Can't Find My Way Home by Martin Torgoff

Author:Martin Torgoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

IV. It’s Like Free Money…

THE WHOLE GARBERVILLE ECONOMY was organizing around marijuana, and a neighbor had come by the previous year to advise Steve Bowser that he would be able to build his house “a lot faster” if only he grew some weed for the market, where it was selling for fifteen hundred dollars a pound. Some guy from Ventura who had serendipitously moved in right down the road from Bowser that winter knew the technique: dig the hole two to three feet in diameter and depth, fill it with fertilizer. And that guy in turn knew some woman who came up and trimmed the buds after the harvest. And when it was all over, it had been a breeze to sell the weed through local contacts.

Six plants, four thousand dollars! That year Bowser became one of some thirty thousand marijuana growers in the northern Californian counties of Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma, Lake, Del Norte, Trinity, and Butte taking part in the largest illicit agricultural movement in the history of the United States: an underground society of cannabis farmers. Humboldt County, where Bowser lived, had been sparsely settled for a hundred years. After the Second World War, when sheep and cattle became less profitable, the building boom created great demand for Douglas fir timber. Ranchers made a lot of money throughout the late Forties and Fifties on what they considered useless junk trees cluttering up their grazing lands, but when the trees were all gone, that was the end of their income. That was when they started selling off the land, cutting up the huge ranches of between five thousand and fifteen thousand acres into much smaller parcels, and by the late 1960s those parcels had been subdivided again. By the time Bowser returned from Vietnam and saw the advertisements for “Humboldt County mountain land, 2 percent down payment” in the San Francisco Chronicle, the forty-acre parcels of a four-thousand-acre ranch in Honeydew were selling for twelve thousand dollars.

“People would come up in droves on weekends and pitch tents on hillsides, hand the dealer five hundred dollars, and have themselves a parcel of land,” Bowser remembered. “A lot of them didn’t know squat about what do with it or even how to make the payments. Garberville was a whacked-out little ex–logging town—plywood wooden storefronts, run-down bars, and not much else.”

Bowser’s status as a Vietnam veteran was typical of the community. “A big part of the back-to-the-land movement, as it turned out, was more about leaving a civilization behind than it was about building an alternative one,” observed Freeman House, the ex-Digger turned salmon conservationist, who was also growing a few plants on his land over in Petrolia, along the coast. “It was a way to drop out of the social mainstream.”

Freeman’s observation certainly applied to Earl Steven Bowser, an ex–air force fighter jock whose experience of the war had been bitterly disillusioning, to say the very least. Born in Columbus, Ohio, Bowser may have looked like an exemplary all-American officer, with his blue eyes and blond crew cut, but he was really an anomaly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.