This hardscrabble Northern California town has become a hotbed for medical marijuana farming. Kids stroll much of the year past pungent plants flourishing in gardens and alleys. The red-and-black clad Timberjacks football team moved its halftime huddle on a recent Friday night to avoid the odor of marijuana smoke wafting over the gridiron from nearby houses. Some students talk openly of farming pot after graduation, about the only opportunity in this depressed timber town.
How Trinity County, a sprawling, lightly populated area twice the size of Rhode Island, came to be dubbed "Northern California's pot paradise" by High Times magazine is a story of law, lawlessness and geography.
Just a little more than 14,000 residents are spread across its 3,000 square miles. People live as they like in its mountains thick with trees, separated from civilization by windy roads and "No Trespassing" signs. For decades, that's made it easy for some residents to grow marijuana without much interference.
That's no shit. I went to visit a friend of mine in Hayfork forty years ago. He had moved up there from pretty affluent circumstances in SoCal to live with his grandparents in a cabin 'out on the Hyampom road'. Those were hippie days and he helped the old folks out and grew dope.
Hayfork is so far out in the sticks that its zip code is eieio. I got there from the west via CA SR36 which wasn't paved at that time for the last twenty miles into town. It was uphill and winding, and my biggest memory is driving with my left ear out the window listening for the jake brakes of loaded logging trucks coming downhill in the opposite direction right at me!. The upside was that after the first big rig appeared outta nowhere around a blind turn, they couldn't scare the shit outta me. If I'da known then what I know now about the sometimes lackadaisical maintenance on backwoods big rigs...ah, the innocence of youth, ignorance really is bliss, fools rush in and all that. But I digress.
The parking space for the cabin was on the opposite side of the road. Walk across the road, then across a suspension foot bridge high enough over Hayfork Creek (a tributary of the South Fork Trinity River and pronounced 'crick') so as to be passable during the occasional high water, and then uphill a little ways to the cabin.
By modern standards, my buddy's grow was pretty modest, maybe twenty or so plants in amongst his grandparents' vegetable garden which he also took care of, but growing weed was a major felony back then, so he kept it quiet. Nobody up there gave a shit, and nobody came looking for it. The local culture was all about logging*, and my pal was enough of an oddity that he was 'that thar hippie grandson of the _________s'. They're pretty friendly folks up there and so was he and he got along fine.
*Q: Why do loggers have foreskins?
A: So they got a place to stash their chew at lunchtime.
He'd been up there a coupla years and had something I had never seen at that time: 2lb. coffee cans full of manicured weed. Many of them. I was there for three days and never drew a straight breath, and no reason to. Pretty laid back bucolic lifestyle. Heh. 'Lifestyle' wasn't even a word then.
He wasn't in it for the money and only needed enough of that to get by, and as far as I know his only cash customer was his brother in SoCal.
Those were simpler times. My friend was pretty pure at heart about growing weed as the answer to society's ills and not much interested in money.
These days, like almost everything else, it's all about the money. I can see growing weed to make a living in these post-logging depression days, but greed has gone way beyond that as usual and has fucked up even little out-of-the-way Hayfork. Seems like you can't get far enough out in the sticks these days to avoid it.
Such is progress sometimes, not always for the good. Sigh.
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