Back in the day, all my pals grew marijuana by the bushel in the mountains between Coos River and the Elliot State Forest. In fact the economy of the south coast got a boost from the thriving throbbing pot trade that spread north from Humboldt County CA. Down there you would see these scruffy long-hairs driving around in new Land Rover four-wheel-drives, wearing Carhardts and Fiskars shopping at the coop and the grange supply, while the loggers drove beaters and ate welfare cheese and the sawmills shut their doors.
The timber industry was dying and the coastal communities shriveling in agony and the homegrown sensemilla trade became the single largest agricultural business in the state, bigger than timber, bigger than grass seed, bigger than fruit or wheat. Illegal and unregulated and yet quietly saving the life of the hardware stores and the gas stations and the taverns in all those little coastal towns.
It was damn simple to do, not easy but simple, in those days, anyway, before the local gendarmerie wised up to what was under their noses and discovered they could grow their budgets and corresponding prestige by railroading county councils with hysterical balderdash about the growing menace of growing. Patent bullshit to be sure but it eventually killed the life. Eventually, but not right away.
I tell you it was a nice thing to have a crop in the fall, cured by thanksgiving, money by Christmas, Bali in February, back to the greenhouse for sprouts in April.
Frank Stuart , whom you may remember from these pages, lived way up the East Fork of the Millicoma where he had a patch every year. Frank was the spiritual leader of the Coos County growers clan.
He dreamed up, in a sensemilla haze late one night, a series of three bumper stickers based on the meme "Honk if you blah-blah-blah" I'm sure you have seen them.
The first said "
Honk if you got the seeds!" Because you can bullshit all you want and anything will grow but to get the good shit you had to have good seeds because in those days before cloning everything came from seed. And there were only a few guys who propagated genetically selected seed, a secret art that was carefully hidden from view and rigorously protected by its customer base.
And actually was more lucrative than growing if you had the knack and the tedious patience for that kind of thing..
The second sticker read: "
Honk if you got the Buds" because the second watershed event meant that you had fought off the deer and the elk and the rabbits and pack-rats and the fern-pickers, hunters, drought, disease and the local cops. And that you had found the energy to climb the hill every blessed day and found enough water and a way to carry it because these fuckers, six-foot pot plants in good amended soil drink a fuck of a lot of water. And it meant that you had successfully weeded out the males before it was too late and that you hadn't been ripped off and that you had found a place to hang and cure the plants and somebody you could trust to help you trim the buds, because thirty or forty healthy sensemilla plants means fifty or sixty pounds of dried buds and that takes hours of tedious handwork when it is done right.
The last sticker in the series really got, though, to the crux of the matter, because that kind of pot would fetch, in quantity, 40 years ago, a thousand or 1500 dollars a pound. Times 50or 60 pounds. To a scruffy longhair, and a new 4wd cost maybe 15k. Frank chartered a KingAir with a pilot when he went to visit the pals in Cali, completely upfront about it, "Hell yes," he would say to the flight service attendant, "I grow the Reefer, and its been good to me. Here, let me get that check. " And out would come a horse-choker of a roll from his scrawny overhauls pocket. Frank knew what was what.
Because the real art, see, was to get the shit to the retailers without getting scammed or beat, dealers that were smart enough and established enough to actually pay you for the shit. I remember like it was yesterday that night at the table in the Timber Inn, Frank leaning back for a pull at a Heinekin, asking the waitress for a clean plate and a package of Riz-La, rolling a handful of doobies and passing them around the table and then drawing this on a napkin:
"Honk if you got the money!"
The point of all this being to say that I finished the deal on the boat yesterday, and I can safely now say this:
"HONK"
