say.

She should have been in the Burger King parking lot.

The exchanges I’m describing, and the story I’m recalling, belong to the emerging weed economy—a high-­‐risk, low-­‐overhead, homegrown agricultural venture just beginning to be large and very profitable in the mid-­‐1980s. This is a striking change from a decade earlier, when it was a completely vernacular economy—homegrown, for home consumption, mostly given away, some traded. For uncounted centuries, vernacular economies exchanged the wealth within a bioregion, and between one region and another, one of the many ways humans adapted to the cycles of our planet. It’s a huge, unimaginably complex, nickel-­‐and-­‐dime operation. Our species was never in it strictly for the money.

But then sinsemilla was discovered, and northern California farmers rapidly developed it into a product that attracted international repute. Prices went up in proportion to the demand and suddenly weed was real money. A long-­‐time grower, Woodrat, who had gardens in more than one county during this period, provided the following year-­‐by-­‐year accounting of northern California’s marijuana boom:

1975 $1,000 / pound

1976 $1,200

1977 $2,000

1978 $3,200

1979 $4,800

1980 $5,200 [I had a superb crop that year and got top dollar]

1981 $4,500

1982 $4,300

Then for three years Woodrat didn’t grow at all. During the late 80’s, he recalled, the price settled at about $3,200 and remained fairly stable through the 90’s, with some decline after medical marijuana was approved in ‘96. “Then indoor weed begins its downward pressure and supply begins to meet demand without the ‘historical’ fluctuations of the past.” He still remembers fondly the late summer “sinse droughts” of outdoor growing. “If you could hold back a few pounds, you could almost double your money. I sold a quarter pound of personal stash in late August of 1979 for $1,600—that’s $400 an ounce.”

It’s still surprising to recall how early and how steeply the prices went up. Plus, the five-­‐ fold increase over as many years was amplified by the deregulation of finance and huge public deficits, so it became impossible to distinguish inflationary dollars from inflationary marijuana.

Maybe there was no difference. It also worked in the other direction, after the financial markets had crashed and everyone was growing tons of indoor. In 2010 I sold a pound for Woodrat when he said he needed quick cash, and even allowing that I’m the world’s worst salesman, $1200 was a pitiable come-­‐down.

So when I say I’ll be doubling my investment on this little smuggling venture, it sounds like I’m riding the 80’s gold rush. My cousin will triple what she pays me for the four pounds, and that appears to confirm it. But the end product will be $60 ounces for working-­‐class Southern Californians. The sum total of today’s transaction—to be paid over a period of several months—will come to $1,250. In terms of either money or time (years!) it hardly seems worth it. That’s what makes me think some other motive is at work. That she and I are still in that

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older vernacular way of doing business. Call the whole thing a pilgrimage to some saint of small profit. A tiny ritual enactment, or a demonstration of something I can’t let anybody to know about.

It’s still raining when the bus pulls into San Francisco an hour late. They’ve assured my cousin it was coming, but she’s been understandably anxious. The driver finally drags my suitcase out of the farthest corner of the luggage compartment. I take it from him, say thank you. Ten minutes later we’re in her VW van heading up Mission. At the house of another cousin we take a few deep breaths, exchange some gossip, go around the corner for a beer.

The Babar is a neighborhood institution, a second home for poets, jazz musicians, working people, and aging hipsters. There’s about one of each on the half dozen stools, a couple more at a table, and an unknown number toking weed in the back room. I ask Al for a beer, tell him I have an extra z I’ve been saving. It’s actually one of three that I was counting as profit, but if I’m going to pay urgent bills I have to cash it now. Like a green forty-­‐dollar traveler’s check. Al’s from back east and still has a good Florida connection, but he can turn this over in a minute, make a little profit, and be doing at least two friends a favor. “Only don’t call it shake,” he says. “Call it something else.” He’s right, of course. “Shake” now refers to an older form of marijuana, an obsolete economy. The beer’s on the house.

The bud trim comes from Rob and Darcy, who save it for me as a favor. No one wants the by-­‐product in any form these days, not even this mix of bud leaf with lots of sweet little crumbs and spiders. Compared to manicured bud it’s bulky, hard to conceal, high-­‐risk in relation to its value. That value will increase six-­‐fold by the time it goes out my cousin’s southern California door, but it’s still chicken feed. Nowhere near the dollars-­‐to-­‐risk ratio of cocaine, the 1980’s gold standard of drug value. Actually, coke’s worth more than gold, a kilo currently going for about forty thou. That’s down a little from last year, but annual US consumption is up, currently estimated by the Drug Policy folks at 75 metric tons. And at least one of those tons seems to be going up the noses of our rural citizens, paid for by the rapidly rising price of marijuana.

The influx of new money has brought other highs and lows to the northern California backcountry. Besides the personal craziness, especially around harvest time when guys with guns are dropping out of the sky—and partly because of them—hill people have to contend with rip-­‐offs, robberies, snitches, locked gates, constant fear, paranoia, isolation, and all-­‐around bad vibes. Hardly the peace and love and understanding that back-­‐to-­‐the-­‐landers had envisioned.

Within the weed economy, the emerging conflict of values may run as deep as the old divide between hippies and ranchers, which was also mostly between old-­‐timers and new-­‐ comers. But this time it’s also the small grows against the big grows; the pioneering cultivators who grew weed to support homestead and community, and the new wave of entrepreneurs who grow weed strictly for profit—a high-­‐risk, high-­‐value, brand-­‐name commodity. In the weed-­‐growing counties of northern California, by the early ‘80s the marijuana business is already generating more than a billion dollars a year [2.5 bill in twenty-­‐first-­‐century dollars].

That’s the estimate of Silas Goldean, who surveyed hundreds of growers, non-­‐growers, assorted dealers, and law enforcement during the late ’70s and into the ’80s. His research gave us the first outlines of a simmering backcountry divide that would soon break out into wider

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conflict. Goldean estimated 35,000 growers, each producing 25 female plants grossing a thousand bucks each, with a net of $14,000. Not a lot of money when the state’s median income for a family of four was $21,000.

It’s important to remember how modest the numbers were then. Also, while the farmer’s share has always been small, the overhead can be very high indeed. Plus, this wealth was going to households whose previous income was not far from zero, and a lot of it went to infrastructure and deferred maintenance. On the other hand, in those years of economic hardship they didn’t have to contend with the high cost of cokeheads and gangsters and monster pickups tearing up the backcountry roads.

Scale changes everything. As the price doubled and tripled, the pressure and the violence rose along with it. “They aren’t plants anymore,” an old-­‐timer complained to Silas Goldean. “They’re thousand-­‐dollar bills.” When they became two-­‐ and three-­‐thousand-­‐dollar bills, they weren’t even money any more. Astronomical, we say, as if describing the currency of some other planet.

The new marijuana business is not the old weed economy. In the exchange of dope for dollars, something essential is lost, and the more the dollars the greater the loss. It makes my small-­‐time smuggling venture look like a public service, trying to even the balance and keep those losses to a minimum.

My city cousin and I are at the interface of two economies, meeting in the Bay area between our two Californias. SoCal weedsters like her use plastic and live on credit. I do have a checkbook, but don’t carry it with me. I don’t own a card, have no credit history except for a long-­‐delinquent student loan and a charge account at the local lumber yard. Between these two economies, buying and selling marijuana, we use paper money. Cash is where the pulp economy is open to the weed economy, where one shades into the other. It’s the currency of those who live below the bottom line.

As of this winter, 1984, of the $168 billion cash circulating in this country only about 20% can be accounted for. A lot of it must be in suitcases and the trunks of cars, but mostly it’s moving from pocket to purse in thousands of small transactions—the everyday exchange that is the web of human community. Like the planet itself, living hand to mouth. That underground theory of business may explain why I’m always broke.

My urban cousin is also performing a kind of charity work. A little bud trim is a working person’s cheap salvation, much appreciated by her friends in southern California where the daily overhead is so heavy. She’ll send me payment as she sells each pound, so I’ll get those winter dividends plus the pleasure of sneaking a little weed into the pulp economy. As an added bonus we get to hang out together, celebrate our transaction, charge the expense to weed’s account. Next day we hurry between rain showers, in and out of restaurants and shops and galleries, then finally to the Emporium where she wants to buy a suitcase. I follow, escalating among floors of glass and steel, blinded by the brilliance, negotiating aisle after aisle of dazzling material stuff. I can’t believe how many suitcases there are, and how much they cost. She finds a small bag of medium quality for forty-­‐five bucks, puts it on her card. I got mine at the recycling center. One paper dollar. It’s a wonder we can even communicate. Luckily, we both speak the language of the underdog.

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The Adventures of Richie Rich

61

It’s raining hard again when the bus leaves town. A couple of hours up the highway, at a depot stop about a hundred miles north, the driver gets back on, looks wearily at his passengers. “Folks, I’ve got some good news and some bad news.” It’s an older crew in the back of the bus this time, and they want the bad news first. “The road’s closed,” he says. “There’s been another slide.” The bus is only going as far as Willits, halfway home.

The good news is, we can get our tickets refunded plus a free bus ride back to San Francisco. Or we can spend this stormy night on the hump of the coastal highway, in a town conveniently situated to exploit the misfortune of travelers. Black Bart held up the stage not far south of Willits.

The old guy across the aisle says he’s seen enough bad weather. He’s going back to the city, then up the Valley tomorrow. For the next hour or so, as the bus heads north into the lashing rain and the land gets steeper and wilder, he tells about his experience in the marijuana trade. Much of it supports the findings of Silas Goldean’s interviews: a clash of ’60s values with the full-­‐out tyrannosaurus economy of the present. The old guy thinks it should be legalized.

There’d still be a market, he says. And it doesn’t cause near the problem that liquor does. He starts telling an older story, about moonshine days in the hill country west of Pittsburgh where he grew up. Life on the Copper Kettle Highway. Wasn’t much different from now. “We called it the business.” Yeah, I say. The biz.

The guy sitting next to me can’t decide what to do. He’s coming back from New Jersey, lost everything but the contents of three suitcases in a Newark divorce court. Hoping to make it back to where he left off. “She even got part of my unemployment.” He says his name is Richard. “Call me Rich.”

Rich could go back to the city, hock his camera, and buy a plane ticket—but one of his reasons for coming back is to take pictures at a wedding. On the other hand, the lady who invited him has a camera. Maybe he can borrow it. But when he tries the pay phone at the Willits bus station, he can’t reach her. He’s having lousy luck with women and money. The bus driver is waiting for us to make up our minds.

I decide to stay in Willits. I head off to find a motel room, offer to share it with Rich, who also doesn’t like the idea of going back. I help him carry his rock collection the two blocks to the motel. Afterward, over beer and cheeseburgers, then beer and bud, he tells me of his life in the biz.

Rich came west at the end of the ’70s, moved from one old friend to another, ended up on a large plantation in southern Humboldt. “A large plantation,” he says. “Like, thousands of plants.”

He worked hard for two or three seasons, saving his money. The operation expanded to include about fifteen people, most of them from the same north Jersey high school. With some working capital and a grasp of the growing process, Rich felt ready to stake his own claim. It’s a classic California gold-­‐rush story, with some of the same rationale.

“I work my ass off,” says one of Goldean’s informants, responding to the charge of greed. “Having gotten in late I’ve got to produce at a level where I can pay off my investment, which was considerable.” Plus, he argues, he’s helping the community. “The weed business is

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probably the only enterprise where Reagan’s supply-­‐side economics is even close to working, where profit comes back to create employment and stimulate the economy. I hope Nancy keeps up her war on drugs.”

When Rich had saved enough to go into business for himself, he went to the guy he’d been working for, pointed to the mountain above them. “See that ridge up there? It gets way more sun than where we’ve been growing.” If his friend would let him grow there, he’d cover expenses, split the profit fifty-­‐fifty. They shook hands on the deal. Early next spring Rich brought in a cat, bulldozed a road through the ceanothus and oak, straight up to that sunny ridge. He hired several friends, then friends of theirs, trucked in planting soil, a semi-­‐ of grow pellets. By May he had two thousand starts in the ground. Miles of plastic pipe, tanks, and pumps moving water day and night. Valves, timers, switches. “Hell of an operation.” It was one of his happiest memories.

That summer CAMP started flying, and Rich immediately saw that his new road was a starkly visible gash in the landscape, a big arrow pointing to his garden. Within days, he’d solved the problem. Using a come-­‐along and steel cable, Rich bent over saplings on either side of the road and staked them to the ground. “I’m a make-­‐it-­‐happen kind of guy,” he said. I had to admire the elegance of his solution.

The season was bountiful, money flowed through Rich’s hands, an ever-­‐larger share of it going into white and brown powders. By the second summer the partnership was fracturing into a thousand intimations of evil. It all came to a crisis one August afternoon, a screaming argument that ended with Rich’s partner up on the ridge firing a .45 into the air and shouting, “Fifty percent!” Rich sat in the cabin the rest of the afternoon, a rifle pointed at the door. If his partner even knocked, he’d start shooting. Around evening, footsteps came to the door, hesitated, went away. Not long afterward, Rich lost his wife and found Jesus, although I’m not sure in what order.

In his way, Rich is also on a pilgrimage, one of those holy errands given especially to fools. I was moved by his passionate investments in love and money, his heartbreak, and his capacity for self-­‐inflicted suffering. I hope he learned something from his bad decisions, but his story tells me that laws older than the state’s govern our relation to money. Economics is a field of experience, a branch of ecology, and an offshoot of human desire. There’s a lot more to weed than numbers.

Returns

Of course not everyone agrees. “They see dope-­‐growing as a romance, a lifestyle, some Robin Hood fantasy,” a big grower told Silas Goldean. “They don’t see it for what it is: a business.”

In fact, the weed economy has to be both—a business and a lifestyle (what a visiting anthropologist might call culture). Like me and my cousin, those who engage in it will live in two worlds and constantly have to cross boundaries. It’s a business partly because it’s illegal, with the DEA providing artificial price supports, but it’s going to be a viable exchange item at some level long after the last helicopter has gone home. The weed economy has the ability to make this adjustment and is already doing so. A lot of growers have decided to regulate themselves, adopting environmental standards as well as adjusting incomes to something nearer where

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they started. This return to the scale of weed economics is bound to be rough in the short term, but it supports the long-­‐term interests of the growers and their communities. It promotes sufficiency and stability, rather than increased urban dependencies and rural violence. That’s the Robin Hood fantasy—but it’s not entirely fantastic. As one pioneer woman grower told the interviewer, “There’s always a market for a quality product.”

Monday morning, hung over, four dollars in my pocket, and it’s still raining cats and dogs. The real dog, if there is one, won’t arrive at the bus station till noon. I decide to treat us both to breakfast, duck out of the rain and into the local Bank of America, but I can’t convince the clerk to cash a check for ten dollars. Just down the street, the Bank of Willits cashier says “Sure,” with no hesitation. “But write it for twenty,” she adds. Really? “If you expect to eat breakfast and lunch.” I thank her for being so trusting. She looks at me. “Who would write a bad check for ten dollars?” I was thinking in the vernacular again.

The road is open by late morning and a ride stops as soon as Rich puts his thumb out.

Maybe his fortunes are changing. He and his suitcases fill the small car, so I shake his hand and wish him luck. Now it’s just me, my mostly empty suitcase, a few dollars, and half a joint in my pocket. I stand in the drizzle for about half an hour, then some friends in a pickup recognize me and stop, back up and offer me a ride home. I spend the afternoon in the camper, watching the rain-­‐whipped highway blur southward. The sun comes out just as we reach Humboldt Bay, everything green and sparkling. I almost look for a rainbow, but stop myself in time.

The highway is its own reward. If we conduct our business like a pilgrimage and are watchful for blessings along the way—as Henry David Thoreau might ask, Who is to say these “intangibles” are not real profit? There is no “objectivity” here. I’m describing an emerging and struggling economy, a culture, supporting itself both spiritually and financially by growing and selling a plant. And it’s up against a global pulp machine that sprinkles cultures on its breakfast cereal.

I’m trying to describe a weed economy that puts business back in touch with ceremony.

Whose transactions acknowledge our real blessings and debts. Whether marijuana as a cash crop can sustain that vision remains to be seen. It has created a path that is being followed by other things of value, like heirloom apples and cheeses and beers and a thousand kinds of craft productions, and maybe that’s been its best result. Maybe marijuana itself will lose some of its outlaw glamour. Economically and botanically it’s a pioneer plant, part of a struggle for survival that now characterizes much of the Earth, wherever pulp economics has set up its franchise. Of course the outcome is far from certain. It’s well known that selling drugs to bring about political change can be a slippery business. The big grower interviewed by Goldean advocated tithing, using the proceeds to buy political reform at the state level, something that’s already happening at home when the DA or the Sheriff is up for election. Not exactly new and revolutionary, but that’s politics.

This is an early stage of a long-­‐term process, which I can only describe from inside a moment in history. I might claim some objectivity regarding money, since I seldom have any, but where weed is concerned I’m hopelessly implicated. Even my chief source here, Silas Goldean, is a grower of some of the best weed in the universe and one of my oldest friends. In a

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good year he gives me a winter sampler that usually lasts till spring. He’s written some of what you’ve just been reading.

We’re all on the bus.

7. THE GOLDEN RULE

I’m in the tool shed when I hear the day-­‐care van coming up the driveway. A diminished sunlight glows through the fiberglass roof, on the work bench a dozen six-­‐inch plastic pots I’ve just finished watering. A couple of seeds in each, some of last year’s best plus a few new varieties: a strain of Dain Bramage given to me by my friend Bob, and a purple-­‐black Kush from a contractor who does a lot of foundation work. John said it was at the bottom of a Yukon lake, in a float plane that couldn’t get out with its load. Black Alaskan Plane Wreck.

All the seeds, with their goofy names and improbable lineage, came to me still in the bud—a gift for which I’m now doubly grateful. As hybrid sinsemilla has developed, seeds have become another highly desirable high-­‐end product. People are combing the Earth, from the Andes to the Hindu Kush, for new varieties of Indica to be cross-­‐pollinated with our Sativa, adapting it to the microclimates of the California Coast Range and the tastes of serious connoisseurs. Each seed represents a huge collective investment of miles and money and risk, long before the first leaves appear.

When the pots have drained I’ll put them in a specially built cupboard above the workbench, where they’ll get just enough light and warmth to keep me supplied with an airy working man’s bud. It’s not the one-­‐toke monster ganja that’s going toward four thousand a pound in these heady days, as the ‘80’s inflate into the ‘90s, but it keeps me at my desk all morning while Mom’s at Mad River Adult Day Health Care. I slide the door closed and go out to meet the big blue van.

How my mother came to live with me, and how I came to own a house at all, can only be explained by the Golden Rule—the ancient law of reciprocity that tells us to act as if everything will be paid for. That law isn’t printed on our money or often mentioned in public, but it’s still in effect. This will become more obvious as the unpaid bills of pulp economics come due. There’s also the dark side of the rule: Don’t do bad shit if you don’t want bad shit to happen to you.

The gold of this rule isn’t a coin you can hold in your hand, no stamped image of a sun-­‐ king at the top of a pyramid, with tribute and taxes going up while chump change trickles down to its base. It’s the gold of the heart again. Its rule is democratic and cyclical: I give to the community because the community gives to me. Or so the theory goes.

In practice, like other poet and artist types I provide a peculiar benefit—my gift, you could say—to a community that is founded on benefits. Sometimes it pays in carbon dollars, but mostly it’s a more mysterious currency, something we don’t yet have a money for. “Free”

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seems to be its treasury. “Volunteerism” appears to be its coinage. It’s at the root of weed economics, and at one time I thought marijuana itself might be that money. One thing making up for another.

Sometimes these contributions stay around and bring their own reward—like the annual fair on the town plaza. Often they’re as ephemeral as a poem you hear in a bar. Who knows where it ends up. Gifts are like a prayer. Nobody knows if or when or how it will come back.

Some human impulse compels us to the giving—“spending for vast returns,” as Walt Whitman put it—though after a while we learn not to wait by the mailbox.

So I was surprised when this house arrived. The money came from agriculture, from a strain of corn developed by Henry Wallace, US Secretary of Agriculture in the ’30s, when a quarter of the nation’s people were farmers. He turned down an offer to be Roosevelt’s vice president, then ran against Truman as the Progressive candidate in ’48, campaigning for universal health care and against the Cold War. When his granddaughter offered me a loan, it was better than a Nobel Prize—money from a plant instead of dynamite. Forty thousand dollars—which I thought was a fortune in 1989—for twenty years, which I thought was a very long time. I argued that the interest should be higher, but she held firm at six percent.

It meant I’d have to leave another garden, this one in a gully at the edge of town. Behind my little rental, in a clearing hacked out of the blackberry and alder, there was just enough sun for a few salad greens and several spindly marijuana plants. I was subsisting by small carpentry jobs and cabinet work, with an annual income that barely made it into five figures. Luckily the landlord was another benefactor, a musician and music teacher, who didn’t charge nearly enough rent and refused to raise it. So you can see, in the matter of shelter, how deeply I was dependent on the kindness of friends. You could say I was banking on it.

But Arcata could no longer support that quality of life. Gentrification was cashing in the value invested by bohemians and artists, who had moved into empty storefronts and cheap rentals and made the place home, in the way art makes a nest of culture. Twenty years later people were flipping real estate and prices were out of reach, driven by an influx of So Cal retirees and by parents who could pay Humboldt State tuition and buy the kid a house. Then there was another spike in housing prices when the Richie Riches started moving their gardens indoors.

Gentrification, speculation, capital inflow, and then grow-­‐houses—those were the forces and relations that brought me to this derelict house on the outer edge of Humboldt Bay. The Golden Rule at work, somehow, even when it’s not working. Over the next year or two I nearly doubled my investment, with a loan that required several hundred hours of my labor— “sweat equity”—but then paid itself off if I lived in the house for ten years. It was like making Br’er Rabbit promise to stay in the briar patch. The welfare state, our substitute for the laws of reciprocity, with the help of friends who worked for little or nothing, gave me a perimeter foundation, new plumbing and electrical, and windows and doors that actually opened and closed. The first thing I built, next to the house, was a little shed where I could keep tools and materials and a few marijuana plants.

Then the Rule kicked in again. My mother, alone and unable to care for herself in southern California, needed a place to live. Taking care of her meant that I couldn’t work as much, but her Social Security check partly righted the balance. I “charged” her $500 a month room and board, which covered our basic nut. Some of my caretaking time was paid for by In-­‐

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Home Support Services, which allowed my mother to pay me $2.25 an hour for fifteen hours a week of cleaning and cooking for her.

Mom and I are practically wards of the state, but we’re right at home in Chicken Beach.

On any weekday morning, while the chip and log trucks rush through the little village, most of our neighbors’ cars—the ones that would move if somebody started them—sit idle in their yards. As with dozens of other forsaken lumber mill towns, it’s partly because there aren’t any jobs to go to. But the weed economy often looks like nothing is happening when there’s actually a great deal of work in progress. Beside the usual smack lounge and a meth lab or two, a variety of home industries and secret gardens are operating in spare rooms and repurposed chicken coops, in garages, mini-­‐barns, lean-­‐to’s, and the corners of back yards—all of it supplemental to the usual scams and art projects and checks that arrive in the mail. Americans in the year 1990 are spending an estimated $9 billion on marijuana, and a large and never-­‐to-­‐ be-­‐reckoned part of it flows though Humboldt’s invisible economy.

Our only local government is also a ward of the state: a community services district of some three hundred homes, mostly immobile, scattered in the dunes between ocean and bay, with here and there an abandoned mill or closed-­‐up grocery store. I’m on its board of directors and attend monthly meetings where we argue till late at night about water and sewage and money. Nobody in their right mind would do it for the fifty dollars a month, but it’s some payback for time I’d be donating to the community anyway. And none of us turns down the money. Sometimes I see one of my fellow board members out on the highway dodging the chip trucks and picking up aluminum cans.

Communal water systems are governed by our most ancient laws and deepest sense of fairness. They predate and often overrule the free-­‐market model, whereby a person or corporation gets control of the flow of goods and services (a weir, a dam, a monopoly of any kind) and meters it out for personal enrichment. Which is exactly what our five board members are accused of—diverting funds to purposes other than intended.

A federal Clean Water Grant had replaced all the separate household wells and septic systems, many of them failing, with one big plumbed-­‐together government. Everybody had to join, even if their well and sewage were working. And they had to pay, even if they didn’t flush.

People still complain bitterly about the communist take-­‐over. Their worst suspicions were confirmed when the district board gave itself powers of parks and recreation, and the final coup arrived when the old elementary school and several hundred acres of dunes came up for sale and they decided to buy it. The school had been closed and its children bussed to town because they were said to be culturally retarded and academically unprepared when they arrived at Arcata’s high school. The hundred acres of dunes and forest adjacent to the school were being run over and cut up by off-­‐roaders because the sand dunes and the woods, like the children’s parents, were considered of little account. A California Coastal Conservancy grant would return both children and land to the custody of the community.

The gossip was instantaneous. They’re stealing our sewer money and buying sand dunes.

They can’t even get shit and drinking water in and out of our houses in the right order—now they want to dig up that lupine the Boy Scouts got a merit badge for planting so the dunes wouldn’t blow away. This whole restoration business is just a way for them bird-­‐lovers to feather their own nests. It’s hard to sell recreation and wildflowers to people who feel they are

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themselves a threatened species. Our district manager, who takes a lot of this abuse, has his own version of the Golden Rule posted on his office wall: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

But when we began to talk about the land around us as a rare and valuable habitat, a place tourists might actually want to visit, and when residents began to see it as their property, they agreed that the dunes had to be protected, and that the community needed a place for its children to play. This narrative glossed over some serious disagreements, but it was a compelling story and our grant made the final cut. This afternoon I’m leaving for the meeting in San Francisco where some of what’s been taken from this community might be returned. This is a new experience of the Golden Rule for people who think it goes Do unto others before you get done unto.

Mom comes down from the van, the driver helping her with the last step. “Hi kiddo,” she says.

Now in her late eighties, she’s more than ever a child of her time. My mother’s a flapper. Prohibition, in her telling, was one long and mostly memorable party. Alcohol remains her drug of choice, despite the confusion it causes and the suffering it’s brought upon her and those she loved. Most of the conflict with her second husband, which was considerable, began with drinking and ended with money. They’d go out honky-­‐tonking, he’d start buying drinks and cashing checks, never wrote it down. A bookkeeper most of her life, she could never balance our domestic account.

Now she laughs at the damage. Tells me how she and my father got drunk on bathtub gin one New Year’s Eve, woke up blind in the morning. It was okay, she says. Later in the day it wore off, must have been wood alcohol. She didn’t care for marijuana the time my sister got her to try it. Said it made her feel funny. Since she moved in I’ve stopped buying her wine. She doesn’t seem to notice it’s missing and she’s a lot less confused. As I walk her in the front door she does a little dance shuffle. She’s still a party animal.

I make tea and we sit at the table. I remind her that I’m going to the city, and we go over the notes and schedule: what’s in the fridge, who will be coming over for meals and bed-­‐time.

I’m lucky to have friends nearby who provide respite care, in exchange for my In-­‐Home Support money or just out of neighborliness. After a year, the caretakers and routines of her new life are familiar. She knows she lives here, tells visitors how we once owned all the land around us but got cheated out of it. Maybe we’re living on her grandfather’s gold claim.

I wedge another log into the stove, damp it down, go put away the plants and lock the shed. My ride arrives, I kiss Mom goodbye. With another board member and our district manager, we’re off to the city to get back a little of what we’ve lost.

The Golden Rule Revised

So an anarchist, a liberal, and a libertarian walk into a bar with a million dollars. What do they talk about? This isn’t a joke. After the Coastal Conservancy voted to give us the grants, we fell into the first bar we came to and started buying tequila shooters and disagreeing about the money. The other board member, prominent in local Democratic circles and soon to serve three terms as County Supervisor, thinks the grant is the answer to our prayers. He believes in fairness, balance, and trade-­‐offs. The district manager, an Ayn Rand believer, says we should

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take the money and do what we want, tell the state whatever it wants to hear. The anarchist, who doesn’t trust either of them, has been a pain in the butt through the whole process.

Complete transparency and consensual decision-­‐making, he says he wants. He’s even worked against his own interest—wanting the parcel across from his house to be in public ownership— when he blabbed about the toxics from refining gold ore. Naturally, the Conservancy dropped the parcel like a hot potato. He’d probably give the million dollars back if he wasn’t outvoted four to one.

Their argument will not be settled in the bar. The grant money will change the community’s relations, and eventually divide them as much as it brought us together.

To remedy and justify the deficits of pulp economics, grants try to do what the weed economy does as a matter of principle: return balance to our transactions with one another and the natural world. When the new settlers arrived in this region in the late ’60s and early ’70s they established themselves by plain old-­‐fashioned organizing work, supported by odd jobs, bake sales, food stamps, and any wealth that could be scammed or stolen from a government that would otherwise spend it on bombs. Then they began to be supported by small bits of capital, savings and inheritances and loans, invested and increased by young crafts people, organic food merchants, purveyors of books and records and paraphernalia. Then it began to come from marijuana, the seed money that established the infrastructure that would then be sustained by grants.

Most of the new ventures were considered services, even the businesses, but the core institutions were explicitly dedicated to human and environmental health, from birthing to hospice care, and from protection to restoration. Nearly all of them organized as non-­‐profit corporations. It was what you had to do, they were told by lawyers, and people began to say “501(c)3” like it was a household word. The late ’70s and into the ’80s were gold-­‐rush years for non-­‐profits, the grants were plentiful and marijuana prices were soaring. It seemed half the people I knew worked for a non-­‐profit or were personally recipients of grants, and the other half were growing weed. Checks from Sacramento and bags of cash and bud—those two forces laid much of the infrastructure of today’s weed economy. Clinics and health projects, once nourished by personal wealth and pot, now were sustained by grants and served a large local community. At the same time these institutions tended to the social damage of pulp economics, environmental groups challenged its resource addictions and, again mostly through grants, worked to recover broken ecosystems.

But the ensuing decades revealed some serious problems with the non-­‐profits. Almost universally, they adopted the corporate form of governance, a legal invention designed chiefly to limit liability. At our services district meetings, where we five directors were sometimes threatened with legal action, I could see a reason for this protection. But mostly, the board-­‐ director-­‐staff model was a legal fiction that people followed with little attention to how poorly it fit their mission. For a holistic clinic or a group advocating ecological values, the corporate model was glaringly inappropriate. It worked much like it did for our services district—not very well—or worse, because it lacked the requirements of transparency and democratic process. At least we sewer and water directors were elected, I’d like to say—but actually I was appointed to fill a vacancy, then re-­‐elected when the district manager—my sweetheart’s brother—forgot to post the notice to prospective candidates and I ran unopposed.

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Cronyism affects non-­‐profits in much he same way. They, too, become self-­‐selecting and self-­‐perpetuating organizations, their fate dependent on people removed from the daily action who meet once a month. The groups have worked best when a strong (usually male) director has taken control, made policy, and told the board members only what they needed to know.

Of course that’s also led to some abject failures. When Mr. Strong left town or died or got elected to office, the organization collapsed or became a zombie of its former self.

The non-­‐profit’s other weakness, again like our services district, was its growing dependence on the state. Grants were among the first victims of the post-­‐2007 contraction of the national economy, making it obvious they were a low-­‐priority handout meant to keep the Golden Rule from looking too tarnished. John D. Rockefeller, the most hated man in America, finally learned the importance of advertising—and now we say with great respect: Ah, he got a Rockefeller. It proves the system works.

The annual budget fights of our services district revealed something closer to our real balance. The county collected property taxes and kicked back a fraction for parks and the like, but before we could get our hands on it the state stepped in and took another fraction. Like the grants, the tax system is a show of balancing the inequities of pulp economics, but without actually doing so. Take their lives and livelihood, their self-­‐respect, their children’s future. Give them a playground and a hundred acres of sand.

Fortunately, many public programs and non-­‐profits are still supported by foundations with real charity in their hearts. And generous support still comes from marijuana farmers, some giving more than a tithe of their profits, although they are fewer and prices are considerably lower than during the gold rush years. According to daily reports as well as long-­‐ term observers, the present generation of growers is far more interested in business than the health of the land or community. I know some fine exceptions to this view, but I doubt they are a majority, if they ever were. Marijuana is no longer the weed it was, which is cause for celebration, but it is also less a part of the weed economy that brought it here, and that is a great loss.

The best argument for decriminalizing weed, instead of providing tax revenue to a state that returns less and less in services, would be the re-­‐assertion of weed’s connection to people and place. Regulation of legal pot will involve some prohibitions, but more important would be a system that sends its profits to the stewards and caretakers who are not in it for profit. Even more directly, imagine a cooperative of non-­‐profits sharing the income of a marijuana garden.

Or think of an old folks’ collective, a retirement home with its sun room producing pot. Weed needs to acknowledge older ways of reckoning and pay dues to its own origins.

Later that afternoon, having celebrated our million dollar triumph, the three of us are making our way over the Bay Bridge. It’s not my car and I’m in no condition to drive, but by some inebriate logic I’m at the wheel because I know where we’re going. A local rock and roll station is promising yeah, if you try sometime, you get what you neeeed.

A few minutes later as we’re flying high over Oakland on the 805 the music abruptly stops and an announcer comes on the air with a true and current statement of our accounts.

On the streets below us, not far from here, two forest activists have been blown up by a car bomb.

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Our struggle to preserve a few miles of dunes and maritime forest was a tiny skirmish on the edge of the Northwest timber wars. Sand dunes and shore pine have little commercial value, but in the industrial forests of Cascadia, from northern California to British Columbia, timber companies and the Reagan administration had been pushing relentlessly for more cutting. As environmental groups pushed back, supported less and less by grants and increasingly by marijuana, confrontations like the Redwood Park battle became common. This summer of 1990 the Northern Spotted Owl will be added to the endangered species list, and the war has just escalated.

On remote logging roads, in tree tops, and in courtrooms, it’s a war between two economies: one says the Earth itself is our only real capital, the sun our means of production; while the other claims the Earth as a commodity and externalizes the costs of extraction. Its special genius is finding ways around the laws of reciprocity. Its favorite son is Charles Hurwitz.

In a hostile takeover in 1985, the Texas corporate raider purchased the county’s oldest and most stable lumber company using $900 million in highly leveraged Drexel junk-­‐grade bonds. By the pulp definition, Pacific Lumber’s mills and nearly 200,000 acres of redwood forest were an “undervalued asset,” and the dominant economic model said: Buy it with deferred-­‐risk loans, strip the wealth, put off the balloon payment as long as possible, declare bankruptcy, walk away with the profits. Laid-­‐off workers were told to blame Earth First! and the spotted owl.

The real cost of cashing in thousands of acres of forest came due sooner than expected: catastrophic erosion, hillsides collapsing onto homes, silt bleeding into rivers, burying farms and orchards and salmon spawning beds. Action was demanded from the public agencies that were supposed to be enforcing the rule of reciprocity, and when that failed, activists went to tree-­‐sits and blockades and their lawyers went to court. Now Redwood Summer is coming, and the stakes are rising. That’s what brought the two forest activists to Oakland in this spring of 1990.

They were on a fund-­‐raising tour.

Singer/songwriter and rabble-­‐rouser Darryl Cherney and the plain-­‐spoken, sharp-­‐witted Judi Bari were a highly effective organizing team. They brought music and passion and economic analysis to crowds of forest defenders, and they were beginning to get the attention of mill workers. They sang and talked about how much forest was being logged, where the money was going, and how much Charles Hurwitz was costing Humboldt County in resources and livelihood. In response, they were targeted by a campaign of lies and defamation, hate letters, and dozens of death threats—all the bullying tactics of the Redwood Park wars ten years earlier, magnified now by inflated money and new spectacles of cruelty and greed.

FBI Cointelpro agents had offered a bomb class at College of the Redwoods that spring.

The guy who taught the bomb class was also the investigating agent who convinced Oakland cops to charge Darryl and Judi with knowingly carrying a bomb—in effect, conspiring to blow up something which turned out to be themselves. They sued agents of the Oakland Police Department and the FBI for the false accusation and lack of any serious investigation into the true perpetrator(s). Eventually a jury awarded them $4.4 million in damages (posthumously for Judi)—mostly for the violation of their First Amendment rights. Miraculously, it hadn’t killed them, and it didn’t shut them up. Judi Bari was even more powerful speaking from a wheelchair. But it left her with less resistance to the cancer that claimed her five years later.

And it gave some idea what your life is worth if you get in the way of the money machine.

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When asked about the protests, Charles Hurwitz told a Chronicle reporter he was just following the Golden Rule: “Whoever has the gold rules.” He laughed at his own cleverness.

When I get home from the city the following day, Mom’s in her favorite spot on the couch reading. It’s sunny out, but she’s had her respite care provider build a fire. The place is cooking. She sees I’m carrying a suitcase but isn’t sure if I’m coming or going. I get the all-­‐ purpose greeting. “What’s up, kiddo?”

I tell her where I’ve been, how we’re going to own all that land out there across the swamp. “Us?” she says. The gold mine at last paying off. “No,” I say. “All of us.” She’s not sure that’s the same thing.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I say. It’s only been two days, but I have to go out to the shed, see if my beanstalk is coming up.

8. COMPASSION AND COMMUNITY

Where does it hurt? Is the treatment worth the cost? Would you like to change providers?

An economics of pain would take into account all the externalized costs of techno-­‐ capitalism, including the price of industrializing life itself, reducing forests, people, all of creation, to pulp.

The weed economy struggles to resist this process by keeping honest books and talking about where it hurts. Politically, it opposes industrial forestry, commodity food, and chemical medicine. Culturally, it revives and preserves older ways of nourishing ourselves, of caring for one another, and being good stewards of the place we live. It has been supported in this endeavor by a plant which returns the gardener’s care, eases the pain, and supports the opposition.

A prime motive of marijuana’s prohibition, and the entire War on Drugs, is to crush this resistance: to co-­‐opt it where possible, by bribery and salesmanship and the temptations of consumerism, or to suppress it with draconian laws and guns. The gravest threat to the power of pulp economics is that people will decide for themselves what’s good for them. Nothing else explains the way the federal government has held to its prohibitions with such an insane death grip. From the raging bigot Harry Anslinger, America’s first drug czar, to the careerist US attorneys of the present day, professional doctor-­‐priest-­‐cops have made it their business—their lucrative careers—to tell us what’s bad for us. They’re protecting their franchise.

What else could explain the full power and majesty of the US government coming all the way out to our little town just to arrest a couple of dudes making glass pipes? Of course the message, when the smoke clears, is not about health and safety at all: Take our medicine. Or we can make the pain much worse.

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Compassion (November, 1996)

I come in through the metal gate at the building’s side door. Holding onto a bouquet of flowers, with the other hand I latch the gate behind me. Past the nurses’ desk, down the corridor to Mom’s room, through the familiar atmosphere of ammonia and loss. During three years of these weekly visits I’ve learned it’s the smell of too much money going to profit, and too little to the people who do the caring. In our case—the case of my mother and a few other old ladies—the money comes from Medicare and they’re housed two to a room. Medication makes up for the lack of staff and suppresses the patients’ bewilderment and anger at finding themselves here.

I hope you’ll shoot me before you let them put me in a place like that, she once said.

Another broken promise.

I cared for my mother at home for three years. It was a chance to return a little of the gift of nurture and we had some good last times together. But it felt like abject failure when I had to admit that her growing dementia was beyond my skill and understanding. By then my own life was as frayed and broken as the connections in her mind. After a long period of searching I found an assisted living home. Willow Bend was just starting and they’d take someone with dementia.

But the proprietor couldn’t make ends meet, and she tried to run the place without hiring any help. After a few months I couldn’t tell whether she or my mother was the crazy one.

But even though Mom’s condition became worse, Medicare increased her monthly payments because she was in an institution instead of a home. The extra money went to Willow Bend. Her monthly stipend went up again when I moved her to this “nursing facility,” though she gets even less attention than where she was. Long after the fact, I see that the government’s priority is not the home, but the institution that replaced it. Not care for people, but for the care business.

These matters are on my mind because just last Tuesday the Compassionate Care Act was overwhelmingly approved by California voters. Proposition 215 basically says there are better ways to manage pain, and it exempts patients and caregivers from prosecution under state or county laws if they want to use marijuana to feel better. Hardly a call for everyone to light up and go crazy, or even a popular embrace of marijuana, it’s primarily a rejection of commodity compassion. However slightly, it’s a turning away from the idea of the human being as a consumer of cradle-­‐to-­‐grave care delivered by licensed health care monopolies and big pharmaceuticals. Weed is a dire threat to that franchise. What else explains the War on Drugs?

It’s strictly business.

Valerie Corral was in an auto accident in Nevada in 1973 that left her with brain trauma and recurring epileptic seizures. The drugs she was prescribed were expensive and only marginally effective, with unpleasant side effects. Through years of research and trial she and her husband eventually found that marijuana controlled the seizures. In 1993 Santa Cruz police arrested them for growing five plants in their back yard.

Valerie entered a plea of necessity—she required marijuana, she said, and because it was illegal to buy, she grew it. The Santa Cruz DA, after a storm of bad press, decided the case

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was not worth prosecuting. More important, the experience led Corral to found the Women’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana—WAMM—which expanded the argument for medical necessity.

Along with pioneers like Mary Jane Rathbun (Brownie Mary), she provided free marijuana to patients on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.

WAMM’s website (now it’s Wo/Men’s Medical Marijuana) describes their alliance in the clearest terms: a collective of patients and caregivers providing hope, building community and offering medical marijuana on a donation basis. We offer a safe, organic supply of medical marijuana to patients with a doctor's recommendation for the treatment of terminal and chronic illness.

Weed is not just another medicine—it’s another idea of what medicine is.

Another force behind passage of the Compassionate Care Act, Dennis Peron, was also motivated by outrageous drug policing. In 1990 he and his partner were held on the floor at gunpoint while Marin County cops searched their home and found four ounces of marijuana.

Peron explained that it belonged to his partner, who was dying of AIDS. The cop put his foot on the partner’s neck. “That stands for Asshole In Deep Shit.” Whatever “crime” was being committed here, it wasn’t marijuana.

The case was dismissed, the cops were scolded, but the intended harm was done. Once again, though, the outrage led to political action. Peron got Proposition P on the San Francisco ballot, and more than eighty percent of the voters agreed that medical marijuana users should not be prosecuted. A couple of years later, when state officials continued to harass his Cannabis Healing Center—arguing that he wasn’t a primary care provider—Peron began circulating the petition that would eventually put Prop 215 on the state ballot. This week, on the second Tuesday of November, 1996, five million voters agreed with him.

It’s important to remember the story of the Compassionate Care Act. Here’s a woman growing five plants for personal use in her back yard. And here’s a man with four ounces of weed that controls nausea and helps him feel human. What conceivable business is this of any government agency? Why should we require the huge and blundering permission of the state to do things that humans have done for themselves for millennia? To relieve pain with something besides booze and pills and TV. The answer, as usual, is money.

When Valerie Corral and WAMM give away marijuana they remind us that weed economics is based on the principle of the gift. It places care and compassion ahead of profit.

When Dennis Peron connects AIDS with marijuana, and both with caregiving, he’s giving that compassion a value—the value of weed as medicine. Not what you could “get for it” in dollars—a value in the weed. In the care. Advocates of medical marijuana are telling us that weed is a repository of wealth, but not in ways recognized by economists and cops. When the transaction is complete, the commodity is gone up in smoke. It’s a gift both in the receiving and the giving.

But even a few days after the election I can see a terrible flaw at the heart of 215’s victory. It leaves local jurisdictions to actually write the laws, at the same time leaving them at the mercy of the Reefer Madness gang at DOJ/DEA. More seriously, it leaves intact the basic model of prohibition. It’s a license for something that needed no license.

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Mom has a room to herself now, since the other Medicare lady died last week and no one’s in line for the bed. You’d think that would free up a little staff time, but last week I found her still sleeping in the middle of the day, heavily medicated. Klonopin takes up the slack when the minimum-­‐wage aides don’t have time to get to her.

Low pay, a high patient-­‐to-­‐staff ratio, bland and pale food, a laundry where things go to disappear—like the smell, these are symptoms of cutting costs to jack up profits. Compassion is all very well, but commodity care demands a profit—in dollars, because nothing else is counted.

The nurses and orderlies, mostly , are being milked of human kindness, for which they are not compensated. They only get paid for clocked-­‐in hours. This is one of three facilities owned by a local family, sold last year to a corporate care outfit in Arizona. The new owners have been cited for negligence by state authorities, but they’ll just declare bankruptcy and be bought by another corporation. Eventually a jury will award $677 million in fines against Skilled Healthcare Group, Inc, owner of all five of the county’s nursing homes plus seventeen others, but lawyers will help them weasel out of most of it. Another loss that will not be paid for.

The weed economy is female: in the budding flower, as everyone knows, but also the leaf like an open hand, bespeaking peace and nurture. Gift-­‐based, hand-­‐to-­‐mouth mother love.

The circle again. Yet the pulp magazines seldom portray marijuana as the province of women except as topless trimmers and grow ho’s. Instead, the whole Rasta gangsta guy thing dominates the public image of weed, the similarity of High Times and Playboy centerfolds being only the most obvious clue to the intended audience.

Women have played a sustaining role in the usual ways: creating marijuana cuisine, providing hospice and nursing care when weed’s not enough, and being most of the labor force that manicures a zillion buds a year. But women have also been pioneers in the cultivation of the mother plant. Mountain Girl’s Primo Plant (1976) was one of the earliest reliable guides to gardening techniques, and through all these years of agro-­‐engineering its influence has quietly persisted. Its author, Caroline Garcia, currently serves on the advisory board of the Marijuana Policy Project.

Instead of high-­‐stakes entrepreneurial outlawry, women have favored small domestic gardens, with no more drama (albeit more secrecy) than in growing flowers. As the big grows and guns have become a public liability, women like Garcia have gotten involved in the politics of production as well as the healing work of community. Their advice and example may be the weed economy’s best hope for the long term, and their voices need to be more prominent in the public conversation about marijuana.

But the conflict isn’t so much between the sexes as between a pulp economy that draws its customers—mostly young and male—into wish-­‐fulfillment and pharmaceutical living, and a weed economy based on long-­‐term nurture and survival—caring for the living instead of regarding them as consumers of a new strain or upgrade or prescription. We ought to celebrate the ways marijuana has continued to resist the norms of pulp medicine, and thank Dennis Peron for speaking plainly to the 215 lobbyists: “All use of marijuana for some reason, even if it’s as small as stress or anxiety, is a medical reason.”

My friend Bob used to say the only drug abuse is poor quality and high prices. Bob depended heavily on marijuana to relieve the phantom pain of a lost limb. He didn’t allow crutches or painkillers to slow him down much, and he could still drive a pickup with automatic

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and get on and off a fishing boat. What finally got him was the Del Norte sheriff’s deputies cutting down his plants and threatening him with jail. He beat the rap when the cops couldn’t come up with the evidence—they’d destroyed it all, they said—but it added to his pain and I’m sure it shortened his life. One more thing taken and never paid for.

Mom’s out of bed today, sitting in the wheelchair she’s used ever since staff was cut and no one has had time to walk with her. She’s having her hair brushed by a young Latina aide who just started last month. Rosalia says in Spanish to my mom, Do you know who this is? “No,” my mother says, no longer bothering to disguise her memory loss.

In her last year my mother has gone back to her childhood. She’s home again, back in Hispanic California. I introduce myself and she tells me her name. Nice to meet you, Guadalupe, I say. Rosalia is putting barrettes in her hair. Underpaid and possibly illegal, she’s the best thing that’s happened to Mom after all these institutional years and all those government dollars. My mother turns to me, a little girl with her hair pinned up. “You can call me Lupita.”

For a moment we’re not social statistics or case numbers, and care is not a commodity.

Our problem with compassion is not just the drugs we’re using—although give me weed over Klonopin any day—but industrialized care itself. If 215 makes marijuana into another corporate medicine, licensed and sold, we will have created two problems where originally there was none.

Community (September, 2003)

It’s dark in the woods. I’m following a wide trail cut through the understory, a misdirected effort of our community recreation program. The vegetation is slowly growing back, the trail narrows again at the point where work was halted. It takes me down into a hollow, winding between green walls of huckleberry and myrtle under a canopy of shore pine and spruce. As the trail climbs out of the hollow it enters a clearing, a green and gray-­‐green carpet of bearberry and lichen, remnant of an ice age ago. I stop at the edge of the trees. The sun comes out, illuminating this little jewel in the forest.

I’m about a mile from home, in the dunes that the California Coastal Conservancy purchased and then turned over to our local sewer and water district. It marked a historic change: a little piece of the ancient commons was given back to the people—and given back to itself. But buying the land did not buy back the knowledge and wisdom to care for it. Like open and honest local government, it will take years of wandering around in.

After more than a decade I’m beginning to know the forest, learning the gifts and responsibilities it brings. I spent a lot of time here after my mother died and it became a reliable source of consolation and perspective. A resource, it both provides and requires care. When we “save” things—money, people, forests—we are investing in the future, knowing we might not see the pay-­‐off in our lifetime.

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Caretaking and restoration are long-­‐term gifts, one generation giving to the next, the way humans have done for millennia. That gift is the buried foundation holding up all the fragmented institutions and agencies by which we try to preserve the wealth of our species and our home. It’s the basis of weed economics: growing things instead of reducing them to marketable pieces, an agrarian model instead of a resource extraction model, a way to bind the pieces back together.

It won’t be easy. The old habits of self-­‐interest and individualism are hard to break. Even the most hard-­‐won victories may be forgotten. When the people of our community got together to acquire ownership of their surroundings they acted from a new and intoxicating sense of unity and cooperation. Parents wanted the old school building for their kids.

Environmental activists wanted to get vehicles off the dunes. Caretakers of land and community joined forces and formed an alliance with the “outsiders”—botanists who wanted to preserve native plants and creatures, and recreationists who wanted to take back their beach.

The alliance was powerful and achieved most of its objectives. Community ownership.

No vehicles on the beaches and dunes. But once that initial effort was successful, the groups and individuals reverted to their separate interests. One group of neighbors controlled the buildings and social programs. Another group struggled to preserve the dunes, to save them from both the recreationists and the preservationists. We fought wars over grants, battled over trails, argued about hills of sand. We endured long and noisy public meetings, set up conflict resolutions that ended with yelling in the parking lot. Along the way we experienced multiple embarrassments and scandals: the recreation manager left amid revelations of missing grant funds and a gambling dependency; the general manager married the secretary, resigned, went into business for himself and got busted by the feds, ten years for a big indoor grow.

Eventually the wars and gossip settled down to the usual impossibilities of group decision-­‐making. But even when our little teacup village was most tempestuous, I think it held together partly because of that first collective sense of itself. The vision of renewal somehow endured: CCC crews building a park, AmeriCorps teachers showing kids how to repair bikes, restoration workers digging exotic grass out of the dunes. Even when we’d forgotten our own beginnings, ecotourists would come through and claim to see some kind of gift at work.

The pain of what we’ve lost mingles with the consolation of what we’ve saved, much like the living transactions around me. The lichen hanging from the tree tops, the myriad nodes and branching of root and mycelia beneath my feet: it’s all connected.

Weed economics is based on a lot more than weed. It grows out of meetings and organizing work, out of phone calls and day care arrangements, a thousand short-­‐term temporary measures on behalf of long-­‐term, sustained investments. A lot of it is not visible, though it finds expression in parks and playgrounds and restoration crews. The change is deeper than that, where I sense a new perception of Chicken Beach. The forest is no longer thought of as useless trash wood. The community, too, can be seen as having a value in and of itself. Not bankable, maybe not always in evidence, it’s a sense of richness, of being more “well-­‐ off.” We can hear it in the shell beads of the Brush Dance, feel it in the ceremony of healing. It’s there when we slip a ring of gold onto someone’s finger. In a unified field of value—expressing the wealth we find in wild original nature, including ourselves and one another—there are no externalized costs, no alienation of labor. Everything is paid for—it’s being taken care of, we say.

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But that’s not the economy that rules here. I came to the woods this afternoon because I heard that another young man had died in the marijuana wars. He was the son of an old friend, Acorn, one of the communal family who used to crash at our hippie farm when they had a food stamp or clinic appointment or a public meeting in town. They weren’t marijuana farmers then. They got their land money the old way, by everything from loans to handicrafts, and from seasonal farm labor to urban office jobs. They bought imported pot like the rest of us.

Growing it themselves was a way to save money. Later they began to plant more than they used, and gave away or sold the surplus. Before it was a cash crop, weed was a contract in their collective lives: a ceremony of agreement among themselves, and a pledge of resistance to the dominant economy.

When the new settlers began to convert weed to dollars, many of the dollars went to support cultural and political activism. I’ve never seen an estimate of how much weed money went to charity, but you can judge the community’s wealth by more than new boutiques. Radio stations, co-­‐ops, clinics and schools, restoration councils, legal aid services, and a wide range of community institutions owe some part of their origin to marijuana money. But its first and most enduring public expression had to do with land use. As the new inhabitants defended their homes, they also began to act in defense of their watersheds. At the height of the timber wars, during Redwood Summer and the subsequent tree-­‐sits and lawsuits and demonstrations, it became an open declaration that the weed economy was overtly resisting industrial cash-­‐crop forestry. The weed nation had learned to tithe itself, and to advertise the fact that pulp economics wasn’t working. It was making Charles Hurwitz and the whole junk bond billionaire class look bad. In Humboldt County, supporting environmentalism had traditionally been marijuana’s most serious crime. Now it was out in the open.

Acorn and his family, like many new inhabitants, had worked to promote new models of land use and community. Growing weed for sale involved reaching out to the wider world, seeking both new markets and new strains of marijuana, and with the product they openly exported those alternative values. Acorn once visited the New York editorial offices of High Times, where he drafted a “Letter from a Grower” advocating a truce in the marijuana wars. It offered a plan for legitimizing the small agrarian revolution they had begun, including collective price controls and self-­‐regulation. In another country this might have been recognized for what it was: a blueprint for rural development. But then Ronald Regan was elected and that effort went back underground, to endure another forty years of the war on weed. Acorn’s stepson was another casualty of that war.

He was eighteen, grew up in the Southern Humboldt pot culture with other young men who came of age in the hills. Many of their peers went off to cities and colleges, but a significant number stayed. A blend of hippie, Jawaiian, and redneck, driving big-­‐tire four-­‐by’s with a surfboard in the back, they’d pass in a cloud of dust on a country road, homegrown hip-­‐ hop filling the air and ah, a whiff of the chronic. They’re devoted to the cultivation of marijuana, and notoriously good at it. Weed was a style as much as a way to make money, under conditions that also characterize opportunity in an urban ghetto. The young bloods from the city must have seemed like cousins. They said they wanted to buy a pound of weed.

It was late August, just before harvest, and paranoia was at record levels. A marijuana activist had gone missing the week before. Chris Giauque had once been arrested on the steps

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of the Humboldt County courthouse, offering to give a half pound of pot to anyone with a 215 card. He was last seen headed out Spy Rock Road and it was rumored that a six-­‐figure deal had gone bad.

For reasons no one knows, Acorn’s stepson agreed to sell pot to the gangstas from the city. He had a friend who had the product, arranged to hook up with the buyers later. His body was found a couple of days later, on the trail to his favorite swimming hole. Acorn described the afternoon and evening that followed, as he and the boy’s mother and a few friends gathered along the road, watching for hours as sheriff’s deputies came and went, the body lying in the trail. I didn’t have to ask what was going through all their hearts. How the price could be so high, or life so cheap.

The contract between us, and between us and the Earth, is broken. Instead of continuing to add to our indebtedness we should just declare moral and ecological bankruptcy.

Short of that, some acknowledgment of the debt would be a good start. Weed has brought many benefits, not the least monetary, but with it have come many of the old habits of pulp economics, half-­‐conscious valuations that we’re just beginning to sort out. A frank discussion of value will have to be part of the “normalization” of marijuana, along with economic arrangements that respect both land and community. It’s the only path to real solvency.

Fortunately, one of the mixed blessings of the weed economy has always been its eagerness to renegotiate old agreements.

What this sometimes meant, in daily practice, was a lot of uncertainty. Some would say it was the effect of smoking too much dope, and there might be truth in that. Of course the dope got us through the difficult times, as Freewheeling Frank said, a lot better than money would have done. But the constant renegotiation had both good and harmful effects on families and personal relationships. It had mixed effects on kids, and was especially hard on single moms and boys.

It’s always more difficult than we expect, to change old ways of doing things.

Community and compassion, when they’re challenged or neglected, fall back on self-­‐interest and cash-­‐only caring. It’s true for institutions as well as people, though it may prove easier to change laws than outmoded values. When medical marijuana was made legal by voters in California, the transition from a culture of prohibition to one of regulation turned out to be a lot more difficult than anticipated. Is it medicine, or is it a business? Is it a crime, or a land-­‐use issue?

As a remote county of a state founded on gold-­‐rush values, we don’t have much experience with community or compassion or truly governing ourselves. Despite a lot of wrangling over local general plans, most land-­‐use issues are decided in the capital, where an army of lawyers and lobbyists see to it that our social and environmental laws—our contracts with one another and the Earth—won’t be effective. This subversion of the public trust can be seen in devastated forests and rivers, in prisons and nursing homes, and in rural communities whose human and natural wealth have been plundered. Agencies and politicians are overwhelmed by the medical marijuana problem because they have so little experience with real regulation.

When the County DA announced on Valentine’s Day, 2003, that a 215 grow could include up to ninety-­‐nine plants per patient, he wasn’t acting entirely out of love and

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compassion. It was widely agreed that he was paying back the growers who helped elect him.

All an entrepreneur needed was a few “patients” to designate him their “caregiver” and he had a license to go big-­‐time. With 215 cards from doctors willing to write the scrip, the Richie Rich mega-­‐farms increased exponentially. Because growers were their traditional supporters and allies, environmental groups would take a decade to respond to the damage.

Pulp economics has infected the weed economy, sometimes fatally. Those who resist are not exempt from its effects, nor are their families. For the new generation it must have been like growing up in a gold camp. Instead of the valuations that brought their parents here, where they unexpectedly hit pay dirt in their gardens, they learned the old lesson of the gold seeker: something for almost nothing. The young man’s death was a failure of the social contract.

Deeper into the woods, under a cluster of myrtles I see a mattress and scattered garbage. Wine bottles, propane canisters. Humans trying unsuccessfully to make themselves at home. A few years ago several public agencies and dozen of volunteers hauled out tons of trash and tires and rusted cars, but it’s slowly coming back. We hadn’t considered that our own species might be among the creatures we are protecting.

In places the path is overgrown, the understory almost impenetrable. Small animal trails lead off into tunnels barely large enough for a person. I have to bend down, almost crawl, then I come out into a tiny clearing where I find half a dozen spindly marijuana plants. They’re barely getting enough sun, forming airy buds that maybe will give someone a mellow maritime forest high. I leave it be, carefully cover my tracks, return the way I came. It’s not a crime in progress, just another organism trying to find its niche.

The little guerrilla garden reminds me of the weed economy itself. I don’t know how it will grow to ripeness, or what its flowering might be like. Or whether our collective transactions have made a net strong enough to hold it together. All its fragile separate strands, our only real safety net, woven of everyday acts of compassion and community.

9. FOUR WAYS WE TAKE OUR MEDICINE

What will we use for money? A decade into the twenty-­‐first century and I’m still walking the streets of this same little town, asking that same question. More exactly, and even stranger, I’m making the rounds of Arcata’s pot clinics to solicit funds for a community institution that’s about to go broke. This last part is not entirely surprising.

The North Country Fair was founded nearly forty years ago on nothing but a few hastily-­‐ chosen words and a small loan from the bookstore to pay for a use permit. We intended to occupy the center of town.

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It was a grand vision. The event would be held on a Sunday near the autumn equinox.

Streets surrounding the town’s plaza would be closed, and for that one day a hundred or so crafts and food and information booths would replace the cars, the half dozen bars, the liquor store, the Ben Franklin, even the four-­‐story dry goods store whose pack trains had supplied the Trinity mines and brought back Indian baskets.

Now the Gold Rush was long over, the lumber boom had gone bust, and Jacoby’s Store along with many others was going out of business. The fair would be a preview of a new town rising within the vacancies. It would offer new products: pottery and clothing, crafts of leather and wood, all manner of hand-­‐made things for sale; non-­‐profits would offer their services and advance their causes; local musicians would play throughout the day, ending with a rock and roll band.

But there had been no public events on the plaza for four years, not since May of 1969 when Nixon and Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia provoked nationwide protests and in Arcata the longhairs and students disrupted the annual Kiwanis salmon feed. One zealous young man even tried to start a fire at the glass and steel entrance of the Bank of America on the corner.

Ever since, the town’s police chief had prohibited all public gatherings on the plaza. He told the newcomers: Forget it.

The Shady Way

I find the iCenter on a busy cross-­‐town street, in a row of storefronts whose windows advertise vintage clothing, yoga mats, martial arts, and tattoos—except for the clinic, whose windows are covered by sheets of brown paper. When I close the door behind me the room is dim and yellow, like an old hotel room with the window shades drawn. You’d never guess that what they’re doing here is legal.

The space is large and sparsely furnished: a long table, a few metal folding chairs, and a folding screen almost concealing a desk in one corner. A young woman comes out from behind the screen and asks my business. I remind her of my recent letter asking for money. I was also here last year, I add—about a donation to help the fair? I’d talked to someone named Steve.

She says she doesn’t know any Steve but invites me to wait on one of the folding chairs. She goes back to the conversation she was having with someone behind the screen.

Listening to their voices I remember there’s a door, hidden by the screen, which “Steve” came out of last year. The THC content of the room had doubled in the few seconds the door was open. He said he didn’t remember getting a call from a City Council member. Hadn’t seen any letter. Maybe his partner had read it. Brent. The secretary would give me his number.

“Brent” never returned my calls.

The secretary—Brenda?—comes out from behind the screen again, followed by two healthy-­‐looking young men carrying their 215 papers. She escorts her “patients” to the front door. All they need now is seed and soil amendment. “Brenda” and I then stand in the middle of the nearly vacant room while she listens to my sad story about the fair. I follow her to her desk where she writes down my phone number. Someone will call me. “Probably tomorrow.”

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The fair’s organizers appealed the police chief’s denial to the City Council. For the past several years the town’s elected officials had refused their every request. Their most recent proposal, to scale down the freeway that was going to cut the town in half, had been run over and left for dead. But that defeat led to the idea of the fair—as in, let’s give this goddamn town a party. And this time they had the US Constitution on their side: not just the First Amendment but the Twenty-­‐sixth. Eighteen-­‐year-­‐olds had voted in the last election and the old City Council was history.

The political change had come with the new economic arrangements. Shuttered storefronts were reopening, with small-­‐time craftsmen, new cafes moving in. A food co-­‐op, a health clinic, a school, a couple of printers, a head shop, a record store, a musical instruments shop, all the necessities of the alternative life. Because they involved property and money, these ventures were sometimes dismissed as “hip capitalism”—a marriage of terms that promised some nasty divorces—but they were also purveyors of an alternative economics: a strong dedication to public service, and valuations in direct conflict with the old Chamber of Commerce.

Arcata Craft & Mercantile Enterprises (ACME), which had organized to oppose the freeway plans, agreed to be the sponsors of the fair. Posters appeared around town, a yellow mimeograph sheet with a very muddy photo of a couple of dozen strangely garbed young people in front of the statue of the dead president at the center of the town’s plaza. It described them as “a cooperative of small merchants, artisans, and people’s services” and announced, with an air of certainty that often characterized their voices, We practice micro-­‐ economics and respect for everything alive. We believe the basis of our life and economy is cooperation and mutual aid. A tear-­‐off booth application at the bottom of the page asked, a little apologetically, for a fee of five dollars.

It’s sepia-­‐tinted and far away now, the picture of that first fair, that brave band of fools.

They’d been planning and organizing for weeks, had been on the plaza before it was light, pushing Saturday night’s abandoned cars out of the way, even carrying a VW bug onto the sidewalk. They laid things out somewhat like the plan they’d drawn, booths got set up, wares displayed, amps plugged in, and about ten o’clock the fog lifted and somebody looked up and said (of course) “Far out.” The gaudy banners, the wild flags, tie-­‐dyed rags flashing in the morning light, even the bronze statue of William McKinley was holding a sunflower. A guy named Dave was on the stage picking a guitar and singing about a new day.

The event lived up to most of its promises, including “first annual.” The little gathering of fledgling enterprises and good causes tripled in size, expanded to two days, and now has a paid staff and a budget in five figures. Many of the ten-­‐foot-­‐square ventures grew into storefronts and manufacturers. The fair was said to be, in community development language, an “economic incubator.” ACME would have said, it’s just doing its thing.

But then more than three decades later, in the spirit of a different age, the fair’s capacity for generating income was noticed by a young entrepreneur who’d been organizing bands and performers. Sensing an undervalued asset, in 2007 he executed a hostile takeover, claiming that the fair and its name and all rights pertaining thereto were legally his. He could have been right. Some of the original group had stayed with the fair and managed to steer it past the worst liabilities, like taxes and insurance claims, but for the most part they’d been

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extremely informal about business and legal arrangements. Anything more structured—or profitable—would have been selling out, right?

So it’s come to this: for the second year in a row I’m begging money from people who publicly sell marijuana.

The Medical Way

Humboldt Patient Resource Center is in a quiet neighborhood of mixed residence and business.

The old gas station on the corner, pumps removed, is a rental where my friend Stan lived for years. He used to play accordion for the fair.

I open the street door, walk into a clean and well-­‐lit waiting room. It could be a low-­‐ budget doctor’s office, except for the guy who passes me on the way out carrying a large grocery bag with young marijuana plants peeking over its top.

I introduce myself to the receptionist at the desk, again just like any medical office except for the thick glass between me and her and several shelves of goodies: cupcakes, brownies, and candies neatly labeled and priced, like some kind of magic bakery. I show her a copy of my letter, relate my sad story through the hole in the glass, remind her that they’d made a big contribution to the fair last year. She asks me to wait. I find a comfortable chair by the frosted front window and pick up a magazine.

O’Shaughnessy’s, the Bay Area journal of medical marijuana, is a testament to the weed economy’s openness, and a model of public inquiry. Its articles and dispatches provide distinctions and clarifications that are often lost in slick magazines and the lies of drug agents: between THC and the lesser known ingredient cannabidiol (CDB), a highly effective pain reliever and anticonvulsant; between decriminalization (like the Moscone law for possession of small amounts) and proposed legalization which would continue to punish nearly half the users, who are under twenty-­‐one; between legalizing growing and continuing to prohibit use and sale; between inhaling and eating, smoking and vaping—I’m deep into it when the receptionist unlocks the door and gives me the news: last year is over.

Last year the director was just finishing a session with a patient when I came in. The guy was in pain and distressed because he’d lost his prescription and now he couldn’t get his meds.

As he left she assured him he’d have what he needed later that morning. She came back to her desk, invited me to sit down. Serious and professional, she gave my fund-­‐raising spiel the same attention she’d given the guy in pain. Then she said yes, they could give us a thousand dollars.

The magic bakery was actually a magic bank.

That was last year. This morning I can’t even get in the door. The receptionist says the director is busy. I should phone. Right. When I called a couple of days ago to make an appointment I was told she was in a meeting. Try again tomorrow, mornings are best. But I didn’t call back. I know the story. The big change in time and money is due to the fact that all the town’s clinics are under a lot of heat from the feds, and may be forced to close down. Even the City Council person who phoned the clinics last year is being threatened by federal prosecutors, along with any official who issues 215 permits or tries to implement the

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Compassionate Care Act. As I witnessed with my mother in the care home, the war is against compassion itself.

When the hippies finally got their little fair back, nearly everyone connected with it was pissed off: crafts people, musicians, the public, and especially the public authorities.

Meanwhile, the lives of starving artisans had gotten leaner than ever, another difference between this year and last being the economic austerity paying off the 2008 Wall Street bailouts. Programs and grants disappeared, and at the same time the market for hand-­‐made goods dried up. Some crafts people said they weren’t coming back. Many performers and vendors (as they were called now) said they liked the fair but had to invest their efforts in the big festivals that had grown up in the intervening years, featuring name bands and thousands more customers.

The young take-­‐over artist may have been blind to everything but profit, but he’d been right about one thing: our small-­‐town spectacle was out of touch with the times. Maybe it always had been. Not long after its beginnings, the hip capitalists were displaced by the yuppies, Jacoby’s store was refurbished ( by coke money, it was rumored) and instead of dry goods and Indian baskets, it was filled with cute shops and two upscale restaurant bars . By summer of 2009, a month away from the fair, the organizers (who now called themselves The Same Old People) were like stranded time travelers looking at thirty empty booth spaces and many thousands of deficit dollars.

Once again, they went to the City Council, whose members were happy to interrupt the ongoing debate about the licensing of medical marijuana dispensaries, an issue that Prop 215 had thrown into their laps more than a decade ago. Thanks mostly to the federal government, the issue was more confused than ever. At least we presented something they could understand: unjust taxation. The Same Old People thanked the Council for recognizing them as the real proprietors of the fair, but the corporate raider had exhausted their reserves. Now City departments, also feeling the economic pinch, had imposed new requirements and fees that were driving them out of business.

But the fair and marijuana were not to be separated. One member of the Council, not usually known to harbor such wild ideas, suggested they combine their problems. The town, she pointed out, had four 215 clinics wanting to be licensed. Maybe they would demonstrate their sincere interest in the public welfare by helping out the fair financially. She even offered to phone them. All the Same Olds had to do was write a follow-­‐up letter and send their bag man to pick up the money. Her arm-­‐twisting, not my salesmanship, probably accounted for most of last year’s fund-­‐raising success.

The Entrepreneurial Way

But that was then. Still, it encourages me to go on, and besides, my third stop is just around the corner in the old Ford dealership. And now I know how to get into the place. On my visit last year I tried the showroom doors, found them locked, then the door to the old shop, also locked.

Anybody home? Nothing. Then out in the empty car lot I saw a tiny building about the size of a

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gypsy wagon, with plywood siding and ’50s aluminum windows, where car salesmen must have hung out, smoking and drinking coffee on a thousand twentieth-­‐century afternoons. When I got closer I saw a small sign on the door: The Humboldt Cooperative, with a large T, H, and C. I squeezed into a tiny vestibule where I was greeted by another receptionist, again behind thick glass, with another shelf of goodies. Instead of baked goods, small baggies of bud were labeled with prices and names that tried to convey what the product might do to you. In response to my boo-­‐hoo about money and the fair, she picked up a phone, spoke for a moment, then asked me to wait on the bench. Okay, I said, although I didn’t actually see a bench till I stepped out the door and it appeared, like the little office, out of the time-­‐warp vacancy of the car lot.

So there I was, two blocks from the plaza, sitting on a corner where once the Fairlanes and Rancheros roamed, waiting for my marijuana provider. Maybe I was also invisible, part of the new economy concealed within the shadow of the past. But I didn’t have to wait long. A guy came out of one of the doors I couldn’t get into, sat down on the bench. Tony, he said. He shook my hand firmly, little bits of leaf and bud clinging to his sleeve. I had a vision of grow lights and seven-­‐foot marijuana plants surrounding the old lube rack. When I told him about the generous support of his colleague around the corner, he said sure, he’d match the thousand, plus split the parking fees. Great, I said. But parking fees? Oh yeah. On the weekend of the fair he sold parking spaces. Maybe I had it backward: maybe I was finding the old economy hidden inside the new.

But this year Tony’s clean when he joins me on the bench. And there’s no money, either.

We had to shut down the grow operation, he says. Although he’s licensed to sell medical marijuana, he needs a use permit to grow and process it. The City of Arcata has sensibly decided to treat medical marijuana grows as a land-­‐use and zoning issue—and a promising source of revenue—but they’re afraid to issue a permit because the DEA threatens to prosecute. The planning commission is apologetic, but its members are also feeling the heat.

Adding to the uncertainty, Prop 19 is on the ballot for the November 2010 election and the California weed economy is as shaky as the derivatives market. The proposition would legalize the possession, cultivation, and transportation of marijuana for personal use in California. There are good reasons to dislike the bill, although most voters agree that we need to end the suffering and inequities of marijuana prohibition. Prop 19 would accomplish this by allowing anyone twenty-­‐one or over to possess, process, share, or transport up to an ounce, and to grow up to 25 square feet in a back yard.

But it threatens serious penalties for those under twenty-­‐one, and does little to change the prohibition model of regulation. Buying and selling would be left up to individual counties, like the 215 provision that’s created so much confusion. And of course it would have no effect on federal law, where most of the draconian enforcement is coming from. As if to illustrate that point, DEA agents recently busted the first 215 grow to be licensed under Mendocino County’s new cultivation program, which allowed patients to grow up to twenty-­‐five plants marked by distinctive twist-­‐ties bought from the County Sheriff for $25 each. That was much too effective and sensible for the feds, who remain deeply attached to the criminalization model and all the benefits it provides.

But the talk on the street isn’t about crime and punishment: people are saying if 19 passes the price of marijuana will drop through the floor. Some growers have anticipated this

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and planted larger crops, guaranteeing a surplus that will cause prices to drop even more. In true gold-­‐camp fashion, others are getting additional 215 cards and pooling money to buy more land and supplies, like the young guys I saw at the iCenter. This could be the last year of the rush. Even the rumor of an impending surplus has caused prices to come down, in classic commodity market behavior. And I thought marijuana would always be a weed.

“Tell you what,” Tony says. “I’ll still split the parking.”

The Weed Way

I don’t have much hope for the last place on my rounds. They’re probably the most politically correct of Arcata’s clinics, but it’s because their practice and mission are so exemplary they are having big-­‐time trouble with the feds. Humboldt Medical Supply was the first 215 facility to apply for a license in Humboldt County, and for a while they offered organically grown Train Wreck, Harlequin, Skywalker, Romulan, Pot of Gold, and a dozen other household names, all at $215 an ounce. They provided it free to the elderly and cancer patients.

HMS is also in an abandoned car dealership, just half a block off the plaza. When I found their office last year, the receptionist behind the glass said I needed to talk to the manager, Linda. There was no candy on their shelves. In a few minutes Linda came out from an office behind the receptionist, very welcoming and professional, said she’d received my letter and would love to contribute, but they’d been closed down. After months of paperwork and permits, investing thousands of dollars remodeling this office, they learned that the City wouldn’t give them a license. The Department of Justice was treating Humboldt Medical Supply like a high-­‐level terrorist threat.

Before I approach them again with my begging bowl, I stop at the Mexican restaurant in another part of the same building, where the Chevrolet repair shop used to be. I order a taco and a Bohemia. I should have an expense account.

The war on marijuana is less about preventing drug abuse than ensuring a political, economic, even religious monopoly. No god but ours. In that we trust. If outfits like HMS and towns like Arcata (when they muster the nerve and the votes) provide an effective cooperative model of delivering care, at a better price (all costs considered), then they are an existential threat to the drug-­‐war business, from the DEA to the pharmaceutical corporations who profit from marijuana prohibition. And will profit again when the government’s present monopoly becomes theirs.

Criminalization ensures that weed will be tightly controlled until it can be safely placed in the right hands. It’s entirely possible that weed will go from Prohibition to Pulp Pharm-­‐ijuana, without any official recognition of its real nature. The plant itself will still be illegal, but if you have a scrip, we have the Marinol.

Shortly after voters in Washington agreed to legalize weed in 2012, The Wall Street Journal reported that Portland DEA Administrator Patrick Moen would be leaving the nation’s crusading enforcement arm to work for a Seattle private equity firm. Privateer Holdings

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specializes in marijuana industry investments and need someone like Moen to steer them through the regulatory board game so they land on Collect $500 Million instead of Go To Jail.

Their initial investments are limited to peripheral industries such as Leafly, the marijuana-­‐rating website, and a Washington construction company that builds business parks for growers. But they have grand plans. Moen said he hoped to “bring professionalism and best practices to the marijuana business.”

Meanwhile, the drug war goes on in its own alternate reality. A month after Moen’s leaving the agency, at a Senate hearing on drugs in Afghanistan, DEA Chief of Operations James Capra digressed from the topic to say that decriminalization of weed by states like Washington and Colorado is reckless and irresponsible. “It scares us,” he said, probably more truthful than most of his testimony. “Every part of the world where this has been tried,” he prevaricated, “it has failed time and time again.”

HMS has a permit now, the receptionist says. But there’s still no candy on their shelves.

And Linda isn’t in. I could try again Thursday, but it doesn’t look good. Under a renewed federal threat of prison and fines, they can’t even give weed away. This year it’s because of their location.

In a recent letter, Federal DA Melinda Haag says that it has come to her attention that only one block beyond the plaza—about where Gregg and Wood ate elk brains for Christmas dinner—there is a public playground. The Arcata Ballpark, where the semi-­‐pro Humboldt Crabs beat the crap out of most of the teams they can get to play them, is more than two blocks from Humboldt Medical Supply. But it’s less than the federally mandated 1,500 feet, and the DA has deemed it an existential threat to youth and baseball.

Desperate and contradictory, the bullying tactics nevertheless work. B of A refuses to let the clinic even open a checking account. And to ensure that HMS gets the message, Melinda sent a warning letter to their landlord—and to the landlords of the other clinics. This has the marks of obsessive madness (or the methods of gangsters selling protection), but I think it’s simpler and deeper: a gut-­‐level fear of letting the news get out—that weed actually gives some people relief from pain, including the pain of living in a war zone. In both the long and short term, weed economics is a better way of doing business. But its principal shortcomings are two: it makes the wrong people happy and it doesn’t put money in the right people’s pockets.

Our share of Tony’s parking lot fees came to $270, which turned out to be the grand total of my second fund-­‐raising effort. He was a little apologetic, but I assured him we were used to doing without money—and we appreciated his cooperative spirit. To cover the shortfall we had to raise the price of booths, but the following year we found a less expensive insurance plan and passed on the savings. I didn’t have to make my begging tour again. Of the four clinics, Humboldt Patient Resource’s medical model survives and continues to flourish. And by its fortieth anniversary the North Country Fair and the price of a booth were back to what they’d been.

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10. OCCUPY MONEY

One summer afternoon, in the garden shop on the corner of the plaza, I was asking about some animal masks displayed on the walls above the ergonomic shovels and cement Buddhas. A wolf, a raven, a fox, an owl, about a dozen wildly painted constructions of cardboard and glue.

Maybe the artist would do a workshop, I thought. They’d be perfect for the fair.

Since the late ’70s, inspired by traveling environmental pioneers Ponderosa Pine and Olive Tree, the North Country Fair had featured an All-­‐Species Parade. And since its beginning the fair had promoted recycling, and was now aiming to become a zero-­‐waste public event. It was a perfect fit: we had the cardboard connection, and we knew there were people out there who thought they were animals. For forty years we’d been trying to connect commerce with the rest of creation.

I wrote down the mask-­‐maker’s name, thanked the clerk, and started toward the door just as this old hippie walked past carrying a large paper bag. At the same moment he looked into the garden shop and we both stopped abruptly. I went out to the sidewalk and we embraced. “Acorn!” I said. It had been ten years. “Hi,” he said. “Want some pot?” A resinous cloud swallowed the street corner as he opened the grocery bag. It was half full of trimmed bud. “Unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve been trying to give it away.” One guy thought he was a narc. Another said, “I’m so over pot.” The third, the woman in the paraphernalia shop, screamed at him to get out. “This town’s going to hell,” I assured him.

“It’s good stuff,” he said. He didn’t have to convince me. From our long acquaintance I knew it was the flowering of decades of research and hybrid cultivation. But it wasn’t his very best, he said, so he couldn’t really sell it. He talked about varietal quality and customer expectations. I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation.

“We should go over to the plaza,” I said. Now that the town is run by liberals, the plaza is a constant skirmish between police and “transients” (some of them long-­‐term) over dogs, tobacco, skateboards, and a litany of “lifestyle offenses.” The old chief of police would have approved—you get the same degree of control, but in a First Amendment-­‐friendly format. To judge by the signs, everything but marijuana is prohibited.

We sat on a bench across from the liquor store, the shopping bag between us. “I’m writing about money again,” I said. Since the ’07 crash I’d been doing an occasional column for Econews. It sounded like I was confessing to a crime.

Money doesn’t have value, it expresses our values. It can take almost any form.

In Crescent City in the 1930s clam shells were used as laundry tickets, which then began to circulate as coinage. It’s whatever we put our faith in.

The trouble is, we blindly put our faith into bad money, and when economic disaster ensues we act like it was something we have no control over, like love or the weather or a crazy god. In the 1920s, in order to pay huge reparations for WW I, Germany simply printed millions more Deutschmarks. Soon its citizens were pushing

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wheelbarrows full of money to the bakery to buy bread. No one questioned the worthless bills or the bad decision they represented. Instead they asked, How did bread get so expensive? It’s the Jews, someone said.

In 2008, when auditors noticed that Iceland’s borrowing had far exceeded its actual wealth, the krona collapsed and the country went into default. Many people were relieved. Now they could go back to being a little nation of volcanoes and fishing villages and rock stars. Icelanders needed a bailout of IMF dollars, but mostly they needed something real to put their faith in. When money is at odds with the facts—say the condition of the Atlantic cod fishery—then that money is no longer creditworthy.

People don’t know what to believe in. They experience desperation. Depression. The cure? Instead of bailing out the banks, Iceland let them collapse. They put some bankers in jail. Their economy is now recovering.

Ecology is nature’s economy. Its bookkeeping tells us everything is connected, everything gets paid for. It’s not a coincidence that drought and soil loss—the Dust Bowl—accompanied the Great Depression. Or that this Not So Great Depression, in its scale, depth, and duration, will be a fit companion to global climate disruption.

We need a deeper, greener money.

My economic sermon hadn’t changed much. For forty years it had been like carrying a candle through a vast dim underworld of debt. Even the near collapse of the global economy was quickly smothered in the deeper darkness of obfuscation and denial. But on September 17, 2011, Occupy Wall Street cut through the delusion like a blazing beacon. Despite its brevity and its obvious failings, the movement that spread from Zuccotti Park shed a new light on capitalism and its workings. It demonstrated that we are governed not by laws, but money.

For a moment the global mind could see it: after decades of defying the obvious logic of nature, pulp civilization was on the verge of disaster. Trillions of dollars of debt had been based on the fiction that the planet’s ecology would not seriously affect business. That doctored balances and managed inequalities could be achieved indefinitely by police and wars and a little restoration work.

The homeless people and activists who camped on our courthouse lawn for half a year brought the spectacle of runaway capital out in public, downtown Eureka, where anyone could see it. Global Carbon was leaving the Earth, withdrawing into more highly refined concentrations of power and remote control, while down here on the ground our logged-­‐over watersheds were being developed into pot plantations and billionaire estates and those who didn’t fit the program—certain species of animal, particular classes of people—were being tagged and managed and kept out of the news.

Eureka police and merchants were outraged that the damaged and indigent had escaped the dark corners where they preferred to keep them. Angry property owners, who came to the courthouse to make a show of paying their taxes, had the opportunity to consider that their taxes might actually be too low. The ragged array of tents and signs and behavior problems clearly demonstrated that funds were not being spent where they were most desperately needed. It made Eureka look like the third-­‐world resource colony it has always been.

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But the smoke that found its way into the courthouse ventilation system, and through the offices of the District Attorney and the Tax Assessor, brought another lesson of Occupy.

Unacknowledged, addressed publicly only by new prohibitions and denial, there was another occupation taking place right under their noses. In the years since Acorn and I had seen each other, marijuana had also participated in the orgy of unregulated growth—or more accurately, growth regulated by laws that are not enforced. Humboldt Weed was now a billion-­‐dollar industry—1.4 bil, according to one banker—threatened by its own prosperity and by betrayals of both law and principle, including the violence that had claimed Acorn’s son a decade ago.

Increased prohibition had only made the problem worse. Or better. As prices rose, weed’s economic power brought it a new respectability, both in the halls of government and the public’s awareness. Marijuana was the new redwood, the new gold.

In the next election, Humboldt growers formed an unholy alliance with our local property rights group and helped elect a four-­‐fifths majority of County Supervisors tolerant of marijuana and sympathetic to the growers’ interests, but also friendly to developers. They promptly rolled back decades of planning and land-­‐use regulation. While expressing sympathy for the propertyless who camped on their lawn during Occupy, the new supervisors had little regard for their human and civil rights. In this conflict between rural and suburban interests, pitting growers against environmentalists, aside from our bench on the plaza and the paper bag between us, I wondered how much Acorn and I still had in common.

Other things had changed, too. Relationships. Homes. Jobs. I’d backslid from carpentry into part-­‐time teaching, the most extended above-­‐the-­‐table employment of my life. I had health benefits, was married to a woman I’d worked carpentry with, and we’d sold the house in the dunes and bought a house across the bay. Inland, a quarter mile past the tsunami sign, a ninety-­‐year-­‐old Craftsman in a little rural neighborhood, no place to grow weed, but warm enough for tomatoes and fruit trees and roses. Thanks to the inflated housing market and twenty years of improvements, we sold the old place for ten times what I’d paid for it, more than enough to buy the new one. For two aging hippies, the whole transaction was off the scale of our economic reality. The property tax alone would have exceeded my annual income, except for a little-­‐known law that lets seniors take their old tax rate when they move to a cheaper house. Even subsisting on the crumbs of the carbon economy, we find ourselves richer than most of the world’s people.

Yet things are not as secure as they appear. The house is at the forested edge of a coastal valley, overlooking green pasture land with the bay’s largest tributary meandering through it, but the bucolic landscape conceals a river full of silt and a long history of unregulated capital. Elk River was the last and hardest hit of several watersheds clear-­‐cut by Charles Hurwitz, and the struggle to save its remnant forest was the climax of years of environmental activism. The protests that began with Redwood Summer had grown to meet the magnitude of the damage until one demonstration in the mid-­‐’90s brought 6,000 protesters to the gates of Pacific Lumber—now rebranded PalCo—where a thousand people were arrested.

It made the national news. A banner was hung from the Golden Gate Bridge: Hurwitz: Aren’t Redwoods More Precious Than Gold? Tree-­‐sits and “actions” in the woods, lock-­‐downs and human blockades became commonplace, and the violence of the response also escalated.

In the decade that followed the unsolved bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, extra-­‐legal

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punishment and torture became commonplace, including beatings, “compliance holds,” and pepper spray applied to faces and eyes. In 1998 a young demonstrator, David Chain, was crushed by a redwood felled in his direction. The price paid by PalCo, settled out of court, was to leave the tree where it lay and build a roadside memorial. Despite the damage to life and property, it was clear that big timber was above the law. No one would be punished, nothing paid for. When our County DA dared to sue PL, he faced a well-­‐financed recall campaign and only narrowly saved his job. David Chain’s memorial was immediately vandalized.

But by the late ’90s massive landslides and flooding could no longer be ignored, and a moratorium was imposed on PalCo’s logging. For several years Charles Hurwitz struggled to make his balloon payments, and water quality actually improved. But state and federal regulators eventually gave in, approving a flawed Habitat Conservation Plan that allowed clear-­‐ cutting to resume. The much-­‐advertised Headwaters Deal set aside 7,400 acres on Elk River’s South Fork, some of it old growth, out of the 60,000 acres of reserve that ecologists had recommended. In return taxpayers gave him $480 million, half what he’d paid for all of Pacific Lumber and its holdings, plus a fat bonus of 700 acres of redwoods formerly owned by Elk River Timber—the infamous Hole in the Headwaters.

Environmentalists had won some important concessions, but government agencies eventually gave most of them back. Fines were assessed but never paid, and the Deal did little to repair or compensate for the real damage. A few million more dollars were tossed into a fund that was supposed to encourage job creation and retrain workers, but it failed to acknowledge the ruin of watersheds and lost salmon runs, the social indebtedness, the lost ties and obligations of community. Instead, the debt was laid to the enviros and government interference, and even more bitterness and resentment fed the toxic air. Residents were left to deal with a legacy of mud and flooding. Only a lawsuit, settled out of court, repaired some water systems and bought a lifetime of trucked-­‐in water for others. Hurwitz was still logging when PalCo declared bankruptcy. That was the summer we moved in. Day after day, a redwood forest rolling past our front door.

“We need to talk about marijuana,” I told Acorn. Sitting on the plaza with half a pound of bud between us, and all I could talk about was silt. At least I had the good sense to take the bag home, thus sparing the town’s reputation. We parted with a promise that we’d soon talk again. Maybe in Mexico, where he spent his winters now. I had a lot of questions.

It’s impossible to untangle one economy from another. To say where one has been occupied by another. Gold remains a mainstay of the pulp economy and continues to attract a quasi-­‐ religious following even when it’s mostly about dollars. Calling themselves New 49ers, their dredges sucking up spawning gravel and young salmon, “recreational miners” have to be forcibly removed from rivers. Ads for soil amendments portray not a pot farmer but a prospector looking for gold, proclaiming Strike It Rich! The currency changes, but the rush goes on.

When Alexander Brizard developed the Native basket trade, the influx of new money changed household relationships as well as income levels—but the story didn’t end there.

While the art mart moved on to other cultures, the Vanishing American stubbornly persisted.

Despite a century of hardship, Native weavers emerged as a strong and independent political

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force. The Native California Basket Weavers Association joined herbalists and environmentalists—even miners—to successfully challenge Forest Service spraying of herbicides. In recent decades the old basket-­‐weaving traditions have been revived in much the way languages are being recovered. But at the same time the carbon economy’s overtly destructive practices were being challenged by this cultural renewal, it began to place a higher value on the baskets as art. And the part of the basket that is a living being, like a redwood canoe or a money shell, sometimes got left out of the transaction.

In 2012 the Yurok Tribe’s Forestry Director was charged with embezzling nearly a million dollars in federal funds through phony invoices and kickbacks. His accomplices billed for owl surveys and consulting, then wrote him checks for most of the amount. He carefully laid it all out in an email that ended up in the Eureka Times Standard. “If anyone asks,” he said, “say you’re buying baskets.”

Just remember that you are buying a lot of Native baskets from me that are valued according to market value for works of art that go very, very high on the open market. I have much more than $100,000 worth of them.

Despite outward changes, we are still in Alexander Brizard’s emporium on the Arcata plaza.

Whatever you need, we’ve got it for sale. Forests? Baskets? Art? Maybe some Homegrown?

At the same time the weed economy struggles to resist libertarian gold-­‐rush politics, the forces of prohibition also push it toward a homogenous pulp commodity, like pork bellies or manganese. Check your daily quotation, regularly provided by the drug police. What we used to call a lid has become a one-­‐ounce treasury certificate, the equivalent of so many board feet of redwood or that many pounds of salmon. Where life is a medium of exchange and the losses aren’t counted, anything can be a “resource.” Commodity marijuana erodes community and self-­‐sufficiency and will create the same boom-­‐and-­‐bust economy that has characterized this region’s false prosperity for a century and a half.

When the growers and trimmers and dealers are put out of business by Bayer and R.J. Reynolds, they will join the laid-­‐off fishermen and woodworkers in the final stage of carbon economics: the human service worker.

The two-­‐day drive to Long Beach leaves me in a deep hydrocarbon haze. While my niece cooks dinner I hang out with her husband on the living room couch, smoke his weed and stare at the big-­‐screen TV. We talk sports, the weather, the traffic on the freeways—anything but her health. A few years ago she got a late diagnosis of multiple myeloma, not discovered till her vertebrae were breaking up. By killing the destructive blood cells in her bone marrow with radiation and chemicals, then replacing them with healthy ones, the doctors hope for remission. A bone marrow transplant.

BMT, she calls it. Sounds like a sandwich, I say. Her sense of humor is miraculously intact, but there’s nothing funny about the treatment. She’s been through it twice now and told me last winter that she wouldn’t do it again. I completely understood. But now she’s doing it, I guess mostly for her family. She’s as sweet as ever, and I’m awed by her courage. A tough cookie, like they used to say.

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He shows me on his phone an app that gives the location of every So Cal 215 clinic— more than a thousand in LA alone, where it’s considered out of control. Wow. Almost like corner liquor stores. We compare his 215 weed with the stuff I brought, some of the bud Acorn gave me. I’d forgotten to ask what it’s called. Free Weed, maybe. I keep it in a little Celestial Seasonings tea tin. His comes in a yellow plastic bottle with a label. Rx: Sativa. Diablo OG. 36 Grams. And easy-­‐to-­‐follow instructions: Do not drive or operate heavy equipment.

What’s OG, I ask him. A minute later I can’t remember his answer.

The other thing is, I’m not sure which of them has the scrip. Could be both. He works long hours trying to keep up with her illness, the medical bills, the house being repo’d. A few years ago he lost his manager’s job at a Trader Joe’s, smoking weed on the loading dock. I don’t see how anyone could work or even live down here without it. Or some inferior chemical substitute.

She’s a graphic designer, but work has been scarce. It gets farmed out to “independent contractors,” which means no job security, no health benefits. They take good care of themselves, lead ordinary suburban lives, drink a moderate amount, don’t use tobacco. She’s smoked weed as long as she’s been an adult, a couple of decades now. They used to be Deadheads, went to every concert they could. Now she’s on a bunch of meds, some for pain, with weird side effects. When I ask if the marijuana helps she says, O yeah. It’s the medicine she takes to be able to take the medicine.

It turns out the 215 card is his. She won’t have one, she says. Doesn’t want it on her record. Jobs and credit are difficult enough. They could lose everything. She’s not worried about herself—she won’t live to see the end of this book. But the cancer, the chemicals, the underwater home, the government holding you down while the bankers suck your blood— sweet brave soul, she’s fighting a war that’s being waged against us all.

The rooster outside my window has been crowing for a couple of hours. Morning light is just appearing through the jungle canopy. At the kitchen table with a cup of black tea I scroll through yesterday’s work, hand-­‐scribbled pages translated into neat electronic bits. I pause to make a change, write myself a note, revise something else back to what it was. I look over today’s barely legible pages, make a kind of work plan, set them aside. While I finish my tea I watch the sky grow light, take a moment for a puff of kief.

Another rooster is crowing now, in another yard. Voices in Spanish coming from a neighbor’s house. Later, after potatoes and chorizo and eggs, I’ll take the laptop outdoors. By the time the sun comes into the patio maybe I’ll have a couple of pages done. Acorn will come from the house with coffee and we’ll resume our conversation.

Weed was the expression of an improvised agrarian economy by people who chose live-­‐in exile as a way to resist the violence of pulp economics. Unfamiliar with the territory but with a doctrinal commitment to place, they moved into the backcountry and small towns of northern California, living by principles that got tested on a regular basis. They had a lot had to learn, but they were prepared to invent what they couldn’t discover. Many had worked with the anti-­‐war, anti-­‐nuke, or liberation movements, but their first local organizing came directly from their homes.

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United Stand said that owner-­‐built houses—many of them improvisational, some highly innovative—were not a commodity. Neither were they a “nuisance,” as declared by the County building inspector. The Uniform Building Code, like the drug wars, is an economic enforcement tool disguised as a concern for public safety. And lenders, in those quaint days, actually did want to know if your house was worth mortgaging. Never mind that you didn’t want a mortgage—without that stamp of approval you couldn’t live in it. Officials with red tags, sometimes accompanied by armed sheriff’s deputies, provided an early glimpse of what CAMP would be like. Of course there was some dubious construction by inexperienced carpenters, but everyone knew that wasn’t the issue.

After protests and many public meetings, the hill people of Humboldt and other rural counties succeeded in adding owner-­‐built home chapters to their local codes, achieving a shaky truce only occasionally broken by a zealous sheriff or public official. A good friend who became a Humboldt County building inspector regarded the job as a public service. He would visit Class K building sites, smoke a doob with the owner, and give practical advice. The conversation was about more than building practices. As the new settlers learned to frame a wall or support a beam, they were also defining themselves in deeper ways than houses and clothing or the lack of it. They were getting to know where they lived: their mountain, their river, their creek.

The attachment to cycles and seasons was at first self-­‐conscious, an imitation of the fishing, hunting, and gathering cultures—the shell economy—that had inhabited these watersheds for many generations. But what they lacked in history the new settlers made up with cultural and political innovation, and the result was a genuine attachment to place and deeply held social values. Their stewardship and care for land and community were expressed by bioregional groups like the Mattole Restoration Council, now a planetary model for reconnecting to place. At the same time, out of sight, grew the plant that represented those values—first in spirit, then as money. Then the money entangled them in things they thought they’d left behind.

“It’s always been about resistance,” Acorn says.

The tropical morning is warm, we’re sitting at the patio table sipping coffee, our talk moving back and forth between forestry and weed. I agree, without any question, that the Northwest timber wars are inseparable from the war on marijuana, and that weed economics grew from the same roots of resistance as the environmental movement. Their kinship is materially acknowledged by bags of cash—the bank of the woods, Acorn calls it—but also spiritually, by adherence to the values that originally gave rise to the back-­‐to-­‐the-­‐land movement. The things that brought us here. The real beginnings of Occupy Humboldt.

Forty years ago, even before the building-­‐code wars, Acorn and his family found out about a proposed land swap near their new homestead that would turn nearby public land into recreational estates. “We made them do the county’s first EIR,” he says. A study would have taken two years, and the developers couldn’t wait. It saved the neighborhood. Some important environmental laws had recently been enacted, but few people had figured out how to make sure they were enforced. Over the years, besides monitoring and appealing dozens of timber harvest plans, Acorn worked to preserve small mills, promote a local hardwood market, and

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build a forestry model along the principles of the weed economy: harvest on a sustainable scale, with price, production, and labor practices in balance with land and community. It was a radical model for this region. The experiment met with strong resistance and suffered major losses, but a market for local hardwood persists.

Our conversation reminds me that we began with an anti-­‐money economics, based on spiritual and political principles. Naive as we were, the leaf (not the bud) was its emblem. Like the peace sign, the clenched fist, the no-­‐nukes symbol, it was an emblem of that resistance. But then the plant flowered and became a way to support rural homesteads and an environmental movement. It became our money. Working for bud was a regular arrangement. The trouble came when we exchanged it for carbon notes. The pulp economy has known for a long time how to occupy other economies. It uses force, always, but as countless cultures have discovered too late, it then happens one transaction at a time.

Both of us have experienced the push and pull of living in two economies. Acorn tells me how he got caught in the argument between Mendocino Redwood Company and the fiercely anti-­‐logging Albion Nation. “I just praised some of MRC’s forest practices,” he says. I sympathize. The same thing recently happened to me, with the same forest manager, only now he’s with Humboldt Redwood. Both companies are owned by the same billionaire San Francisco family with deep connections to the governor, whose appointees to our regional water quality board have been studying the destruction of Elk River for eighteen years without significant action. “All I said was, the guy’s a good forest manager.” Unfortunately, he had to produce more board feet than the watershed could withstand.

Photos of Elk River from the late 1800s show enormous stumps, bare earth, a river of mud and a sky smoky with burning slash—and that was only the beginning. Within the last two decades my upstream neighbors have seen PalCo haul away another few thousand years of history, with that many years of resulting erosion. The watershed and its residents are still bleeding. No wonder they say I’m too friendly with the forest manager. At least he talks to us, I argue. They point out that smooth words like “sustainable harvest,” after decades of industrial destruction, still mean disaster. And why should they trust me? Other environmentalist allies have gone on to more glamorous and winnable issues.

Weed, for example. Now the enviros are after the Charles Hurwitzes of hemp who bulldoze trees and mountaintops, burn and spill diesel fuel, poison wildlife, and suck up precious streams and tributaries. There are many hundreds of them, and no question they should be stopped. The managed deterioration of Elk River, though, is a more complicated issue. Environmental groups and public agencies, while seriously understaffed and underfunded, still oppose bad timber harvest plans and clear-­‐cutting. But the New Forestry— regulated, certified, green-­‐washed—is a much more difficult adversary than Hurwitz. For anything less than total clear-­‐cuts, the corporate loggers are actually rewarded with real carbon notes (in the form of credits). The enviros also have a hard time with angry residents. They’re like traumatized war survivors, but unlike endangered owls and fish they won’t wait quietly for a study to determine if they should be listed. And the social justice groups are just as reluctant to cross the boundary between people and the environment. This fatal separation keeps our accounts in two sets of books.

I tell Acorn about the Hoopa tribe’s forest manager, the guy who skimmed environmental grants using Indian baskets to cover his crime. Turns out he wasn’t the only

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nature professional involved in the scam. He wrote checks to a local bird biologist, who billed him for counting Northern spotted owls, kept a percentage (the “admin,” life-­‐blood of the grant world), then kicked back the balance to the manager—“for baskets,” if anyone asked. There were other perks for the environment: “Bonuses to your staff are on again this year,” he wrote in another email. “Set up a nice little R&R outing for your staff, and I will pay via invoice.” The biologist’s lawyer said his client thought the money was for youth groups. That same biologist once chaired a committee I was on, which struggled for years to reach its decisions. He had difficulty taking firm positions.

Forests? Baskets? Did anyone ever count the owls?

Growers, enviros, tribes, all need to occupy money—to keep more open books, and to remember that the pulp economy lives on hidden costs. A recurring question in my morning conversations with Acorn is whether legalization of weed will bring more honest accounting.

Recent experience hasn’t been encouraging. During the rush of the ’80s it was already clear that weed and its environmental base were parting ways. When 215 made marijuana quasi-­‐ legal, the old land ethic was simply overwhelmed. Leaving the rule-­‐making to county governments ensured decentralization but left regulation in a gray area that accommodated greed and ambition. Proposition 19, promising to resolve many of the problems created by prohibition, lost badly at the two ends of supply and demand—both Humboldt County and LA voted it down.

“We didn’t kill it,” Acorn says. The growers are still being blamed for its defeat. “There aren’t that many of us.” I agree that 19 lost for good reasons: it had serious flaws, and voters were better informed than on most ballot issues. I voted against it because it criminalized young people. Obviously pot isn’t for everybody—nothing is. It can make adolescence (including late-­‐life adolescence) even more confusing. But that calls for better education, more counselors instead of cops in the schools. If we have to have age limits at all, I say let’s reserve weed for people over sixty. God knows, we’re the ones who need it.

11. CANNABIS AND THE COMMONS

Out on the cobbled street an old pickup truck loaded with vegetables and fruit is driving slowly through the neighborhood. A loudspeaker on the cab announces today’s offerings: Jicama.

Lechuga. Zanahorias. Tomates. The street dogs are barking. Somewhere nearby children are singing a musical game.

By the time we’ve finished our coffee, Acorn and I are both dialed in for the day. On the night of my arrival, after a tour of the casita, he handed me a small pipe. “Comes with the room.” In the bowl was a fat black pearl of sinsemilla flower-­‐dust, melted to tar in the tropic heat. “It’s not a full-­‐lobotomy stone,” he said. “More of a social and convivial high.”

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One puff gets me through a morning of writing and conversation.

“Just don’t smoke around the locals,” he said.

The housekeeper is sweeping at the other end of the patio.

Acorn gave me a tour of the village the day after I arrived: a few hundred households of Mexicans and expatriates, a small downtown of shops and cafes with an international mix of visitors coming and going. It’s a living model of weed economics, without much evidence of weed itself. I know it’s around. On our walk I saw the world’s oldest living vato, all the way from ‘60s East LA, leaning against a palm tree down by the beach. But its use is controlled by custom more than law, in contrast to the high-­‐stakes drug war that’s tearing apart Mexico and Latin America. The local economy, traditionally based on fishing, now adds gringo expats and ecotourism to its small outside income. A mango industry flourished briefly but succumbed to the village’s remote location.

Besides gift shops and several food markets, the few blocks of the main street are mostly cafes and restaurants, as if half the population lives by feeding the other half. This might not be literally true, but even a visitor can feel the intimate give and take of community—a spirit of openness that’s not just generosity but the absence of anxiety and fear. It’s apparent even in the way the locals drive, with little regard for what we consider a margin of safety. The tropical air is a little heavy, but it’s unburdened by the gringo’s unrelenting terror of risk exposure. It feels like a huge weight has been lifted.

One evening we walk the few blocks downtown, where old mango packing sheds have been converted to a community center. During the 1930s all the land around the village was declared an ejido and restored to communal ownership, but the town also owes its collective well-­‐being to a Mexican president who built a vacation home nearby and became the village’s patron. Support for the cooperative diminished when he left office amid the usual scandals, but a hospital, a water system, and cobbled streets still provide the infrastructure of communal life.

The usual activities are available for expats and tourists—shops and galleries, yoga classes, jungle tours, and plenty of restaurants—but the community center houses the crucial elements of local self-­‐reliance: schooling for young and old, a library, an art collective, a recycling program, small manufacturing, several volunteer organizations, and environmental groups devoted to the protection of species like the jaguar and sea turtle.

We’re a little early for a lecture about local birds. While waiting for the talk to begin I browse the library’s shelves, as eclectic as the community and like everything in the old building impeccably well-­‐ordered. Acorn introduces me to the young woman who is the center’s principal organizer. She is bright and capable, engaged with the people around her. I assume she’s a local but it turns out she’s organized similar communities in Europe. The birder turns out to be from southern Oregon, at the northern end of the flyway. After his talk, like migratory birds finding one another, we compare plover populations, our familiar habitat and this one. A lot like home, we agree. Only warmer, with a lot more life and color.

Acorn is part of this mix. Not the stereotype of a vacationing dope farmer, he’s an avid student of the territory fluent in Spanish and in touch with the locals as well as the expatriates.

He’s always been my idea of a good planetary citizen, traveling comfortably across several continents, supporting himself over the years as a carpenter, travel agent, environmental

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investigator, wilderness advocate, and—threaded through all of them—community organizer.

For fifteen years he didn’t grow marijuana at all.

Acorn has written about breeding, cultivating, and selling weed, but his stories are most deeply about nourishing the weed of community. They should be published and their lessons acknowledged. For its participants, one of the effects of the drug wars has been self-­‐censorship, especially the news that’s hardest to report. His evaluations of the weed-­‐growing culture are vital intelligence from the field, delivered straight:

As important as children have been in the eyes and hearts of this community, and considering how much energy has been expended in their behalf, in many ways we have failed them. We imposed a clandestine economy upon them, saddling them with the burden of secrecy and requiring of them a kind of fundamental dishonesty in how they represent themselves to the outside world. We failed our children by not creating a more broad-­‐based economy in which they could participate if they chose to stay, or left to learn a profession and wanted to return. And in some ways, they failed us, those that stayed, by not supporting the institutions we had built.

Or is the fact that we lost so many children the biggest indictment of all?

Acorn also showed me some negative reports from outside, including a five-­‐year-­‐old New Yorker life-­‐style piece that portrays the new settlers as just another wave of American idealists who sold out. “Dr. Kush” now seems dated and jaundiced, as if the self-­‐appointed custodians of finance and culture couldn’t handle the fact that a remote province had exported not only a highly profitable weed but a set of values that were changing dominant social forms.

But cultural opinion like this has to be given its due. There’s truth in the story, and it forces us to separate the false critiques from the ones we need to hear.

“To say that these failings are because money corrupted us is far too simplistic,” Acorn continues, and I know I have to heed that warning. The weed culture, he says, has lost its revolutionary zeal, instead prefers its middle-­‐aged comforts and complacencies and the addictions of the dominant culture. But he also enumerates ways in which weed and the hippies have been extremely successful—the kids who do well, both at home and out in the world; the technological innovations of solar power and low-­‐impact rural living; and especially the development of new environmental and restoration skills, both on the ground and in the halls of government.

But lest I start thinking that marijuana is the new shell money, my speculations wandering from the facts, he tells me again how important accuracy is at the present time.

“Lives are at stake,” he reminds me. Things we’ve put our own lives into.

One afternoon toward the end of my week in Mexico, Acorn drags me away from the keyboard and takes me with him to a local collective farm where he’s going for vegetables. For a subscription they get a weekly supply of whatever’s ready for harvest. Farm-­‐shares. We have those at home, I say. But the walk to the farm reminds me of home in other ways.

Our cobbled street turns down the hill into another street, which quickly becomes a dirt path into the jungle. Then, after a quarter mile or so, the path widens into a newly cleared road.

On one side, instead of vegetation there’s a chain-­‐link fence, and behind it, stretching into the

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distance, the well-­‐trimmed greens of a golf course. Acorn says it’s part of a recently built hotel and tourism center, financed by a resident gringo developer. Officially, his Mexican wife probably owns it. Farther along, where the road opens up into cleared fields, a construction crew is sinking fence posts, pouring concrete, erecting bleachers. It’s a big production. A polo field, he says. People say it’s drug money.

The invasion of wealth takes me back to the lessons of Occupy: from Zuccotti Park to the Humboldt County courthouse, we saw a live demonstration of who owns what, and what they’ll do to hold onto it. In many small ways, that demonstration continues. Some of its participants became volunteers for environmental and social justice groups or began to work on innovative trading systems, virtual currencies, food conspiracies, garden clubs, transition towns, and mutual aid societies—carrying forward the slow and difficult work of building a weed economy.

But in the following election, long after the demonstrators were gone and the wealthy and the homeless had gone back to the wherever they hide from the middle class, a well-­‐ funded campaign reversed decades of progressive planning and conservation efforts in Humboldt County. The ensuing divide between environmentalists and the growers who supported Citizens for Property Rights had only widened since Acorn and I talked about it on the plaza. But I have to admit, for residents of Elk River the property rights argument has been the only thing that’s brought tangible relief. People’s taxes got reduced by fifteen percent, not because of flood damage to their homes and water systems and orchards—which no public agency wants to admit—but because residents sometimes couldn’t get to them. Still, it’s a more real result than we’ve achieved in years of working with liberal environmental regulators.

Acorn and I come down on both sides of this land-­‐use conflict.

The garden is just a short walk down the dusty road from the polo ground, behind a wire fence at the edge of the jungle. Acorn introduces me to the young woman who oversees the garden while she’s filling his bag with vegetables. I tell her in English where I’m from, how cold and dry it’s been. Like the organizer at the community center, she’s worked to create farms like this elsewhere, in other villages. Like Acorn, these young women are planetary citizen-­‐ organizers, with some basic issues in common. The garden versus the polo field, the community center versus the luxury hotel—more clearly than at home I can see they are acts of resistance to the invasion of the global pulp dollar. She and Acorn talk in Spanish about local goings-­‐on, money and land-­‐use laws, while I wander the patches and garden rows, admiring basil and new lettuce and carrots, trying to remember that it’s January. A long way from home, thinking about our own beginnings, remembering other gardens.

On my last morning in Mexico our talk comes back to legalization and what effects it will have on the weed economy. Washington, Colorado, Uruguay, and now Oregon and Alaska all have undertaken flawed experiments, with maybe the South Americans having the best chance of creating real change. Proposed by President Jose Mujica, narrowly approved by a conservative Senate, the legalization experiment in Uruguay is urgently motivated by the US-­‐supported drug wars raging all around them. The new law will establish and maintain an open market, subject to a tax, with prices kept low enough to make it unprofitable for large-­‐scale traffickers. It legalizes the plant from seed to smoke, allowing home cultivation of up to six plants per person per year.

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Distributed through the Public Health Department, pharmacies can sell to any Uruguayan resident eighteen and over (registration in a database is required) up to 40 grams (1.4 ounces) per month, the price currently set at a low one dollar per gram. The law provides for “smoking clubs” of fifteen to forty-­‐five members who can collectively grow up to ninety-­‐ nine plants annually. The collectives must use cloned plants supplied by six government-­‐ approved growers. The law prohibits advertising, makes it illegal to drive under the influence, and establishes a control board to work out the monitoring and regulatory details as the law comes into effect. Acorn and I speculate what such a law might mean here in Mexico, where it’s even more desperately needed.

Of course it’s Los Estados Unidos that most need to change. There’s a sense of disbelief that after decades of repression and denial, public views of marijuana prohibition are opening up. Oregon, Washington, and Colorado are struggling with the details of licenses, local control, home cultivation, tax rates, DUI’s and medicine. Soon half a dozen states will have some sort of marijuana decriminalization, and another dozen are presently considering legalizing it. Eleven more are looking at medical marijuana programs, and three states are considering licensing industrial hemp. Even drug-­‐sniffing dogs are being retrained.

It’s not clear that any of this will lead to essential change. As long as “drug enforcement” is wedded to the old capitalist knot of prohibition and profit, all these new laws will suppress the market for some, then put it in the hands of others, probably their corporate sponsors. So we could end up with low prices in a mass market—this Bud’s for you—and a high-­‐priced product for those who have the juice and the scrip. Or it might be like the wine market, which provides everything from Thunderbird to fancy varietals, cultivated by all kinds of interests, from mega-­‐corporation to monastery, all of it taxed at twenty cents a gallon. But the habit of policing for profit will be hard to break. Washington state, for example, wants to make a bundle of money and is actually increasing the penalties for anyone trying to do business on their own.

In effect, the state is becoming another DEA and a drug cartel. Acorn says he’s thinking it’s time to change professions again.

Later that morning, after we’ve finished our coffee and the sun is warming up the patio, another early Humboldt pioneer joins our conversation. Robin and I have never met, but in minutes we’re time-­‐traveling back almost half a century, to the Briceland Cafe and Truck Stop, a quasi-­‐legendary venture that took the concept of Free even deeper than the Diggers. It was a natural progression, much like the Diggers who occupied Surrey Hill in 1649 went beneath the Levelers, who were themselves being supplanted by the True Levelers. The idea has always been to bring economics back to earth.

“The Diggers hated us,” says Robin. “We went too far.” He says this with evident pride.

It was a miracle the Truck Stop lasted as long as it did. “The whole operation worked out of the money jar,” he explains. “The Free Bank. Everyone put in whatever they could, took out what they needed.” Not too surprising, the jar was often empty. But then they made a new rule.

Deposits and withdrawals had to be written down, so everybody knew where the money came from and where it went. After that the Free Bank worked just fine. The proof of the Truck Stop’s radical success, he says, is that it was burned to the ground.

The story is not just ancient history. The spirit of that experiment lives on in hundreds of economic ventures undertaken by a new generation, revived now and then by conversations

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like this. Mostly now we hear it at funerals. Robin describes a recent send-­‐off in Briceland: more than three hundred people led by bikers and a brass band solemnly promenading the quarter mile to the cemetery. The deceased rolling along in an open coffin filled with bud.

Whether the weed economy continues to thrive, and whatever form it takes, will depend on a new generation and whether they choose to adhere to weed’s original valuations, to stay faithful to its hard-­‐won platitude: What Goes Around Comes Around. In spite of repression, despite dreadful loss and greed and rip-­‐offs, growers and workers and dealers have kept a very complex market reasonably stable and honest, and quality indisputably high—which is more than can be said of Wall Street, for example. But we’ll want to set the measure higher than that, and support the young farmers and organizers and providers who are struggling to do the right thing.

Whatever economy is next will be an outgrowth of this region’s history, of all its numberless transactions. Again: an economy does not just end where another begins, nor does a new one have fixed limits and boundaries. Each borrows or begs from the others as it negotiates with history and place. Telling the story of money, we recover some of what’s forgotten and maybe understand the possible currency of each: the ecological and spiritual balance of shell money, the power of gold to represent both the one and the many, the ability of paper and electronic coin to transcend borders and facilitate planet literacy—and weed to bind it all together.

A model of a post-­‐prohibition weed economy is threaded through my talks with Acorn, but we’re not writing a prescription. Maybe the regulation of weed will change the way we regulate other things, like money and natural resources. It’s easy to agree that the marijuana economy should be small-­‐scale, local, transparent, and fair, but there are huge cultural investments in the old ways of profit—the ingrained customs of “sin tax” that push our transactions into “dark” money, not accountable to anyone living. We live in a plutocracy, governed by Pluton, also known as Hades, god of the underworld. Climate change is only one symptom of his rule, and in the darkness no one can see where he’s taking us.

The vital question is whether weed will benefit and nourish community, including the community of nature that has been left out of our accounting. This also depends on the answer to the prior question: can it resist the carrot and stick—the carbon dollar and the corporate state that backs it up. We are in a war, and as the “drug war” ends, the real economic conflict is beginning to emerge.

What will most strengthen weed’s resistance is good example and affirmation of its values, and this will have to be part of writing local regulations. Right away, our get-­‐it-­‐done county supervisors wanted to write an “urgency” ordinance like the one that ended Occupy.

They loved the idea of lending public support to private enterprise—the good old boys and girls have been doing it for years. And I have to admit it’s fun to make up new rules. Here are some I’ve gathered from the experience of this book: 1) Decriminalization of the seed and plant: Anyone can plant it. Anyone can grow their own.

2) Surplus production: More than enough for yourself and a friend should be licensed and taxed and subject to land-­‐use policies enforced equally upon agriculture, forestry, and ranching.

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3) Medical use: Untaxed. Any strain, free to all who need it.

4) Taxation: Funds go to drug education and research, but primarily to watershed and community groups. Some growers will donate beyond what they are taxed. The paying of dues is the heart of weed economics.

Of course that old devil Pluton will find his way into the details. The present challenge is to move from one system of price controls to another, from a system that imposes fines and imprisonment to a system that provides for the common health and wealth. This will encounter serious resistance. Only adhering to weed’s original principles will get us through it. That means transparency, horizontal and open decision-­‐making, contingent and adaptive practice. Which will require long years of work: relearning the principles of the gift, of good medicine, care and compassion.

We are going to need an economic and political version of ecological restoration as we recover from the cultural and market aberrations of prohibition. Any new regulation will have to practice monitoring and adaptation—the same principles of management we apply to natural systems, but I hope with a plainer way of talking about it. A group of growers and their advocates has published a booklet called Best Management Practices, borrowing the BMP tool that hasn’t worked very well for environmental regulators, but it' a good start. We need to develop and refine that advice, and maybe include an appendix of Worst Management Practices, beginning with poor democratic process. In their haste to the Emerald City the growers may look like gold miners or loggers, or investors wanting to lock in their positions.

Anything that doesn’t come from the bottom, from decades of hands in the dirt, from laborers in the gardens and hillside cabins, from the end user’s last roach or scrawny back-­‐yard plant—whatever leaves them out will inevitably fail. A primary rule here, and maybe the hardest to follow, is Keep It Small. Regulating scale is the only way to prevent the pulp dollar from moving in and becoming too large and powerful to govern. To rephrase the egregious Grover Norquist, capitalism should be kept small and friendly enough to take a bath with.

In my final conversations with Acorn it’s clear there’s only one higher principle: everything has to be paid for. What doesn’t fit the territory—any economy that doesn’t reflect its ecology—will sooner or later fall away and be replaced by something unforeseen. The money could be anywhere. Whatever follows the gift. Anything that comes close to covering what we owe.

Acorn surprises me when he says he’s thinking about being on a county advisory panel to advocate for medical marijuana. He doesn’t agree with the 215 solution any more than I do.

Of course weed is curative—I consider myself and most of my living friends examples of its efficacy. It’s just none of the government’s business, except to break up the monopoly it presently holds, and keep it that way. To ask the state—or Big Pharma—to certify that marijuana is good for me is just another twist on prohibition. It needs to be not only legalized but decriminalized—so that anyone, unless there is some clear and present danger of harm, can grow and use marijuana, whatever the state of her health. We need to get beyond 215. We need new valuations all around. Weed, like they always said, is just a gateway.

“It’s the camel’s nose in the tent,” Acorn says.

“Right,” I say. And we go back to describing the rest of the camel.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is indebted to many other books, and to those friends who have shared its history and indulged my habit of writing it down. Many of them are not called by their real names, which is how they prefer it. To them, and to those friends and compadres who are named, my apologies for all I’ve left out or poorly remembered. I can at least name and acknowledge Kathy Glass for her painstaking editorial work, and thank Aryay and Mike, Acorn, and Silas Goldean for their additions and corrections. Had I then stopped adding and revising, this book might have been nearly free of error, except for the hundred things I’ve left out or forgotten. As it is—as it always is—the mistakes that remain are my own.

NOTES These notes are based on several decades of reading and collecting materials, under circumstances that have not always been ideal. This work is only a prologue to what remains to be recovered of our history, so we have something to say when a young person asks, Why is it like this? How did it get this way? Notes are arranged by chapter, keyed to phrases that seemed to need attribution or discussion.

1. WHAT WILL WE DO FOR MONEY?

IOU to the sun There is a slow reawakening to the fact that the same principles of metabolic change are at work in both social and natural economies. This awareness manifests first in the arts and sciences, then in the markets. See The Ultimate Capital is the Sun: Metabolism in Contemporary Art, Politics, Philosophy and Science, a text to accompany an art show and symposium, Akademie der Künst, Berlin. October 2014. Courtesy of Scott Holmquist.

Economy is a branch of ecology This understanding came through many sources, few of them resembling traditional economics. Murray Bookchin’s Post-­‐Scarcity Anarchism (1970) joined the anarchist principle to a new understanding of ecology. The essays of Wendell Berry, collected as Home Economics (1987), argued for a return to traditional agrarian values, cooperation, and community. Gary Snyder—most notably at the time in “Four Changes” (circulated widely and redrafted in 1969 and 1970, then again in Turtle Island in 1974)—called for a radical change of direction regarding population, pollution, consumption, and the culture that was driving them.

He based his views on traditional Zen teachings, the politics of the IWW (the Wobblies), and his experience of wilderness and life in the backcountry. All this reading was grounded in local and natural fact by texts like Eugene Odum’s Fundamentals of Ecology (1953 et seq.) and the work

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of conservation biologist Raymond Dasmann, especially The Destruction of California (1965)— and by the investments we were making with our lives.

These influences came together under the cumbersome name of bioregionalism, at first in newsletters and magazines and bundles, many of them collected as Reinhabiting a Separate Country: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California (1978), edited by Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft, and in a special issue of the Whole Earth Catalog’s Coevolution Quarterly (No. 32, Winter 1981): Bioregions. This latter includes Jim Dodge’s seminal essay on bioregionalism, “Living By Life.”

Black Bear See Free Land, Free Love: Tales of a Wilderness Commune, ed. Don Monkerud, Malcolm Terence, Susan Keese (2000).

Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1960) gave voice to the generation that rebelled against the norms of the 1950s. Goodman encouraged their experiments and their redefinition of success and failure. His Compulsory Miseducation (1964) was another crucial text in the critique of public schooling, which parents and teachers welcomed along with John Holt’s How Children Fail (also 1964) and Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age (1967).

Goodman also reintroduced us to anarchism, again redefining success:

...far from being “Utopian” or a “glorious failure,” it has proved itself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In the period of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise by joint stock companies was anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill of rights and independent judiciary were anarchist. Congregational churches were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The free cities and corporate law in the feudal system were anarchist.

At present, the civil rights movement in the United States has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist. And so forth, down to details like free access in public libraries.

Of course, to later historians, these things do not seem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were all regarded as such and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats of chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to the actual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called “anarchist.” It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-­‐slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems. (“Reflections on the Anarchist Principle,” 1966)

the social spectacle The idea of the spectacle came to us through the French Situationists, along with some harsh criticisms of their American counterparts—our immature politics, our bogus spirituality, and our drug habits. See “On the Poverty of Student Life” (1966). But their concept of detournment—roughly translated as a subversion or hijacking of established symbols and events—was developed by American youth into lively forms of street theater.

Think of the Yippies showering the floor of the Stock Exchange with paper money, or remember the many apparitions of Anonymous. Detournment lived on in venues as diverse as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, Adbusters magazine, and Stephen Colbert’s appropriation of the TV talking head.

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Stone Age Economics Marshall Sahlins’ 1972 study of gift economies was a primary text of my backward approach to money. It led me to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Published as Essai sur le don, forme archaϊque de l’éxchange (1925), this classic exposition of the subject then sent me back to the origins of anthropology itself. But Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983) remains the best account of the difference between a gift economy and a market economy.

an economics column Dr Loon, “Commodity Market Quotations.” Northcountry Constitution, April 1975.

The Great Law of Peace of the Longhouse People, published by Akwesasne Notes, Mohawk Nation (1974). The central document, traditionally read from beaded wampum belts, of the Iroquois Nation or Hotinosnsionne.

the root of all money Don Taxay, Money of the American Indians and Other Primitive Currencies of the Americas (1970). My introduction to the origins of shell money and its use in California and along the Northwest Coast. Discusses the many forms and functions of “primitive” money, including the Iroquois and their wampum.

in the fall of 1970 Berti’s killing was reported in the Eureka Times-­‐Standard, but see “Justifiable Homicide”: Cannabis & Tragedy in Humboldt County, 1970, posted 10/8/2012 by Nick Johnson at Hemperical Evidence: hempericalevidence.blogspot.com.

another drug war killing The murder of Dirk Dickensen was well reported—the cops made the mistake of bringing a Times-­‐Standard reporter with them—but also see the online Humboldt Herald (December 2006): humboldtherald.wordpress.com. It draws on the Times-­‐Standard reporting and a May 1973 Rolling Stone article, “Death in the Wilderness.” Originally written by John Ross and submitted to Rolling Stone, the story was declined by editors and given to their in-­‐house reporter, Joe Eszterhaz, thus compounding the crime.

another kind of money Dr Loon, “Tusk Shell, Gold Dollar, Pulp Note & Weed: Four Principles of Economy in the Six Rivers / Humboldt Bay Region,” in Reinhabiting Another Country, ed. Peter Berg. Planet Drum Foundation, 1978. An early version of this present essay, attempting to describe our history with money and account for our present impoverishment.

2. A NATION MADE OF SHELLS

Stephen Powers His Overland Monthly articles were collected and published as a report of the US Geographical Survey, Tribes of California, in 1877. Reprinted by U of California Press.

For money, the Cahrocs Powers and later observers assumed that the use of woodpecker scalps and dentalium shells by the Karuk and their downriver neighbors was the “primitive” equivalent

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of our money exchange. The following caution comes from Dr. Tom Torma, Cultural Director for the Wiyot tribe:

“I would be careful of assuming that dentalia or woodpecker scalps were ‘money’ in the sense that western society understands it. While it is true that you could give it to someone and get something in return, my understanding is that they were more symbols of wealth than the source of wealth in the way that dollars are.

“In most non-­‐monetary societies, the wealth itself comes from other sources (a large family that can support each other, a strong relationship with spirit, skills that are useful to the community, etc) and it is not separate from other aspects of life, such as religion, family, or politics.” (Personal email.)

Alfred Kroeber Handbook of the Indians of California (1925) opens with chapters on the Yurok and other Northwestern tribes. Kroeber’s classic study displays all the arrogance and insights of the recently invented science of anthropology.

where the money came from Lucy Thompson, To The American Indian. Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman (1916, 1991). Introduction by Julian Lang. Several descriptions of how the ancestors brought “cheek” or Indian money from “the old land of Cheek-­‐cheek-­‐alth.”

a well-­‐regulated anarchist society See Freeman House, “Cultivation of the Wild: 1000-­‐1850,” for a description of the way social order imitated the order of nature. House’s contribution to Ray Raphael’s Two Peoples, One Place: Humboldt History Volume I (2007) is the best written narrative of life in this region before the Americans.

they worked it out with shells Throughout the region, shell money functioned as a kind of contract between people and place. See Napoleon A. Chagnon, Ecological and Adaptive Aspects of California Shell Money. Annual Report: Archeological Survey, Dept of Anthropology, UCLA, 1970 (so far as I know, not compromised by Chagnon’s controversial later work in Venezuela).

Lewis Henry Morgan His League of the Ho-­‐de-­‐no-­‐sau-­‐nee, or Iroquois (1851) revealed how the shell exchange and its ceremonies formed the basis of the Iroquois Confederacy. It also portrayed a matriarchal society with very different notions of family and property than those of his Rochester, New York, neighbors. Male leaders were “raised up” to the councils of the six nations, replacing their predecessor by means of a wampum exchange similar to the ceremony that paid for the loss of life. But leaders could also be recalled by the clan mothers (and in theory clubbed to death for repeatedly ignoring their advice, though I have not read that this rule had to be enforced).

a story we’re still trying to recover Shell Game: A True Account of Beads and Money in North America (1996). Jerry Martien documents the encounter between indigenous gift economies and an invading market economy, from the early 1600s to 1980s Manhattan.

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the potlatch ceremony Thomas F. Thornton, Being and Place Among the Tlingit (2008).

Describes the potlatch ceremony and its place in another culture structured around money and property. It also describes its fatal encounter with pulp economics.

Two economies Llewellyn L. Loud, in Ethnography and Archaeology of the Wiyot Territory (1918), maps and describes a thriving Wiyot culture with many village sites, canoes and trails connecting them, of which the Gregg-­‐Wood expedition was apparently unaware. Loud was in the Humboldt Bay region in 1913, visiting sites, digging for artifacts, and interviewing the survivors.

3. HEART OF GOLD

Gold Fever Lois de Lorenzo’s 80-­‐page book is still popular with beginning prospectors, according to goldfeverprospecting.com where it retails for $6.95.

A gold economy Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (1999), provides an excellent history and analysis of the empire whose colony we are.

Like my mother’s story Every banker’s birthday seems to be an occasion for publishing another expensive coffee table book glorifying money. An in-­‐law, recognizing that I needed to know more about the subject, gave me a nice one: Jonathan Williams, ed., Money: A History, published to celebrate the opening of the British Museum’s HSBC Money Gallery, 1997. Lots of color pictures.

the Gregg-­‐Wood Expedition The story is really Wood’s. Both his and Gregg’s papers were lost, but he lived to reconstruct it from memory. Lewis Keysor Wood, The Discovery of Humboldt Bay: A Narrative. San Francisco, 1932. From Humboldt Times, April 1856. Reprinted as a pamphlet by Society of California Pioneers.

4. PULP: MAKING TREES INTO MONEY

the history of paper Harley Wessman, “Depletion For Dollars: The Economics of Chip Mills.”

Katuah Journal, Fall 1992. With Robert Mitchell, coordinator of the Tennessee Valley Hardwood Alliance.

“More on Chip Mills,” Broadcaster, Ozark Resource Center, March 1997, reports 130 mills operating in the Southeast. Exported pulp is then imported as paper, with the usual loss of jobs and pollution of watersheds.

As for the people themselves An alternative to pulp economics can still be found in many traditional crafts and skills, including the making of books. A personal favorite is The Tulipomania, a chapter reprinted from Richard Bentley’s Memories of Extraordinary Popular

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Delusions (1841), describing the wild speculation in tulip bulbs during the 1630s. Produced at Arion Press in a limited edition on mouldmade German paper and given to me by the printer, Jerry Reddan, who began his career at Eureka Printing.

The Redwood Empire Michael Kowalewski, ed. Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration. In story and picture. Owen C. Coy, The Humboldt Bay Region 1850–1875 (1929). An early attempt to piece together the colonists’ narrative: “The Redwood Empire” is the opening chapter.

During the peak years of logging During the 1964 flood alone, the equivalent of 10,000 years of natural erosion is estimated to have occurred. From a presentation by Alderon Laird at a Humboldt Environmental Forum, Rivers of Humboldt County. In three 3-­‐week sessions, coordinated by Maggy Herbelin of Eureka, restoration groups, historians, and ecologists reviewed the state of the North Coast’s principal watersheds, from February through April 2011. It was a good model of the kind of watershed council we desperately need.

The decommissioning of the nuke Redwood Alliance was the organization principally responsible for the closing of the local nuclear reactor, but efforts arose from other early groups like Net Energy, and from individuals like Mike Manetas and Michael Welch who are still active in overseeing the burial and transport of nuclear materials. The Alliance published Nuclear Free Times into the ’90s, back issues archived at redwoodalliance.org.

The inside story of the Humboldt Nuke is only now emerging, told by former nuclear control technician Bob Rowen in My Humboldt Diary: A True Story of Betrayal of the Public Trust (2015).

Redwood National Park For an inside view of the park wars in retrospect, see Dan Sealey, Suzanne Guerra, John Amodio, “Redwood National Park Expansion, Woodstock, Earth Day, and the Kent State Massacre,” Proceedings of the 2011 George Wright Society Conference on Parks, Protected Areas, and Cultural Sites: Rethinking Protected Areas in a Changing World. georgewright.org

Emerald Creek Committee Another recent account from the participants, Dan Sealey’s “An Activist’s Return To Emerald Creek” (Econews, June 2012), describes revisiting the scenes of the park conflict with fellow Creek Freeks John Amodio and Sungnome Madrone, whose first-­‐hand reports let the world know about the clearcutting. Sealey was reluctant to go back, recalling only the violence and all that was lost, but he was surprised at the recovery of the watersheds they’d saved.

an active war zone As described in the official history: travel.nationalgeographic.com.

Senator Henry L. Dawes Under the Dawes Act from 1887 to 1934, 60 million acres of “surplus” Indian land were carved out of their reservations, and following the 1906 Burke Act another 30 million acres were lost to forced sale and takings—in all, two-­‐thirds of their land base.

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Colin Powell Reported by AP Oct 6, 1996. The former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later apologized for the use of the term “Chinamen.”

Warren Buffet The Sage’s bullish remarks were widely reported, though he expressed regret that Berkshire Hathaway had a net profit only $24 billion in 2012. dataomaha.com

it was the early ’80s Reagan’s not-­‐so-­‐covert Central American wars were a continuation of the Vietnam War, and Central American Solidarity was among the more recent groups represented at Pecwan. The G-­‐O Road was organized out of the Northcoast Environmental Center, like nearly every environmental campaign of the time, but had supporters among the Native community and a small band of Del Norte County environmentalists. The most dynamic and immediate organizing at the time was coming out of the Humboldt Herbicide Task Force, which also allied itself with other regional and watershed groups, including the California Native Basketweavers Association. Much of these groups’ history was lost to the 2001 fire that destroyed the Northcoast Environmental Center. The rest is being lost to mold and failing memory. There is urgent need to collect and curate this history, a task currently left to a few unpaid archivists.

I’m the little girl in the poem Some of the poems read that day by Shaunna Oteka McCovey can be found in her collection, The Smoke House Boys (2005).

California Counting Collected with other essays by Leanne Hinton in Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages. The categories of counting also extended to the nomenclature of money shells. See Humboldt State University Center for Community Development, Yurok Language, Literature and Culture. 3rd edition, 1974.

Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908–09 was not published till 1957 and was soon forgotten, then reissued in 1980 thanks to the efforts of Andrew Genzoli, who wrote a history column for the Times-­‐Standard.

1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians Passed by California’s first legislature, the Act basically gave any Justice of the Peace authority to convey any Native land or minor person to any white citizen who requested it.

Alexander Brizard Made for the Trade: Native American Baskets of Northwest California.

Exhibition at Trinidad Museum and Clarke Historical Museum with catalog by Ron Johnson, with the assistance of Colleen Kelley Marks and Susie Van Kirk. Besides featuring some of the greatest basketmakers, it discusses the role of dealers Brizard and collector Grace Nicholson, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Lila O’Neale, and the romantic photographer of Indians Emma Freeman.

The more ghoulish side of this story of private “collecting” is told by Tony Platt in Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past (2011).

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The Last Lords of Palenque Victor Perera and Robert D. Bruce, The Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain Forest (1982). Witnessing the destruction of the mahogany forest, Chan K’in says, “What the people of the city do not realize is that the roots of all living things are tied together.

When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky.”

the Masai News clipping from San Francisco Chronicle, October 1986.

Sherman Alexie The story appeared in the New Yorker, April 21, 2003.

even the US Forest Service Congress mandated under the Multiple-­‐Use Sustained Yield Act of 1969 that the USFS evaluate the cost and benefits of every use of federal forests. Economics: What’s a Forest Worth?—a little leaflet directed to the public—seeks input on this difficult undertaking. Two cartoon images show a pair of conifers and a pair of deciduous trees, then the same generic trees bearing price tags with dollar signs on them: get it? The necessity of affixing value in this way led environmentalists to take up the notion of “ecosystem services” that can be quantified. What has your ecosystem done for you today, and what was it worth?

Totem Salmon Sub-­‐titled Life Lessons from Another Species (1999), Freeman House’s book is the product of a lifetime of passionate engagement with salmon and the watersheds of which they were the embodiment. His essays should be collected and widely read. I was awakened to bioregionalism by his “Future Primitive,” written with Jerry Gorsline in the early ’70s, and followed his work in essays like “To Learn the Things We Need to Know: Engaging the Particulars of the Planet’s Recovery” (in Helping Nature Heal, ed. Richard Nilsen, 1991)—but also in the publications of the Mattole Salmon Support Group and the Mattole Restoration Council, where he was an active leader. His voice is distinctive even among the collective eloquence of publications like Dynamics of Recovery: A Plan to Enhance the Mattole Estuary (1995), which mingles the insights of scientific observation with the humility of doing the actual work. He is a model of watershed citizenship, and his work gives eloquent testimony to its joys and difficulties.

Ents and Hoedads Some of this history is gathered in Working the Woods / Working the Sea: An Anthology of Northwest Writing (2008), ed. Finn Wilcox and Jerry Gorsline. The anthology was first published in 1986, collecting the experience of a generation that went to the woods— and the sea—at the end of the ’60s. The more recent edition is three times as large. Like the present story, it tries to account for what happened in the years that followed.

5. HEARTS AND MINDS AND MARIJUANA

This chapter is expanded and revised from “Hearts & Minds & Marijuana” by Dr Loon (Siskiyou Country no. 12, June-­‐July 1984).

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we’re running up a battle flag Ronald Reagan, Remarks on Signing Executive Order 12368, Concerning Federal Drug Abuse Policy Functions. June 1982. He cites the WWI Battle of Verdun, recalling it as if he’d been in the movie. presidency.ucsb.edu

60 Minutes The CBS News sinsemilla segment aired in 1984.

Emerald Triangle A confusing tag that evoked southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle (where the gold was opium, smuggled by the CIA), and gave a completely false idea of our geography. The rebranding of the region was nonetheless highly effective—it’s just the kind of label sheriffs and newspapers love. By June of 1985, an LA Times story could run “Emerald Triangle: Marijuana Crop—an Uneasy Life” and readers could be counted on to know where it was. The Times reporter interviewed residents and officials who said weed had created a “bootlegger economy” and was scaring away tourists and legitimate business. “Something ought to be done to stop it,” said County DA Terry Farmer.

the normally conservative County Supervisors John Ross, Cannabis Petition Drive (October 1979), advocated a petition drive to support County Supervisors Eric Hedlund, Sara Parsons, and Danny Walsh, who had voted in favor of local control and against federal funding for a Northern California Sinsemilla Strike Force. The petition also called for legalizing cannabis cultivation, a proposal decades ahead of its time.

Narcotics Intelligence Estimate US Drug Enforcement Administration. The Supply of Illicit Drugs to the United States from Foreign and Domestic Sources in 1984.

Vineland Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel is located in a re-­‐imagined Humboldt County, said to be based on the author’s experience during the 1980s in a small coastal community known as Wasteheaven.

Cultivator’s Handbook Bill Drake’s 1969 classic was followed by International Cultivator’s Handbook in 1974. Both are revised and updated and currently in print.

it changed people’s hearts and minds See Dale Pendell’s Pharmakopoeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft (1995), especially the chapter on Cannabis Sativa, its history, pharmacology, and effects.

dirt and books F.H. King, Farmers of Forty Centuries, Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan (1911). Based on the American agronomist’s 1909 observations, revived by the organic gardening movement as a primary document of sustainable farming.

Thomas J. Barrett, Harnessing the Earthworm; a practical inquiry into soil-­‐building, soil-­‐ conditioning and plant nutrition through the use of earthworms (1948), was another early soil-­‐ building classic kept in print by Rodale Press.

Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (1950), an enormous best-­‐seller despite nearly unanimous rejection by the scientific community and a prime example of the alternative cosmologies we sought in every realm. Tony and I talked about the “orgone” theories of

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Wilhelm Reich, which seemed crackpot even in the ’70s, but also Reich’s classic text, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, a cogent analysis of our time (1933, reprinted in 1970 by Albion Press).

symbiosis of gardener and plant Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World (2001) would later document the human gardener’s association with the tulip, the apple, the potato, and marijuana. Having witnessed this for decades, I find it hard to say which has most influenced the other. Robert Clarke and Mark Merlin’s Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany (2013) describes the long history of our species’ association with the plant.

John Ross Los Marijuanos de Zapicho [ca. 1974, unpublished ms]

los sembradores Angel Del Valle, Los Sembradores, Brochure accompanying the show of his photographs at Galeria De La Raza, San Francisco, in 1976. Del Valle’s photos had already appeared in High Times, California Living, Berkeley Barb, and Jerry Kamstra’s Weed: Adventures of a Dope Smuggler (1974).

Our interests at the time ranged far beyond Mexico. The Marijuana Farmers: Hemp Cults and Cultures by Jack Frazier (1974) explored the history of hemp, from archeological sites to nineteenth-­‐century paper-­‐making. Ganja in Jamaica: The Effects of Marijuana Use by Vera Rubin and Lambros Comitas (1974) was sponsored by the Center for Studies of Narcotic and Drug Abuse and The National Institutes of Health, in a very scientific manner informing us that “Ganja use in many ways is central to the life style of active participants in the ganja subculture.” Just what we were thinking.

The federal penalty The Comprehensive Crime Control Act did not pass till 1984. By 1986 land seizures had begun in northern California. US Federal prosecutor Peter Robinson said, “We mean business, and we mean to drive people who are growing marijuana for sale out of business.” The proceeds from selling seized assets went to state and local police agencies. See Ellen Taylor, “Land Seizure is cruel punishment,” Letter to the Editor, Eureka Times-­‐Standard 3/15/86.

California’s Uniform Controlled Substances Act California Health & Safety Code 11054(d)(13).

Its provisions, like the federal penalties, are summarized at normal.org.

homesteaders with a little patch See Albert Saijo, “The Day CAMP Busted Across the Ridge.”

Collected in Woodrat Flat (2014), it tells the story of a small-­‐time grower under the gun—the joys of a homestead in the Mattole Valley and the outrage of armed agents of the state descending on it. “It was a celestially beautiful day the day CAMP busted across the ridge....”

PAY YOUR DUES Paid advertisement. Star Root (November 18, 1982)

wacky tobaccy Many backcountry residents were far ahead of the hippies in their gardening skills, and some were already growing and selling weed. Malcolm Terence, journalist and early resident of the Black Bear commune, has written a story, “The Famous Flores Sisters,”

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describing how he learned the secrets of the female plant from a long-­‐time Salmon River matriarch. The story is part of a collection, Beginner’s Luck [unpublished ms].

Civil Liberties Monitoring Project Mimeograph press release, September 4, 1985. See Dominic Corva, “Requiem for a CAMP: The life and death of a domestic U.S. drug war institution.”

International Journal of Drug Policy, February 2013. CLMP remains active in civil liberties issues in Humboldt County: civilliberties.org.

6. THE ECONOMY OF THE FLEA

coke’s worth more per gram Task Force on Cannabis Regulation, The Regulation and Taxation of Cannabis Commerce. 1981. Report presented to The Center for the Study of Drug Policy and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Proposes that the US grant to the states the right to regulate marijuana cultivation and commerce. This Carter-­‐era study was quickly suppressed by the Reagan administration.

For a pound of high-­‐quality Woodrat, personal note.

Shake In addition to his prices from the ’70s and ’80s, Woodrat gave me this outline of five grades of marijuana:

SHAKE—the sun leaves (when they’re not stripped off before or at harvest); all the large secondary leaves and larger tertiary leaves; leaves that “shake” off the dried branches when bagged after drying (the dried plant matter being far more brittle and thus breakable).

TRIM—I count everything left on the trimmer’s plate during the manicuring process—3 or 4 times the potency of shake since the “interior” leaves among the swollen ovule clusters are quite resinous. Best deal in weed.

SMALL BUDS—ovule clusters smaller than the trimmer’s little fingernail. If an oz of standard bud is $100, the same weight of small bud is between $50 and $70. Some people call them “pipe buds.”

REGULAR BUD—regular bud.

COLAS—the heavy clusters of bud at the very top of the plant, or at the ends of the main branches. Because the colas include lots of stem by weight, they’re usually the same price but higher prestige. No difference in potency. [Personal note.]

Silas Goldean “Cannabis and Community.” Upriver Downriver. Number 8, n.d. [ca 1982]. Ray Raphael’s Cash Crop: An American Dream (1985) also interviewed backcountry residents, confirming many of Goldean’s findings and revealing an emergent community of rural Humboldt County.

cash in circulation Two years later, a 1986 AP story reported that the Federal Reserve could not account for the whereabouts of $136 billion. “Underground,” they guessed. See FRED in St. Louis, who keeps track of this sort of thing: research.stlouisfed.org.

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7. THE GOLDEN RULE

miles and money and risk All rose proportionately, despite mounting evidence that the drug wars were based on bad information. See Family Council on Drug Awareness, Ten Things Every Parent, Teenager & Teacher Should Know About Marijuana. Newly Updated for the 1990s.

Intended to counteract government propaganda, it quotes Jimmy Carter: “Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself.”

Information like this soon disappeared as the momentum of the Reagan drug wars continued to build, the intensity increasing with their distance from reality. Eric Schlosser, “Reefer Madness,” Atlantic Monthly (August 1994), describes this period as a new Prohibition era, updated for the 1990s: “there may be more people in prison today for violating marijuana laws than at any other time in U.S. history.”

Gentrification The Canadian geographer David Ley, author of Urban Studies (2003), shows that artists retreat from places with high economic capital but low cultural capital, whereas the cultural richness of places frequented by artists is seen as a valued resource for the entrepreneur. Or in starker terms: “The redemptive eye of the artist could turn junk into art.

The calculating eye of others would turn art into commodity.”

the welfare state The loan came through the non-­‐profit Redwood Community Action Agency, which administered most of the programs by which the state tried to restore some social and ecological balance to Humboldt County’s accounts. They subsequently recommended me as a carpenter to other homeowners in the program. RCAA was also the agency for our work at Horse Linto Creek and dozens of restoration projects throughout the region. They have recently completed a new tide gate on lower Elk River.

$9 billion dollars The DEA estimate is cited in Lana D. Harrison et al., “Cannabis use in the United States: Implications for policy” in Cannabisbeleid in Duitsland, Frankrijk en de Verenigde States, eds. Peter Cohen and Arjen Sas (1995). It also marks the federal government’s belated announcement that sinsemilla cannabis is not the drug it used to be.

two forest activists have been blown up by a car bomb The bombing of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney is still unsolved, the facts hidden among the undisclosed costs of pulp economics.

Many of the relevant documents are maintained on a website, judibari.org. The incident was the subject of a controversial series in the Anderson Valley Advertiser, revived in a 2012 documentary, Who Bombed Judi Bari? and updated periodically. In a North Coast Journal article of May 2015, Cherney said he’d turned over long-­‐suppressed evidence to the Mendocino Sheriff. The investigation is ongoing.

Charles Hurwitz The 1986 takeover of Pacific Lumber and ensuing decades of liquidation logging are discussed further in Chapter 10, “Occupy Money.” The on-­‐the-­‐ground and from-­‐the-­‐ heart story is told in Joan Dunning’s From the Redwood Forest. Ancient Trees and the Bottom Line: A Headwaters Journey (1998) with photos by Doug Thron.

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8. COMPASSION AND COMMUNITY

Harry Anslinger As the government’s war on drugs moves to a new phase, its entire rationale is revealed to have been based on careerism and personal prejudice. See Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (2014). Includes the story of Anslinger’s personal vendetta against Billie Holiday when she refused to stop singing “Strange Fruit.” The truth and lies about addiction are also being exposed by Canadian physician Gabor Maté, in public appearances, radio broadcasts, and his best-­‐selling book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2008).

the smell of too much money By the early ’90s the effects of Reaganomics included the monetization of daily life, the digitization of consciousness, a growing economic inequality, and plain old recession. At first this sparked a revival of interest in the subject of money.

An issue of Parabola (February 1991) with money as its theme opens with Thomas Buckley’s discussion of Yurok wealth, which he compares to life in the ’90s. The issue also includes “Buddhist Economics” by E.F. Schumacher, whose Small Is Beautiful (1973) had proposed a return to older ideas of value and scale.

An issue of Whole Earth Review (Spring 1992), again with money as its theme. Elin Whitney-­‐Smith interviews Karl Marx, who claims that computers mark the final stage of the alienation of labor: alienated thinking. This change in the relations of production will bring radical change, Karl predicts. “There will be economic crisis. Where decisions are made by workers who know the product, know the customer, and see the benefit of the result in their pockets, business will survive.”

An issue of MS magazine (March/April 1992) featured a Special Report: Up the Down Economy with articles like “Creating Jobs We Can’t Be Fired From” by Gloria Steinem, “Decoding Economic Terms for Real People” by Marilyn J. Waring, and “How We Got Into This Mess & Ways To Get Out” by Pamela Sparr.

Much of this economic questioning subsided during the closing decade of the century as the liberal party (freedom for people) gave up these interests and decided to serve neoliberalism (freedom for capital)—until it erupted in the 1999 Battle of Seattle.

WAMM’S website wamm.org directs you to its history, its continuing mission, and its favorite recipes. Valerie Corral is still a member of its board of directors. Her brief history can be found at the website of NORML, on whose advisory board she serves.

Another force behind passage As the public face of medical marijuana, Dennis Peron has been a mixed blessing, with the usual pros and cons of focusing a movement around a single personality. Memoirs of Dennis Peron: How a gay hippy outlaw legalized marijuana in response to the AIDs crisis is available in a Kindle edition.

Low pay, a high patient-­‐to-­‐staff ratio The new owners, Sun Health Care Group, will finally abandon the facility after a decade of neglect and evasion. Reopened by Skilled Healthcare, it also became the subject of numerous complaints, including a civil suit brought by Eureka

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attorney Tim Needham, and eventually criminal charges by state attorney general Kamala Harris. These stories were reported by local media and pursued by patient advocates, but lawyers managed to delay change for years. See California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform (canhr.org) for ongoing efforts to keep elder care compassionate and accountable.

Women have played a sustaining role See Wendy Chapkis, “The Trouble with Mary Jane’s Gender,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations: Issue 35, 2013. Also Linda Stansberry, “Women in Weed,” North Coast Journal (01/08/2015). An even longer-­‐term issue may be the elimination of human labor altogether. In a special insert to the North Coast Journal (01/29/2015) the guys at Trim Scene Solutions assure us that their automated Twister T4 Trimmer “makes your life easier and your pockets fatter. And remember: Machines don’t need lunch.”

Mountain Girl The Primo Plant: Growing Sinsemilla Marijuana. Carolyn Garcia is also the author of The Primo Plant: Growing Marijuana Outdoors (1998).

Letter From a Grower The letter may be found somewhere deep in the archives of High Times.

another casualty of that war The killing was reported in the Times-­‐Standard, August 28, 2003: “Man’s Death Ruled a Homicide.”

Chris Giauque Online postings through 2012 describe the circumstances surrounding his disappearance and offer a $200,000 reward for information.

up to 99 plants In 2003 Senate Bill 420 clarified some issues of Proposition 215, establishing an ID card system and setting possession and cultivation limits, but allowing counties to set higher grow limits. The Humboldt DA’s medical marijuana policy of February 2003 allowed up to 99 plants, up to 100 square feet of canopy, possession of up to 3 pounds of bud, with a 1500-­‐watt limit on indoor grows. A 2011 ordinance limited indoor growing to 50 square feet and 1200 watts per parcel. In October 2014 a land use ordinance prescribed a 100-­‐square-­‐foot limit on parcels one acre or less, up to 200 square feet on parcels of one to five acres. The trend is toward allowing larger outdoor parcels to serve multiple patients.

9. FOUR WAYS WE TAKE OUR MEDICINE

I find the iCenter Peter Hecht, Weed Land (2015), reports the inside story of iCenter and its founder, also the history of WAMM and other pioneering advocates of medical marijuana.

mutual aid Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (1902) was a great influence on the economic thinking of the ’60s and ’70s. Based on his own observations and scientific research, his book countered Darwin’s theory that species evolve entirely through competition and provided examples of mutually beneficial behavior, including his own cooperative farm.

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Humboldt Patient Resource Center One of the first dispensaries established following the passage of Prop 215, the not-­‐for-­‐profit collective has lived up to its name. Its resources include a library and reliable information, as well as in-­‐house cultivated flowers, edibles, concentrates, clones, tincture, salves, oils, balms, and lab testing services.

O’Shaunnessey’s Founded in 2003 by Bay Area MD Tod Mikuriya, one of the authors of the Compassionate Use Act. Its online edition (beyondthc.com) features The O’Shaunnessey’s Reader, an ongoing history of the medical marijuana movement, plus Dispatches from the editors and an “entourage” of informed sources.

The Humboldt Cooperative A Eureka Times-­‐Standard story of September 2009 portrays its owner—not Tony—and his ambitious plans, which include the non-­‐profit Humboldt Cooperative Management Group with gardens in six counties. The entrepreneurial model is strong on organization, but lacks the devotion to patient need that comes with the medical model.

Proposition 19 Sharon Letts, “Bringing Bud to Market,” Arcata Eye, July 2010. Two-­‐part article on the potentially fearsome impacts of Proposition 19. North Coast Journal ran a piece in March 2010 with the subtitle, “To Save Humboldt County from Legalization.”

Mendocino Laura Norton, “Mendocino County Sheriff offering twist-­‐tie pot markers.” The Press Democrat, July 2, 2009. The ties sell for $50. Medicare patients and veterans pay half-­‐ price. All revenue to go to the County’s general fund. “Providers” permitted to grow up to 99 plants, each with a tie. Growers charged with “over-­‐growing” may subsequently pay $50 per plant to reduce the charges to a misdemeanor. LA Weekly opined that the DEA went after Matt Cohen and Northstone Organics, a leading advocate of the twist-­‐tie program, as part of a general policy of prosecuting the best models of reform. “To go after him is to strike a blow in favor of the Mexican cartels,” said a spokesman for NORML.

See Stephen d’Angelo, The Cannabis Manifesto: A Paradigm For Wellness (2015), which provides a well-­‐rounded list of necessary reforms.

Patrick Moen “Drug Agent Joins Budding Industry,” The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2013.

Meanwhile, the drug war goes on “DEA operations chief decries legalization of marijuana at state level,” The Washington Post, January 15, 2014.

the bullying tactics The eventual closure of HMS was reported by Kevin Hoover of The Arcata Eye, January 3, 2012.

10. OCCUPY MONEY

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Ponderosa Pine aka Keith Lampe, worked as a journalist, served in the Korean War, afterward returned his medals and commendations to protest the war in Vietnam. He moved to the west coast in 1968 and within a few months stopped a log truck in west Marin County, which was said to be the beginning of environmental activism. He died in Ecuador in 2014. Samantha Kimmey, Point Reyes Light, November 26, 2014.

Money doesn’t have value Dr Loon, “Deep Green Money,” Econews, October 2009.

For a moment the global mind In the wake of the market crash and Occupy, a number of books began to appear on the subject of our long-­‐term indebtedness, a dawning awareness that the bill collectors were at the front door even as the bankers were escaping out the back.

Margaret Atwood, Payback (2008), Ellen Hodgson Brown, Web of Debt (2008, 2010), and David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011). Ellen Brown’s book (subtitled The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free) proposes the establishment of public banks, a good start toward knowing what we owe. In the early days of Occupy Eureka, a Wells Fargo manager came over from across the street and started a conversation on that topic.

“Why doesn’t the County create its own bank?” Then the cops came and put an end to that kind of talk.

1.4 bil, according to one banker Jennifer Budwig’s graduate thesis (University of Washington School of Banking) based its figures on the 200,000 plants seized the previous year, which she estimated (very optimistically) as one fourth of the total grown. That yields “a minimum of $1 billion in gross revenues for producers,” of which she calculated $415 million was spent locally (Eureka Times Standard, 12/4/2011). At one of several public presentations that winter—the Chamber of Commerce lined up to hear one—she presented the figure as $1.4 billion. By spring her conservative estimates had been challenged and raised to $2.6 billion (Lost Coast Outpost, 2/2/2012).

part-­‐time teaching In compliance with federal regulations, I received a letter (August 1999) from the Executive Assistant to the President of Humboldt State University warning me of the penalties (up to one year and $100,000 for first offense) and health risks associated with six substances: alcohol, other depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, PCP, and in a class by itself, marijuana. Its chief danger was said to be the many auto accidents attributed to its use. These warnings and bogus facts get handed around from agency to agency until they acquire all the trappings of truth. This one came from UC Davis in 1990 and from unspecified material provided by the California Department of Justice Training Center. Who?

Charles Hurwitz “Bad Capitalism: The Pacific Lumber Story” by Martin Porter provides some of the economic story (posted at linkedin.com), including a critical analysis of the Headwaters Deal. In 2003 San Jose Mercury News ran a more optimistic view, “A decade after Headwaters deal, truce comes to Northern California redwood country” (03/08/2009). The website of The Headwaters Forest Reserve (blm.gov) provides a little of this history, but the docent and visitor’s program has just begun to tell the story of activism behind the park.

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David Chain Seth Fosenfeld of the San Francisco Examiner wrote an account of the events surrounding Chain’s death (03/14/1999). It can be found online at jailhurwitz.com.

the ruin of watersheds Kyle Keegan, “Autopsy of a Pending Local Extinction. The Tragedy of Mono-­‐Economics and Why Outside Regulation Alone Won’t Save Our Salmon,” Forest and River News, Spring 2015. See also the 2012 issues of News for Keegan’s three-­‐part economic and ecological history of the region. I hope it becomes a book.

the lost ties of community Kari Marie Norgaard, Learning from the Past: Timber and Community Well-­‐Being in Siskiyou County. A Socio-­‐Economic Assessment. Klamath Forest Alliance, 1997. Reports that where communities make this difficult transition, the loss of timber jobs is offset by ecological and economic gains.

This kind of essential grassroots study has an old history, though it doesn’t get much ink.

I still treasure my copy of California Public Policy Center’s Working Papers on Economic Democracy (ca. 1978), a mimeograph book given to me by Rudy Espinosa, one of the many community activists who participated in this project. It addresses good questions, like Who Owns California? It was followed by other Working Papers, including Towards a New Rural California, 40 pp, also undated.

See also Orion Afield’s special issue on Community Economics, Autumn 1998. Builds on ’90s anti-­‐globalism and local alternatives, including local currencies.

buying a lot of native baskets Both the Eureka Times Standard and North Coast Journal reported extensively on the embezzlement, following charges brought in 2012. Though it shocked the local community, the fraud was hardly unprecedented. The region experiences these financial scandals on a regular basis. One year the money was missing from the state college, already struggling with budget cuts; another year we lost our principal dairy distributor to fraudulent bookkeeping, so now our butter comes from somewhere in the Central Valley. No one calculates the cost of these violations of public trust or asks why they happen. People must have supposed that environmentalists are above such desperation.

Commodity marijuana As marijuana goes “mainstream” it will become obvious that it isn’t weed. Shoppers will make the kinds of choices that come with the new opportunism.

O.G. I’m reliably informed by cannabis historian Silas Goldean that O.G. stands for Original Gangsta, an Indica/Kush Mountains hybrid said to be favored by Snoop Dog and other early rappers.

A good friend Floyd (Buddy) Biro, county building inspector, was a pioneer at negotiating the interface between the pulp and weed economies. When his Panther Gap homestead was heavily damaged by the storms of February 1974, he applied for federal disaster relief. He claimed to have raised $1500 worth of marijuana annually, which he traded for food at Sun Harvest in Eureka. This is an important precedent in two respects: The clerk entered the weed simply as a “crop”; and though the claim was at first denied because the transaction was barter, that decision was reversed.

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how to occupy other economies The classic story is told by Jack Beeching, The Chinese Opium Wars (1975), in which the English bring opium from India to addict the Chinese, who then pay for it with tea and silk and eventually their independence as a nation.

Hurwitzes of hemp Seth Zuckerman, “Is Pot Growing Bad for the Environment?” (The Nation 10/31/2013), brought the environmental disasters of large-­‐scale pot growing to national attention, with more nuance and distinction than has been typical of most reporting on this latest form of the drug wars.

See also Mike Riggs, “Blowing Smoke” (The Nation, 11/10/ 2013). Despite the new focus on environmental harm, it’s business as usual in the drug enforcement industry. Part of a special issue, Dope and Change: Why It’s Always Been Time to Legalize Pot. The report also examines historical racial disparities, medical pot advances and retreats.

precious streams and tributaries Know Your Water Rights (2015?), a leaflet prepared by Friends of the Eel River and the Salmonid Restoration Federation, is representative of the shift of environmentalists’ attention from timber companies to marijuana growers. It introduces growers to all the rules and procedures the lumber industry mastered decades ago, including how to apply for a Fish & Wildlife “1600 Agreement” before you substantially modify any river, stream, or lake. The prohibition model reminds growers that failure to follow these procedures could lead to fines of up to $1,000 plus $500 a day. Unless regulating marijuana brings reforms to our entire regulatory system, it’s possible to foresee a time when these water rules are got around by big marijuana as easily as by big timber.

counting Northern spotted owls The missing owl money was never entirely restored. Ron LeValley of Mad River Biologists pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to embezzle funds from an Indian tribe and was sentenced to ten months, of which he served nine and a half. (North Coast Journal 4/20/2014, 5/14/2015)

Growers, enviros, tribes Of these groups, the tribes seem to have most successfully managed the transition from poverty to riches. Casinos are a far cry from Indian gambling, and not all tribes or rancherias want one, but the gambling proceeds are returning a little of what was never paid for. Likewise, not every tribe wants to have weed growing on their land, as the feds have allowed them to do. The Hupa decided no. The Pomo down in Ukiah are building a big greenhouse.

11. CANNABIS AND THE COMMONS

ejido Lands communally owned according to traditional Indian systems of tenure, combining collective ownership with individual rights of use. It distinguishes pasture land, cultivated land, wild lands, and a town site. As with our general plans, lawyers and bankers have found ways around it.

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Acorn has written All of Acorn’s work quoted here is from manuscript and personal communication.

Dr. Kush David Samuels, “How medical marijuana is transforming the pot industry” (July 28, 2008). “By going into the pot business, Emily had made the kind of compromises with reality that idealistic people often make when they get older and lose faith in their ability to effect wholesale change, and when they need the money.”

Uruguay While the registrations and bureaucracy have moved forward, the actual delivery of marijuana to pharmacies has been stalled by a new president who opposes the plan. This sort of regression can be expected wherever reform is enacted by decree.

Washington Another New Yorker weed piece, “Buzzkill” by Patrick Radden Keefe, gives a good account of the contradictions and likely failures of Washington state’s revenue-­‐driven corporate-­‐scale model (11/18/2013).

the concept of free Kaliflower Collective, Deep Tried Frees. 1978. 16pp. Reflects on the theory and practice of free, from the Diggers of 1649 to the present. See also 1% Free: Trip Without a Ticket (1966), included in The Digger Papers, a special issue of Paul Krassner’s The Realist (August 1968). Copies of Free News can be found in Digger archives at UC Davis library. The website www.diggers.org closed in August 2015.

Best Management Practices Northern California Farmers Guide. [2014?] Its cover advertises “A Prosperous Economy and a Healthy Environment. Seeking Balance and Sustainability in Northern California’s ‘Green Rush.’” Available at grow-­‐supply shops and elsewhere (I picked up my copy at the ice cream store), it describes itself as a “community-­‐based collaborative project.” For further information the 20-­‐page guide refers readers to Kristin Nevedal of Emerald Growers Association and Hezekiah Allen of Better World Development.

EGA is now California Growers Association and Allen is its executive director. He’s young, public-­‐spirited, and a Humboldt native–but he spends a lot of time away from home now, in Sacramento and on the conference circuit arguing for marijuana policies favorable to the emerging cannabis business community. CGA has been very successful in conveying its views to our commerce-­‐friendly County Supervisors, with an eagerness and urgency expressed

by Hezekiah Allen’s call to action: “There are jobs to be created, rules to be followed, taxes paid.”

EGA has been praised for opening the political conversation and for discussing some of the problems addressed by the pamphlet, especially water use and poisons. They have been criticized for lack of transparency, poor public process, and favoring established farmers and large grows. Their website offers memberships, beginning at $100. Associate members ($500-­‐ $1,000) are invited to help shape policy and craft their message. Business Partners ($1,000+) serve in leadership positions and work hand in hand with the Association to change the world.

These young advocates of a new weed culture may appear naive about money and power, but they are hard-­‐working and effective organizers and they know their marijuana.

Emerald Growers Association put together a symposium, Marijuana and the Environment:

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Regulation and Responsibility in California, in conjunction with Drug Policy Alliance in April 2015. The discussion of responsible regulatory policy was disappointing in its timid political vision, but it was followed by a panel discussion that included Kristin Nevedal, a patient advocate and member of EGA, Casey O’Neill, a third-­‐generation grower and EGA’s board chair, and Chris Van Hook of Clean Green, a long-­‐time certifier of organic products. They portrayed a working culture of farmers, providers and distributors built on a model of cooperation and service. The program was both hopeful and discouraging, and reaffirmed that our political skills have a long way to go to catch up with enlightened practice.

it’s fun to make up new rules Instead of the stone-­‐wall silence of prohibition, we presently have a deafening rush of potential marijuana regulation. Three bills governing medical pot have been hastily combined into one and approved by California’s legislature this fall, with the details to be worked out over the next two years by state agencies and counties. The legislation abolishes the collectives and cooperatives created after the Compassionate Care Act and defines marijuana as an agricultural product, to be provided by licensed dispensaries, delivered by licensed transporters, and grown by licensed growers in gardens of up to one acre. You cannot hold more than one kind of license. Growers will pay fees to the State Water Board: $1,000, $2,500, or $10,000, depending on the degree of their environmental impact, with reduced fees if they work through a farmer’s organization or coop. Penalties will be abundantly provided, but growers and providers are arguing for self-­‐regulation.

The urgency of this legislation is driven by the expectation of broader legalization in the near future, and the desire to have a model on which to base the new rules. It’s given pot farmers a place at the table, but what will happen there is anybody’s guess. A Blue Ribbon Commission convened last summer in Garberville, chaired by the Lieutenant Governor and attended by our US Representative, bringing unprecedented attention to the issue and a new political weight to rural Humboldt. But the Commission’s own Pathways Report: Policy Options for Regulating Marijuana (2015) tells us that the change will not happen in one election cycle.

The cops say they want to protect children and prevent highway accidents; elected officials desperately want the taxes; entrepreneurs and investors will be demanding profits. It will sorely test the state’s feeble regulatory mechanisms. See water, for example.

in their haste to the Emerald City Thadeus Greenson, “Growing the Machine” (North Coast Journal 4/30/2015), describes the players and the political history of CCV Humboldt.

Luke Bruner made the presentation to the county supervisors in February 2015. He got the board’s attention with the $2 billion figure, then characterized the issue as a civil rights struggle: small marijuana farmers, many of them in the supervisors’ chambers that day, were victims of discrimination. “We are equals in society and we should be treated as such.” The rowdy applause that followed was excused by Supervisor Fennell, saying they had just witnessed “a little bit of history.”

Bruner grew up in Chicago, took up theological studies, then worked as an anti-­‐abortion organizer. In a drastic career change, he came west to attend business school at Humboldt State, but instead became a convert to the cause of weed and the political process that would make it legal and profitable. He warned the supervisors that corporate America was waiting to

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move in and reap all the reward of our trademark crop. Act now, he urged them. “Our unique way of life is under threat.”

Bruner found a partner for his political vision in Kevin Jodrey, a botanist and contractor who moved to Humboldt when he realized he had “the perfect skill set to be a dope grower.”

He worked on so many indoor grows in suburban Arcata that he needed a map to find them all.

“My reputation is golden,” he said. “I’m the guy who brings in the loot.” Jodrey became cultivation director at the Patient Resource Center in 2008, where he met Bruner, then opened Wonderland Nursery in southern Humboldt and hired Bruner as business manager.

Wonderland advertises multiple strains of marijuana clones in colorful inserts in the North Coast Journal. In one special insert, Know Your Cultivator, we are told that Kevin is at the epicenter of the modern cannabis movement.

Though they use the slogans of liberation, Bruner and Jodrey have allied themselves with Humboldt County’s traditionally conservative politics (Bruner helped defeat Eureka progressive Chris Kerrigan in the 2012 supervisor election). More surprising, despite their promises, CCV Humboldt proposals have failed to address issues raised by Dan Ehresman of the Northcoast Environmental Center. They claim to have solved problems of scale and environmental impact by proposing use permits for gardens over 10,000 square feet—only a quarter of the state’s full-­‐acre allowance, they point out. A farmer can’t survive on anything smaller. As Scott Greacen of Friends of the Eel River has said, they look like one more industry seeking to write its own rules. These forceful young entrepreneurs, the visionary Bruner and the can-­‐do Jodrey, may be the Gregg-­‐Wood expedition of weed.

covering what we owe One day Acorn stopped by with a bundle. He lifted it out of the trunk of his car, brought it in, laid it on my desk and unwrapped it. It was a very large book: chronic freedom.

Assembly and design by Scott Holmquist, with interwoven narrative by Douglas Fir (2010). Large format, 19½ x 13½, hand-­‐sewn binding cords of 1.8 poly drip, cover boards of southern Humboldt white oak, in an edition of 30 copies. More than a thousand pages documenting the history of hippies and marijuana in Southern Humboldt from 1969 to 2010, it reproduces old newsletters, journals, posters, drawings, lists. Three pages carry an embedded bullet slug to commemorate three young men who died in the marijuana wars, including Acorn’s stepson. The book tells their story.

A copy was given to each of the families who’d lost a son. Three hundred facsimiles were printed, given away, or sold to collectors and libraries. The book’s introduction announces its intended audience—Against Dialogue: and for speaking only to ourselves. With several companion volumes it is shown at private homes in rural Humboldt County. Conceived as a public service as well as an act of resistance to the monopolist publishing industry, the book is both medieval and post-­‐industrial in concept. chronic freedom gives the community’s story back to itself. It documents the drug wars, the commodity spectacle of marijuana, all the memes of coolness the young men grew up with, and it redeems something of their culture and their lives. As if a book could be money.

As if a book could re-­‐pay some of what we owe.