Humboldt Gold :: Chapter Three
as told to Pernel S. Thyseldew by Larry Funk
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It didn't take me long to find my land. Garberville was (and is) loaded with realtors, and it seems like half the county is up for sale at any one time. For a price. I wasn't able to get a bargain, like those who had trekked north even three years before me. It hadn't taken the landowners long to realize the value of their acreages. If it was suitable for growing that all-time great cash crop...Humboldt Green Gold...or even if it wasn't suitable, they figured they could talk some dumb city slicker into believing he could grow a million dollars worth on a forty acre piece that faced due north, got no sun, and had no water.

I was saved from that particular fate by Brenda. Saving me from embarrassment seemed to be her Karma. She was really glad that I had taken the big step, had cut the silver cord; that is, moved away from home for the first time in my life. Well, that's not exactly true. I had spent almost the entire year of 1967 in San Francisco, trying to be a Flower Child. I had a room in the Haight, lived with a suitably spaced-out girl who called herself "Rosy Dawn," and limited my vocabulary to 26 phrases. Twenty-four if you eliminate "far out" and "groovy."

Then I was drafted. So, at nineteen, I was trained to be an operating room medic, just because my father was a doctor. After that, I spent two years in Germany and one in Washington. But in my mind, I never left home. The whole experience is a fog. I remember a few faces, one or two names. Mainly I remember how glad I was to get out and back to San Diego. There, I spent the next six months living at home while surfing and getting drunk.

My folks soon put the pressure on. In this generation, all Funks must go to college. The last thing we were supposed to remember was that on both sides of the family, Funks and Greenbaums, the grandparents had barely made it through the eighth grade before they proceeded to make themselves fortunes. Times were different, I was told, at least three times a day for six months. (You figure out how many lectures that adds up to.) "Times are different, Larry. You can't expect to go out and make something of yourself without a good education these days. So maybe you were born in the wrong century, but what can we do about that now? Go to school, get an education. Maybe it's not Medicine or Law for you. How about Engineering? Electronics? Advertising?"

After six months of this, I enrolled at San Diego City College. It was boring. I had been bored in high school, so why did anyone think I wasn't going to be bored in college? I dropped out, and enrolled in Business College. It was boring too. So I tried Welding School, which proved to be the most boring of all. Finally, I enrolled in Bartenders School. It wasn't all that boring. At last, I had a trade.

For the next couple of years, I tended bar here and there around town. I got an apartment of my own, a car, and a girl, and then another. I went to my folks' on Sunday for dinner, unless I was busy surfing or driving down to San Felipe to fish and drink beer. Then I got bored with bartending, and somehow drifted into the job at Pacific Stereo. And that's the way the seventies went.

By the time 1982 rolled around, I was going on 33 and getting used to the idea that I would spend the rest of my life pretty much the same way. Then Grandma died.

So here I was, with the not inconsiderable help of my baby sister, crawling over various pieces of real estate, trying to act like I knew what I was doing, with bucks in my pocket just burning to be spent. I guess I had some vague idea that I would end up with something that looked like "Tara" in "Gone With the Wind." The way it looked before the war.

What I got was 40 acres of hilly land with a small meadow, lots of second-growth trees whose names I do not know, a water supply, and a more or less waterproof tent. Tara it isn't. Nor Pacific Stereo, either.

That was also the year I found out that once you really and truly leave home, there's no going back. Sensational, huh? I think this thought has been passed on a time or two, but it had never before struck me as being profound. Like I said, I found out.

It was early November. I had my land, but I couldn't yet start a crop. That had to wait until Spring. So I helped Brenda and Eagle with theirs, at the same time picking up some tips on drying and cleaning. Actually, I learned more than I wanted to know. I would have preferred going into the next season under the happy impression that after I had busted my ass for nine months growing the stuff, my hardest days would be over. Instead, I learned that my back would hurt just as much in October as it did in May, only in different places.

By then, my romance with Kiki was on hold, meaning that she was holding out for a trip to some Swarthy Isle. I had made the mistake of bragging to her about my inheritance, also my income from the tax-free municipal bonds. She understood that I had to make land payments, and hold back enough cash to get me through the next year. But since she got through life on ten plants and a monthly welfare check, hoarding anything more was, to her, sheer anal retentive display.

So maybe I am the slightest bit cheap. Maybe I am also prudent. All I know is that in that point in time, it did not seem like a good idea to spend several large bucks to sit on some beach with a less than docile redhead. I decided instead to go back to San Diego for the winter. Brenda said I'd be sorry. I said I couldn't live in a tent all winter, any more than I could, or would spend three months in Hawaii with Kiki and foulmouthed Rain. I could, however, spend three months in my family home. Sure. I lasted three weeks.

It's funny. I hadn't really been aware, during all those years of Sunday dinners, how much time my mother spent needling the rest of us. Had she always been that way? Had her laugh always sounded like a duck drowning? Had my father always addressed me in a way that intimated I was the retarded one in the family? Was he forever going to call me "Sonny?" Why me? I'm the oldest for God's sake! Why didn't he call David "Sonny?"

Was it really possible that I had changed so much in three months away from San Diego?

I traded in my Camaro, got a Toyota 4 by 4, and hauled ass back north.

After listening to Brenda say I told you so for two days, I took Kiki and Rain to Jamaica. From there we went to Mexico, and by the time we got back to Humboldt in February, it was time for me to become a serious grower.