Growing has
created a new set of rules, a new etiquette that
Amy Vanderbilt, or whoever, would never think to cover.
The rule covering
locked gates in September, for example. A lot of the roads up
here are private, and maintained by the property owners. One of
the leading
causes of dissension among neighbors is road maintenance. Meetings
of the road
committee are often quite heated.
That these roads
are private is a fact not appreciated by visitors and tourists
accustomed to the public streets and freeways of Southern California.
That
these same roads are often sealed with gates and locks is a puzzle
to some of
the slower witted visitors. But considering the value of the crops
grown behind
most of them, it's not too off the wall for the owners to want to
cut down on
the casual traffic of deer hunter, hiker, or rip-off. A locked gate
is the
simplest solution. Posting road guards during harvest season isn't
unusual
either. Of course, neither of these measures can stop the Law, who
will either
cut the locks or drop out of the sky in helicopters.
But it's the
rip-off the growers hope to discourage most. Thus the rise of
"road etiquette." I ran into a couple of friends at the
P.O. the other day who
live up the first road to my west. Avocado Al is a refugee from
a Fallbrook
avocado ranch. He told his family, after he settled up here, that
he was
growing avocados in Humboldt. One morning his old man appeared on
the doorstep,
wanting to take a look at the grove. That ruse exploded, Al, honest
to God,
turned to growing kiwi fruit. Of course, he also plants pot in the
kiwi grove.
Al's neighbor,
Marie, is a nice, motherly back-to-the-land type who brings huge
supplies of whole wheat and honey cookies to all the local get-togethers.
The
fact that they are completely inedible doesn't faze her. It's the
giving that
counts. Her friends usually invent ways to toss the incredible inedibles
into
the blackberry thickets, which results in a rash of quail and rabbit
indigestion.
Seeing them
talking that day in the post office, I broke in on the conversation
just as Al was saying, "She knows the score. She knows better
than to bring a
friend up from Berkeley right now!"
Marie, sounding
anxious, asked, "Does she know the new combination on the
lock?"
"No, thank
the Lord. Joe let them in. They were waiting at the gate, and he
just plain let them in. Man, he's gotta be warned about that."
Marie nodded.
"He's sure lived here long enough to know the road rules."
She
turned to me. "You'd know enough not to let a couple of people
up your road,
wouldn't you, Larry?"
"Um, we
don't have a gate," I said apologetically. "We post guards
with
walkie-talkies, though. And we stay home a lot too. Right now, I'm
just in town
doing a mail run for the road." I displayed my dangle of keys
as proof of our
roads' responsible attitude during these trying days.
Marie turned
back to Al. "So what happened when you got home?"
Al jammed his
thumbs in his jeans pockets. "I told her as nicely as I could
that she had to take her friend and split. She got all hot about
that, but she
left early the next morning. Left me a note that she'd be back in
a week to
pick up her things. So now I'm telling everybody on the road to
unlock the gate
for her only if she's alone."
Marie patted
him on the shoulder, and I tried to look sympathetic. He was not
to be consoled. "I am pissed," he groaned. "My own
wife carrying on like she
didn't know the score. It's unfuckingbelievable!"
I moseyed back
out to my road and passed out the mail. Reg the Veg volunteered
to make the next mail run, and John Smith said he was up for the
grocery run,
and to please leave lists and money on his kitchen table before
ten the next
morning.
I went back
to my tent and tried to bring CAMP in on the scanner. They must
have been out of range, because all I got was the ambulance bringing
in an old
lady with chest pains. I envied her the simplicity of her problem.
I was due
for guard duty from midnight to dawn, and needed some sleep so I
could stay
awake later. It was boring work, even with Reg the Veg for company.
Also,
nights were getting cold, and we had to keep moving so our feet
didn't numb.
I managed to
doze through the early evening. At about 11:30, I put on my
camo...olive green watch cap and a smear of blacking across my face...and
picked up my walkie-talkie and shotgun. Reg was waiting by his driveway.
"You
want to go up or down?"
"I'll go
down." We each took a direction from the middle of the road.
Reg would
walk up to where the road faded away in a canyon that led to the
Fibbles, and I
would walk down to the paved county road. We would stay in touch
through the
radios. Then after a few minutes, we would retrace our steps and
meet in the
middle, where we could hang out a little and have a smoke and some
of the
coffee Reg brought in his thermos. It wasn't bad duty, shared like
that, and
Reg's coffee was fine.
On nights like
this one, I tried not to think about what I would do if I
encountered a trespasser. A sinister one. To bolster my courage,
I once told
Reg I was sure I'd shoot to kill. I don't think he believed me,
even though he
did call me "Killer Funk" for awhile. But didn't somebody
say there are no
pacifists in foxholes?
As I stashed
the last of my crop into ZipLok bags late last November, I
realized that this part time occupation involved a bit more than
advertised. I
admit I'm not the early bird set to grab the first worm, like some
growers out
there who are in the bag and sold by October...sometimes September.
Still, I'm
not a total laggard. I take until about Thanksgiving to get my stuff
ready to
sell...if I'm lucky enough to have something to sell. Then I have
to haul it to
San Diego and collect my money, by which time it's Christmas.
Then comes my
winter vacation. A lot of people seem to resent that aspect of my
routine. Though the vacation time and sick leave in most jobs comes
pretty
close to the time I spend on Mexican beaches, I'm still made to
feel like some
exploiter of the masses because I grab my vacation in January.
Anyhow, by February
I'm back in my tent, going through my seed stock. I have
now reached that level of sophistication where I no longer have
to buy my
plants, as I did the first year. I don't even have to buy my seeds.
Brenda
showed me how to save a male and pollinate a couple of nice mamas.
It's not as
sexy as it might sound. Shaking one plant over another plant is
not my idea of
eroticism.
Following that,
I prepare my seed beds, crooning over the little ones, and
making sure the mouse traps are set. And its off and running again.
Next comes the
transplanting into little pots, then into bigger pots, and
finally into the ground. And of course, I still have my "holes"
to fix every
year. Just because I don't go through that 'Chinese Coolie' torture
of the
first year doesn't mean I'm off the hook. Marijuana is what those
in the trade
call a "gross feeder." That means it takes a lot of stuff
in the ground and on
the plant to produce those two pound beauties I aim for. I have
not yet found
the perfect formula. I keep trying. Great cooks aren't born overnight.
When I first
got up here, I was dazzled by all the exotic recipes I was
given. There was, for example, the "Vegetarian-Organic"
recipe that uses no
animal products or synthetic chemicals whatsoever. No bone meal,
no fish
emulsion. It does employ liquid seaweed and allows the use of manure...because
shit has been through the animal, but is not of him, and because
chickens and
steers are vegetarians, right? I've never followed this recipe with
any
devotion. I always give in and use fish emulsion. And come blossom
time, I
weaken yet more and go for a high phosphate synthetic. This puts
me beyond the
pale not only with the vegetarians, but with the organic growers.
Live and let
live, I say. This does not go over so big with them either. I've
stayed away so
far from the more exotic ingredients, like dog kibble and karo syrup.
Brenda
advises me to learn to grow a decent size plant with time honored
techniques
before I go off the board. Someday, though, when I get a really
good grow going
and am a little ahead of the game, I'm going to have an experimental
patch
where I can try out all the crazy things I hear have been done to
plants: those
ideas that get thrown around after midnight at the Branding Iron.
California is
a big state. Some think it's too big, that it really should be
two states, North and South. Maybe they're right. I'm 750 miles
from San Diego,
as the freeways go, and the differences I see between here and there
are
astounding. Different landscapes, different climates; even the people
are
different. They look different, they drive different cars, and they
listen to a
different sound.
For one thing,
there is no Spanish influence to speak of up here. To give you
an example of how pervasive that is in the south, let me tell you
a small
story. Once, on a trip home, I ran into an old girlfriend who acted
interested
in what I was doing. She even asked for my new address. When I told
her
"Garberville," she said, "Where?" I said, "Humboldt
County." She got out a pen
and wrote it down: "Jumboldt County." I pointed out her
error and she just
shrugged. "I've lived in Southern California so long that all
h's are j's as in
San Jose, Jacumba...like that." Then she got into her red 280Z
and roared off
to La Jolla. She never did write. Or maybe her letter rests in some
dead file,
its J as in Humboldt determining its destination.
After my friends
discovered how long it would take them to drive from the sunny
southland to visit me, I found myself with far fewer friends. Only
those caught
in a heavy dope habit who figured to buy it wholesale for doing
the 1500 mile
round trip stayed in touch. Usually the touch came about the end
of September.
Dope is grown
in Southern California too, of course, but our northern stuff has
the mystique. Users will gladly pay extra to be assured they are
inhaling the
essence of these northern hills. One guy told me he didn't think
dope raised in
the smog belt could be any too good for the body, so he had to have
either
Humboldt or Hawaiian to maintain his well-being.
The buyers can
be impressed with proof of point of origin. It's like having
the stuff packed in bags from a favorite local market, with the
name printed on
the paper. One store here printed bags in bundles of 500, and rumor
had it that
some showed up as far away as New York and even Paris!
