by Alia Volz
At the highest point of the span, the girthy main cable descended to eye level, then swooped to the top of the north tower. Whoosh. The second tower spat them out the other side into a rural landscape with immediately warmer weather. This happened so fast; on one side was urban civilization, and on the other, gnarled oaks and butterflies.
No moisture followed them from the bay. Inland, the sky was robin’s-egg blue. Mer got that joint lit and Barb cracked the window. Donald tuned the radio to KSAN. “Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!” They sang along with Bowie as the truck descended into Marin. Clumps of sycamores wearing slow-burn autumnal colors stood in toasted brown fields. Petaluma, Santa Rosa, Cloverdale: grazing cows, apple orchards, half-collapsed barns. KSAN fuzzed out, sticking them with two Christian stations and one playing country and western. Purpling grapevines blanketed the fields along the highway. Hopland, Ukiah, Willits. After four sun-smacked hours in the truck, they blew across the Humboldt County line.
Neither Barb nor Mer had been this far north, but Donald knew the area well. An old pal of his lived in the woods near Garberville. He’d met Mumser—who’d taken her moniker from a Yiddish word meaning “bastard”—in the UW-Milwaukee theater department, and they’d hitchhiked to California together in 1971. Now, five years later, Mumser was living on a rural parcel with a burly mountain woman whom I’ll call Betsy. The collapse of the logging industry had flooded the market with large tracts of unwanted land, where rough, swooping hills discouraged people from living in close proximity. Donald had helped Mumser build her cabin using homesteading catalogs and how-to manuals. The result was rickety, full of chinks and corners that didn’t quite meet. But Mumser moved in anyway.
Thereafter, Donald had a home away from home in the country. After a few months in San Francisco, he’d either (a) burn out on the pace, (b) get strung out on smack, (c) fall out of grace with friends/lovers/dealers, or (d) all of the above. Then it would be time to cool out in the woods before thumbing a ride back to the City to spin the wheel again.
At Garberville—a one-horse town with a population of around eight hundred, a seedy motel, and a redneck bar called the Branding Iron Saloon—Donald guided them off the highway onto an intricate maze of dirt roads. Trees ruled the region: towering Douglas firs, expansive oaks, slick madrones with blood-colored skin curling away from the lime-green flesh underneath. Despite the worsening drought, fragrant redwood groves still seemed cool and moist, with tree trunks as wide as Barb’s truck. There were also ugly stretches of clear-cut land, scarred and eroded, barren but for stumps and weeds. They snaked over hills, around hairpin corners, and alongside sheer drops. Meridy stared out the truck window, awed by the majesty of this rough, unbridled wilderness.
* * *
A couple of weeks prior, Mer was kicked back on the barge watching TV and eating takeout from the Palace Chop Suey Café when she heard Donald jog up the stairs to their flat, back from visiting his friends in Garberville.
The crucial gestures of the 1976 presidential election were unfolding on TV, and as political races went, it was entertaining. “I wanna wish you a nice day and ask for your help,” Jimmy Carter said, pumping the hand of a bemused passerby. “I’m from Georgia and I’m running for president, yes, president of the United States.” He chuckled, as if to himself, then flashed a cheek-busting grin. The press followed him to bus stops and hotdog stands, where he’d natter amiably like he had nowhere else to be. Pundits doubted he could run a church picnic. But Carter’s down-home earnestness had an appeal in the aftermath of Watergate; he didn’t seem likely to steal a grape at the supermarket.
Gerald Ford wasn’t cut out to compete with a nice guy. After inheriting a furious country, he’d turned around and pardoned Tricky Dick, a move criticized from both sides of the aisle. He’d presided over a severe recession and the highest unemployment rates since the 1930s; vets returning from Vietnam couldn’t find work. Ford was also preternaturally clumsy; he’d slid head-first down the steps of Air Force One, then popped up to shake the Austrian chancellor’s hand as if nothing had happened—a clip that got funnier every time it aired. Mer almost felt sorry for him.
Donald poked his head into her room. “A rose is a rose is a rose,” he said.
“Chow mein?” Mer offered, holding up a carton.
Donald perched on the bed next to her. “Listen to me. A rose is a rose is a rose.”
He explained that Mumser and Betsy were preparing to harvest a spectacular crop with huge sticky sinsemilla buds the likes of which he’d never seen. Once the plants were dry, they would use tiny sewing scissors to snip stems and leaves away from the juicy buds. The detritus from trimming—known as “shake”—would get shoveled into garbage bags. That got Donald’s wheels turning.
“Say Mumser and Betsy get busted, God forbid,” Donald said. “The cops won’t care if it’s connoisseur bud or moldy old shake. A pound is a pound is a pound. Having this stuff lying around is a liability to them.” He popped a wonton into his mouth.
“What do they do with it?” Mer asked.
“It’s hard to get rid of,” he said, chewing. “Mumser still has a couple trash bags full from last year’s crop. She was about to burn it, but I stopped her.”
Mer shook her head. “Won’t the brownies be weak if we use shake instead of bud.”
“Not this shake.”
Donald’s Garberville friends were at the forefront of the California sinsemilla revolution. This new weed didn’t come compacted into bricks with sugar water or bound onto sticks. It grew regal and tall on hidden sunbathed hillsides. The buds were large, pert, and garnished with tiny crystals. Like Christmas trees for psychedelic dollhouses. Sinsemilla bud was too expensive to waste on brownies. Furthermore, it was too strong; the idea was to get people high, not put them in a coma. But then Donald thought: What about the shake?
“You know,” Mer said, dropping her chopsticks into the chow mein. “If this works, it could be big.”
“Gigantic.”
“Can you get us some to try?”
Donald hustled out to his room and came back with a large paper sack. “They gave me this to play with.”
After a Saturday sales run, Mer and Donald brought pizza to Barb’s and hung out while she experimented. Then they sampled the result and watched Saturday Night Live together. When Chevy Chase careened across the screen doing one of his Gerald Ford pratfalls, Mer laughed so hard she peed her jeans and had to borrow sweats from Barb.
The new brownies were stronger than what they’d been making with expensive Mexican bud and had the bright, fresh flavor of California’s finest.
* * *
Mumser didn’t have a telephone. So the crew had piled into Barb’s pickup that September morning without a plan—unless you consider showing up unannounced on an illegal pot farm in the woods a plan.
The cabin stood at the end of a long private driveway bristling with ponderosa pines. It was a crooked structure with a misshapen deck slouching off the side. Donald knocked on the door and peered through the window.
“I’ll find her,” he said. “Don’t wander around.” He jogged off behind the cabin, curls bouncing down his back.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mer muttered. “Tell me she’s here.”
“If we drove all the way up here for nothing, I’ll kill both of you,” Barb said. “I knew we should’ve sent a letter first.”
“It’s pretty up here anyway.” A fat white mare ambled up to the nearby deer fencing to check them out, chewing on a mouthful of dry grass. Barb smoked a cigarette while Boogie chased a squirrel and Mer made friends with the horse.
Fifteen minutes later, Donald trudged back up.
“Mumser’s visiting her folks in Milwaukee.”
Barb groaned.
Donald held his palms out soothingly. “It’s cool. Betsy says she’ll meet with us. The stuff is half hers anyway. We just have to wait for a couple of hours so she can finish her chores.”
Shading her eyes, Barb looked around at the t
reetops and the clear blue sky. “I have some mescaline we could do.”
* * *
Today, California pot growers can apply for licenses to operate legally. The associated cost and requirements vary by county and city, and can be discouraging to small farmers—but it’s a vastly different world. Throughout the seventies and eighties, growing a single plant was a felony offense in California. Decades later, Betsy is still reluctant to discuss their farm, but Mumser agrees to a phone call after some consideration. She still lives in Garberville, though she has moved into town and no longer farms.
“It was all for fun,” she says. “We didn’t come up here to grow. We didn’t! We just wanted to be in the country.”
After hitchhiking from Milwaukee with Donald, Mumser had initially settled in San Francisco. One night, she attended a gay and lesbian rally, and a drag queen got onstage. Some women in the audience took offense to the drag—viewing it as a parody of womanhood—and made a fuss. The LGBTQ+ community would become more united in later decades, but separatist movements were on the rise back then. Mumser left the rally disgusted. She’d come to California seeking an environment where living out of the closet wasn’t such a hassle only to get sucked into infighting. When Betsy invited her to build a cabin in the country, she went for it.
They were both urban women who knew nothing about homesteading, but they were enamored with the notion of living off the fat of the earth. The early 1970s was a rare moment in US history when the pace of urban migration slowed to a crawl as young people ditched cities in search of a simpler life. Land was cheap in Humboldt County then. The once-flourishing lumber industry—forty-seven sawmills within twenty-fives miles of Garberville in the 1950s—had dwindled as the hills were logged out; by 1976, two sawmills remained. Back-to-the-landers erected cabins and outhouses, planted sustenance gardens, raised goats and chickens, and set about living rustically. But while you’re planting tomatoes—and buying weed from someone else—you might as well plant your own weed. Then, while you’re planting your own weed, you might as well plant extra to sell. That money could buy a woodstove or badly needed insulation. Someday you might upgrade from an outhouse to a flushing toilet. And how are you going to afford a septic tank with organic tomatoes and welfare checks?
“We saw that people were getting new trucks and all this stuff,” Mumser says. “And we were like, Whoa, where did they get the money for that? And then we were like, Ooh.”
Cultivating high-quality pot was not a job for the lazy or unfocused as Mumser and Betsy soon discovered. They installed a water tank on a hilltop and ran lines to their patch, then lugged soil and fertilizer into the woods in fifty-pound sacks. Rabbits, deer, caterpillars, molds, fungi, and human thieves posed constant threats. In late summer, when the female plants produced psychoactive resin, every day of sunshine made the product stronger. But an early frost could ruin everything. Timing was essential. Once pulled, the plants were hung to dry on hooks in the cabins, where the growers could watch obsessively for signs of mildew.
It took about nine months of daily labor to usher an outdoor crop from soil prep to sale. At any stage, local police or federal drug enforcement could have seized everything—including their freedom.
“There were a lot of big people,” Mumser says. “But we weren’t big. We were just like a little small thing, just a little thing.”
By all accounts, their farm was small but mighty, and their homegrown packed a punch.
* * *
The Sticky Fingers crew drank foul-tasting mescaline tea on Mumser’s deck. Red-tailed hawks carved circles overhead. Barb sat on a rocking chair, Donald on the deck’s edge, Mer on a stump.
While waiting for the drugs to kick in or the grower to show up and do the deal—whichever happened first—they discussed a spectacularly complicated romantic entanglement Barb had fallen into. Her on-again, off-again boyfriend was sneaking around with another woman, his best friend’s girlfriend. So Barb started sleeping with the best friend, a burly carpenter named John Battle. John was supposed to be a fling, but Barb fell in love with him. It was mess worthy of a Jacqueline Susann novel and it was causing Barb a lot of heartache.
“So what’s with you and these Viking types?” Mer asked. John Battle, like most of Barb’s crushes, was tall, pale, and heavyset, with a bushy red beard. “Must be something from a past life.”
Barb grinned. “Call me Helga.”
“Not that I’m doing any better,” Mer said. She’d been nursing a crush on a wiry Scorpio who called himself Spider. They’d met at a party and talked for hours about art, love, spirituality—everything Mer cared about. But after flirting with her all night, Spider left with his arm around a squeaky petite blonde who’d had too much to drink. Mer’s love life was an endless series of almosts and nahs and whatevers punctuated by unbearable stretches of unrequited infatuation.
“We need to find you a magician,” Barb said. “Someone magical.”
Mer chuffed. “I won’t hold my breath.”
“Don’t be so negative. You have to visualize what you want in life,” Barb said. She tipped back in the rocking chair to gaze up at the sky. “Look,” she said. “There’s my Viking ship in the clouds. Come and get it, boys!”
A wave of laughter seemed to lift Mer off the deck then place her gently back down. “I just came on big time,” she said. Vibrations twanged along her arms as if each hair were an antenna tuned to a different radio station.
“I think I’m gonna barf,” Barb said.
Mer felt it, too: pangs in her gut like the beginning of food poisoning. The landscape suddenly exploded into intricate geometry. The firs and pines broke into interlocking triangles in varying shades of green. The clouds were layered circles of white and silver. Everything slowly rotated as if in a kaleidoscope. She vaguely heard Barb retching over the side of the deck. Donald began to sing, his rich tenor rising through the hush of the woods, and a flock of small brown birds burst from a nearby tree to perform spirals and loop the loops in time with his wordless song.
* * *
In a snapshot Donald took that day, Barb sits in a rocking chair on the dirt in Mumser’s yard, smiling. A jean jacket covers her knees, and she wears a white engineer’s cap over her blonde hair. Mer stands with one foot cocked on the chair and Barb’s arm slung over her knee. She wears an embroidered purple blouse, harem pants tucked into red knee socks, and no shoes, grass and twigs clinging to her feet. Her hair is in tight, uneven curls, and she’s grinning at the camera over dark sunglasses. Under her left arm, she clutches a copy of the I Ching. Behind them, there’s Barb’s white truck and tangled woods stretching toward golden-brown hills.
They spent the afternoon there, taking blurry pictures of one another’s dilated eyes and Boogie’s snout, and acquiring sunburns. Meridy tried to ride Betsy’s horse around the pasture and toppled off.
Betsy stopped by to greet them wearing nothing but jeans and muck boots, belly hanging over the waistband, breasts loose. She had curly blonde hair, and freckles across her chest and shoulders. She squatted on the porch. “What are you guys tripping on?”
“Oh, a little mescaline.”
Betsy’s smile was beautiful. “Well, come down to my house in an hour or so. No rush. I’ll be there.”
And she was gone.
Mer was amazed. She’d never met a woman who so obviously didn’t care what anyone thought of her—completely owning her boobs and belly. Betsy seemed to have discovered the secret to unselfconsciousness.
“I wish I could be natural like that,” Mer said. “I mean, how much time do we spend worrying about how we look? Worrying about those last five pounds.”
Barb snorted. “Or ten.”
Donald rolled a joint from sinsemilla raised on that very farm. Being there—where the marijuana consumed sunlight through its leaves and minerals through its roots, where it grew from tender sprouts to towering goddesses—changed the experience. From then on, when Mer smoked California sinsemilla, she would think of th
is place. The smell of the trees, the harmony of the colors.
* * *
Decades later, seedy weed has gone the way of VHS tapes; only people of a certain age will remember what a pain in the neck it was to deal with—and how mediocre the buzz could be.
The key to growing sinsemilla is murdering the men; one must kill every male marijuana plant before it can pollinate the females. Then, instead of producing seeds, the unfertilized females ooze gooey psychoactive resin. Stickier means stonier. But the differences between male and female plants are subtle and apparent only at certain stages in the plant’s growth. Sinsemilla farming is a delicate art, requiring horticultural knowledge and expert timing.
These techniques were new to the United States back then. The 1976 publication of Sinsemilla: Marijuana Flowers by Jim Richardson was a turning point. It’s a handsome coffee-table book with more space dedicated to photographs than words. The sparse writing makes an impact. Part practical manual, part pot porn, it gives step-by-step instructions that one doesn’t have to be a horticulturist to understand. And the language is so suggestive that it’s tempting to read it aloud in a phone-sex voice.
The virgin blossoms swell with sexual energy eager for consummation. But the breeze brings no pollen and the rhythm continues to intensify . . . As the last pistils come into the tips, the clusters turn pure white. The pods swell and the resinous coating thickens. The true sweetness of the flowers comes forth and becomes so strong it is almost too much to bear.
