Brady - Humboldt: Life on Americas Marijuana Frontier

: Proposition 215, Californias 1996 medical marijuana law. Also, shorthand term for the doctors recommendation that allows one to use or grow marijuana for medicinal purposes.

Back-to-the-Land: A migration movement from cities to rural areas by American youth that began in the late 1960s.

Bank of the Woods: Cash savings that are buried or hidden on ones property, often in plastic tubes, glass jars, or recycled pickle or pepperoncini barrels.

CAMP: The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. A multi-agency task force created in 1983 with the goal of eradicating marijuana cultivation throughout California.

CAMPed: A verb used by pot growers to describe a garden that has been destroyed or confiscated by law enforcement.

Cartels: Criminal organizations blamed by law enforcement for massive grows found on public land, despite lack of evidence linking them to Mexican organized crime.

Depping: Light deprivation; an agricultural technique of covering outdoor pot plants with a black tarp to simulate nightfall and induce flowering and an early harvest.

Diesel dope: Marijuana grown under lights powered by diesel-powered generators.

Fronting: Providing pot to a dealer on condition that you will be paid once the dealer sells it to someone else.

Guerrilla growing: Growing pot on someone elses land or public land without permission. More common among small growers before medical marijuana; now largely attributed to cartels.

Grow or Scene: A marijuana garden.

Grower: Someone who grows pot; could be six plants or six hundred.

Hempheimers: Marijuana-induced forgetfulness.

Hipneck: A hippie-redneck hybrid. Such a person might be named Sunshine, drive a big truck, and grow a lot of marijuana.

Homestead: A home built by its owner, often located off the electrical grid with no indoor plumbing and with a small marijuana patch growing out back next to the vegetable garden.

Humboldt time: A relaxed notion of time; the opposite of punctual.

Humboldt twenty: A hundred-dollar bill.

Marijuanaries: Places envisioned for some time in the future where tourists can visit and sample pot and learn about how it is grown and harvested.

Pot Princess: An attractive young woman who dates wealthy growers who have giant trucks and gardens. Also known by the more negative term potstitute.

F ollow the same path as the youth who once fled the city. From San Francisco, cross the Golden Gate and head north through the rolling hills of Marin, and then Sonoma County. Keep going. In the summertime, the landscape is a sun-scorched ocher. After the rains have begun, it is an Irish shade of green. Continue through the vineyards to Mendocino. Hours will pass. The grassy hills give way to ragged mountains, and the trees grow pointy and thick. On foggy days, the treetops catch the mist that billows in off the Pacific, and clumps of it hang there like fallen clouds.

Past the South Fork of the Eel River the road winds through a patch of ancient redwood forest called Richardson Grove State Park. These trees, the coast redwoods, are the tallest living things on earth. They come from another time; their ancestors provided shade for dinosaurs. Californias redwood forest once stretched from the Oregon border south to Big Sur. Then, in the 1850s, men who came west seeking adventure and riches discovered the beauty and durability of the wood. They called it red gold. Trees were leveled. Fortunes were made. Today, only 4 percent of Californias old-growth redwood forest remains, like a magnificent cathedral that has been knocked to the ground, with only its gilded altar left standing.

In Richardson Grove, the redwoods loom mere inches from the roadway, and the trunks of the larger ones may be wider than your car. The oldest tree in the grove is called the Grandfather. Shaped like a giant slingshot, with two trees sprouting from his base, the Grandfather is about twenty-four stories high and has stood for more than 1,800 years. His rings tell the story. Just beneath the fibrous bark, man landed on the moon. Deeper inside, Columbus sailed across the Atlantic. Toward the core, Mayans were beginning to carve their language into temple walls.

Inside the grove, even on a warm summer day, it is dark and cool. Most of the sunlight is caught in the branches of the giants high above, but in places, it filters down, leaving delicate lacelike patterns on the road.

Keep driving. Youre almost there. Richardson Grove marks the unofficial entrance to Humboldt County. Pass through it and youll begin to understand the local saying about living in a world that exists behind the redwood curtain.