I had to proceed three quarters of a mile up the dry ravine and then go over the right bank. I did that. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t crossing the Rhine, either. When I left the ravine, not much light remained. Two hundred yards on my belly put me in sight of the house. Shack, really. There was light; not the cold light of electricity, but the rich amber of a kerosene lantern. It showed one window clearly in the dark mass of the house, and the crack of a half open door. Nothing moved in the yard. I glassed the place as thoroughly as I could while some light remained; then I waited. Several times, someone walked between the light and the window. Once I heard what sounded like a whine. It was a sound I had been listening for.

Twenty minutes later, a gaunt figure came to the door and set something on the porch. From two places in the yard, heavy shadows lifted themselves up and glided over to eat. I couldn’t tell the breed, but they were dogs, and they were big.

I didn’t need much from this place. I wasn’t gathering evidence for a grand jury. This was Skinny Alan’s property; if they were growing a significant amount of pot here, then I was on the right track. What I didn’t want was to wander around in the dark running into booby traps. Most of the stories about trip wires and shotguns in the California north woods were probably not true. Probably not. But I didn’t want to test the assumption, so I stayed where I was and prepared to wait out the night.

Mosquitoes moved in. They tried their best, but compared to the kind I knew as a child, they were a joke. A Wisconsin mosquito would have eaten them alive. I put on my jacket, ate a No-doze and waited. And waited. The moon came up late and thin and mostly hidden by trees. The dogs down below ate and went back to sleep. Occasionally one of them would snarl low and quick out of reflex. About two AM the inhabitant of the shack came out with a flashlight, stirred them up and cussed them out as she walked to a small building behind the shack. I saw that it was a woman and the building was an outhouse. Five minutes later she went back inside, and that was the high point of the night.

The sky began to lighten about five. By six there was color in the sky and she had a light on inside. About that time I smelled bacon, so I ate another candy bar. At seven fifteen, she came out, lean and hard, dressed in ragged denim and plaid flannel. She was about forty-five, with skin like leather and a graying hair that she had cut short. She gathered up a hose and a bucket, called the dogs, and set off uphill toward the ravine.

I gave her a good start, then followed. Once I had established that she was following a trail, I cut out into the woods so I wouldn’t leave a scent on the ground. The buck brush and manzanita were more than head high, but I could catch a glimpse of her from time to time. It was an easy stalk. more tomorrow

The Chamber of Commerce had an information booth in one of the hardware stores. Between hip boots and manure scoops, I picked up a city map, and bought topographic maps of the surrounding countryside.

This was the valley of the Eel River, and topography dictated the crescent shape of the town. The river itself was across the valley, on the other side of the freeway, and the town filled the remaining space between the ranges of low brown hills. No one was adventurous enough to build houses up where they could overlook the valley, probably because there wasn’t that much to see. I had driven through some pretty country to get here, but Garberville itself was nothing to brag about.

The Thunderbird Motel was just seedy enough for my needs. It looked like a place where fishermen would stay when the steelhead were running. That definitely wasn’t now. By one o’clock the sun was blistering. The motel room air conditioner was tired and noisy; I turned it on high and spread my maps on the bed. Comparing topographic maps to the plat descriptions was no easy task. They operated out of different ways of thinking. I finally found a description of the intersection of two roads on one of the plat descriptions that I could match up with the topo; after that I could locate myself and find some of the properties I had come to see.

Then I used the phone book to check addresses. Only William Johnson was listed. I checked out the location of his house, and of Jim Davis’. Skinny Alan lived in Redway, and I didn’t have a map for it.

I found food, ate, showered, set the alarm, and slept. At six that evening, I was dressed and driving. I figured I had about two hours of useable light left.

Ninety minutes later, I was afoot with the shotgun hanging across my back and the .44 on my belt, hiking up a ravine toward the nearest piece of suspicious property.

The Pinto was stashed out of sight up a dirt road. If anyone saw it, and cared enough to notice, it looked pretty much like an abandoned car. If I left it there long enough, someone would steal the tires. Otherwise, I wasn’t worried about it giving me away.

Remember, this was 1989. There were no Google maps. No Google, in fact, and barely anything resembling the internet. Just topographic maps.

I had studied the topo map with great care. The ravine I was hiking in ran up through the scrub oak and manzanita in the general direction of the only building that showed. Of course, the topo had last been revised fifteen years earlier. There could have been a small town up ahead, and I wouldn’t know it. At least the contours of the land would be the same, barring bulldozers. I had to proceed three quarters of a mile up the dry ravine and then go over the right bank. 750 double steps of a Roman legionnaire. The way I was weaving about to avoid the brush, I would call it a thousand. If I went too far, the ravine cut sharply to the left, and I could backtrack a couple of dozen yards. more tomorrow

If I wanted to be a big pot grower today, I would have lots of little plots of land scattered all over the area . . .”

“Like the seventeen plots owned by the Davises.”

“Yeah, only maybe more so. You know of seventeen. How many are there you don’t know about? Anyway, I wouldn’t want to have too much direct contact with the farming. I’d be management. I’d supply the means, pay salaries, and skim my take off the top.”

Rusty stopped in mid-sentence, then looked at me sharply and said, “Mostly, Gunn, I’d enforce discipline. If your man could do that, he could make millions. But he would have to be ruthless. A guy like that couldn’t hesitate at a few killings.”

Rusty wiped up the last of his eggs with a piece of toast and asked, “How are you armed?”

I told him about the Bulldog. He just shook his head and said, “Wait.” He headed off downstairs to his shop and five minutes later came back with an ancient double-barreled shotgun. It was a basket case. Apparently someone had let it rust and then had sanded the rust off. Instead of having it reblued, they had covered the metal, and half the stock, with black spray paint. The stock was wrapped with duct tape.

Rusty was polishing it with a rag. Not to make it look good; he was removing his fingerprints. He handed it to me along with a couple of boxes of shells.

“I took this in trade, thinking I’d rebuild it in my spare time. It’s old, and it’s never been registered. It’s sound, despite what it looks like. I’d like to give you something better, but you need something that ballistics can’t trace. I’m giving you double-ought buck and in case things get real serious, slugs. They aren’t accurate past twenty yards, but they’ll stop a grizzly in his tracks.”

Chapter Thirty-three

I headed north across the Golden Gate and took Highway 101 through the oak and gold clarity of a Marin County morning. Choosing a speed was a delicate task. The last thing I needed was to be pulled over while I was carrying a pair of unregistered weapons. Cars were slamming past me in true California fashion, going eighty and ninety. Fifty-five miles per hour was the law then, but it would have been suicidal, so I kept pace with the slowest traffic at just under seventy.

I was heading into country that I knew only by hearsay. During all my years in San Francisco, I had not had the leisure or the money to explore the state. I had been to Sacramento a number of times, on business for Joe Dias or doing research for my thesis, but I had only gone as far north as Mendicino once, on a fishing trip. Garberville was about fifty miles inland from there, and further north.

I came off the freeway about noon and rolled through the town from end to end to get a feel for the place. There wasn’t a lot to see. One main street ran north and south, a second dead ended into it and carried traffic back toward the freeway. Restaurants, gas stations, a lumberyard, two hardware stores, a movie theater, two grocery stores, an antediluvian five and dime still hanging on long after the main chain had died, and four or five video rental stores. Since it was California, there were also two health food stores, a new age bookstore, and a palm reader. more tomorrow

“I don’t mean everybody. There are a lot of pacifists up there in the hills. People who still stand by what they stood for twenty years ago – who would rather be robbed than shoot someone. But there are a lot of people squirreled away up there, and if even a small percent is armed, that’s a lot of firepower.

“That’s the little guys. The big growers went Nazi. At harvest time, those counties started looking like Army maneuvers. Everyone wearing camouflage gear and carrying rifles. Outside the town, they were carrying machine guns. Seventeen year old kids dropping out of school to sit out in the forest all dressed up to play soldier with a real Uzi in their hands.

I said, “It sounds like Viet Nam.”

Rusty snarled, “You weren’t there, man, so don’t tell me what Nam was like.”

I just shrugged and hoped I hadn’t set him off. Then he nodded, and said, “Yeah, I guess. No discipline; kids with guns; most of them with no real sense of why they’re there. A little like Nam, but only like a pale shade of it. Way, way watered down.

“Bad enough to make me leave, though,” he added. “I grew up in that area and knew it when you could be free there. When the paranoia set in, I left. It got so I couldn’t walk into the woods to take a pee without worrying if someone was going to shoot me. ‘Course, the chances were nothing would ever have happened. Like living here. Man, people get killed in San Francisco every week, but nobody has taken a shot a me yet. Still, it spoiled things. I used to hunt and fish all over that area when I was a kid and all I ever had to worry about was bigfoot. Now kids the age I was then are driving big cars, carrying AK-47s, and snorting coke bought with their earnings. I just didn’t like living there any more.”

Rusty slammed his chair back from the table and went to the refrigerator. He took out bacon and eggs, and started cooking. I didn’t say anything. He was worked up, and he had to do something with his hands before he could go on. I understood that, and you don’t push Rusty if you want his help.

There was a lot of slamming of frying pans and low voiced cussing. Eventually, he tossed a plate of eggs and bacon in front of me and sat down to eat his. It was edible. Just. I choked it down and waited.

Finally, Rusty said, “About your problem. The man you want would be a big grower, but things have changed in the last few years. About the time things got too weird, a bunch of drug control agencies started working together and put a lot of big growers out of business. They started using helicopters and concentrating on the biggest growers. Some of those guys would clear an acre of timber in a national forest, sell the logs, then plant a whole field of pot. That only worked until they started air surveillance. A lot of big guys went down.

“This was after I left. I only know the details by hearsay. If I wanted to be a big pot grower today, I would find some way to spread the risk around. I would have lots of little plots of land scattered all over the area . . .” more tomorrow

“They wanted to live off the land and be independent. Man, you just can’t do that. It’s fucking impossible. You can make a living in farming – if you’re lucky – if you have a half a million dollar investment in farm machinery and two hundred acres of good, black Kansas land. Not in the hills up north. They starved. And they all grew pot. And they sold a little to get by, just like they had in the cities, only now they were growing their own. Sort of cut out the middle man, see. That started it.”

I said, “This doesn’t sound like what I’m looking for.”

“It isn’t. It’s how most of the pot farmers do business, and why. It isn’t how most of the pot gets grown. You follow the distinction?”

I nodded.

“Most of the growers are small time. They think and act like overage hippies. Or like kids who grew up with hippie parents. Most of them are pretty decent people, really, although their thinking is too damned sappy for me.

“The thing that came later and turned the whole business around was sinsemilla. That’s an improved strain of marijuana and an improved way of growing it. You separate the male and female plants and frustrate the reproduction urge. The plant responds with more of the chemicals that make it good to smoke. It gets real potent.

“Pot was already bringing some money into the back country and keeping the homesteaders afloat, but sinsemilla would sell for real money. That’s when some guys started farming it on a mass basis, with plantations of pot cared for by hired workers. It started to be a real crazy scene. Guys would bring workers out into the back country, especially around harvest time, and leave them stranded miles from nowhere. The workers would make good money, by local standards, but sometimes they got stiffed, and sometimes they were treated no better than slaves. The guys running the show, the plantation bosses and their lieutenants, weren’t your top-of-the-line folks. They had new money and lots of it, and most of them used it to spend their time smashed, sometimes on their own product or booze, but more often on coke.

“It was the money that changed everything. It was still hard work, but now you could hire people to do it, and get rich as ‘management’. It was easier still to wait until someone else had raised a crop, then swoop down at harvest time and throw five thousand dollars worth of plants in the back of your pickup. Or wait until the plants were processed and carry away fifty thousand dollars worth at gun point. So the growers started arming themselves. The big guys were first, but even some of the small time growers started to carry guns. You’d see people who went through the peace movement – who used to shove flowers down the barrels of National Guard rifles – sitting out all night among their plants with a rifle across their knees.” more tomorrow