The High Life
by Wells Tower, tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com
March 25th 2011
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The sights of Humboldt County, Calif., can be hard for the rational mind to
reconcile. Its hysterical shifts in landscape and weather conspire to make you
feel, in the most pleasurable way possible, that you are going out of your
head. A day’s drive in Humboldt carried me past what appeared to be: a Hawaiian
beach, an Icelandic coastal flat, a swath of rustic Switzerland, an
elk-thronged Montana prairie, a street in San Francisco, the Ewok moon of
Endor, a prop village from a musical about the Gold Rush, and Allentown, Pa.
The dawn brought blue skies, which turned to brilliant sunlit rain, then hail,
then sleet, then driving snow, then back to full sun refracting into a huge
rainbow that seemed like the meteorological equivalent of a crazy person’s
laugh.
Humboldt’s atmospheric caprices echo the character of a county that proudly
resists any consensus about what constitutes a sane or normal way of life. A
five-hour drive north from San Francisco, Humboldt is a mostly rural coastal
region a little less than twice the size of Delaware, inhabited by 129,000 or
so artists, back-to-the-landers, outdoorsfolk, slow-food entrepreneurs and
urban refugees who found the Upper Haight too staid.
The county is also home to a large community of people whose knack for growing
high-quality marijuana has made “Humboldt” a sacred word to dope smokers
worldwide. Cannabis cultivation is more or less rampant throughout the county,
though the outdoor industrial-scale plantations lie mostly in southern Humboldt
(“SoHum,” to locals), where rough-hewn settlements give off an aura of people
being up to something. A fair proportion of homes visible to highway traffic
have additions built of plastic sheeting. Much of SoHum’s population lives up
rutted, hillside tracks where tourists, locals caution, would be most unwise to
venture on their own.
An hour up Route 101 sit Eureka and Arcata, Humboldt’s largest towns
(population 26,000 and 17,500, respectively), which feel more genially disposed
toward outside guests. Eureka, the county seat, has yet to recover fully from
its hard landing at the end of the county’s fish and timber age. Shuttered
storefronts, bail-bonds operations and check-cashing establishments sit between
its attractively refurbished Old Town harbor front and an arresting stock of
Victorian homes.
Arcata is a town with greater appeal, helped along by the countywide disdain
for outside influence. A local ordinance limits the number of franchise
restaurants to nine, and no chains, save an incongruous Bank of America, mar
the handsomeness of Arcata’s central plaza. I checked into the Hotel Arcata, a
96-year-old establishment in the heart of downtown. My unfussy room had a
claw-foot tub and a piping hot space heater, and seemed a great bargain for
$99. I went back to the desk and asked if I might stay on through the rest of
the week, which, incidentally, would overlap with New Year’s Eve. The desk
clerk — ground down, I imagined, by her daily dealings with local free spirits
and individualists — looked at me like I’d asked to crash for free on her couch.
“O.K.,” she finally said. “But you can’t bring a bunch of crazy, noisy people
back to your room.”
“I don’t know any crazy, noisy people here,” I told her.
“You’re going to meet some, believe me,” she said.
“Well, even if I do, I don’t think I’ll want to bring them home with me.”
“They can be very persuasive,” she said.
On an alpine stretch of Route 299, heading into Trinity National Forest, plumes
of fog rose from the hillsides, which resembled a sodden green carpet slung
over a scalding radiator. Dark, confidential groves of Douglas fir and redwood
crowded the little highway, emanating a kind of Narnian ominousness. A
skeptical East Coast type by nature, I started having some newfound,
Californian feelings about “the energy” of the forest. So I was in an unusually
open frame of mind when I stopped at the village of Willow Creek, whose China
Flat Museum and Bigfoot Collection is known to sasquatch enthusiasts worldwide.
The museum was closed for the winter, but one of its volunteers, a kindly
retiree named Peggy McWilliams, was good enough to give me a tour of the place.
“Do I believe they’re out there? You betcha,” she offered without prompting.
“We get reports all the time. For example, a little while ago,
search-and-rescue came down from Oregon looking for a missing 4-year-old boy.
When they finally found him, all he would talk about was the big hairy man that
had picked him up and sat him alongside the road. I doubt it was a hippie. A
hippie probably would have carried him off.”
The collection, housed in a windowless rear chamber, was amply stocked with
physical evidence collected over the years by Bigfoot observers local and
far-flung. Arrayed in glass cases were reconstructed skulls, yellowed news
clippings, dioramas, footprint casts and a plastic bag containing a few strands
of wiry fur alongside the query “Can you identify this hair?” The footprint
casts — taken nearby at Bluff Creek, the site of Roger Patterson and Robert
Gimlin’s famous 1967 film, whose footage of a shaggy creature is proof to
believers in Bigfoot lore — were not enormously convincing. They looked like
hoagie loaves with toes.
McWilliams wanted to be clear that she herself had never seen Bigfoot, and that
only one thing about the creature was absolutely certain: if you see one, you
should not tell a soul. “The writers and researchers would be all over you,”
she said. “They’re absolute pests, and nobody needs that kind of disruption.
It’s best to keep quiet.”
I thanked McWilliams for the tip and told her I was off to the redwoods of
southern Humboldt. “Keep your eyes open,” she advised. “You might see a
Bigfoot.”
No offense to Peggy McWilliams or the good people at the Bigfoot Field
Researchers Organization, but pulling into Humboldt Redwoods State Park, I
wondered: who needs a mythic ape when you’ve got redwood trees around?
Perennially fattened on a diet of Pacific Ocean fogs, many of the trees in the
state park (and its counterpart in northern Humboldt, Redwood National Park)
casually top 300 feet, and the oldest specimens have been growing for two
millenniums. In my touristic career, I’ve grown numb to the presence of
hammerhead sharks, giant tortoises, grizzly bears, blue-footed boobies and
pilot whales, but in the awe department, coast redwoods seemed to have no point
of diminishing returns. Each tree revealed some astounding new characteristic
of girth, bark tone, branch anatomy or moss couture. The forest’s crisp, misty
air made breathing a thrilling novelty. It seemed to inhale itself. I tried not
to think about a distressing spate of recent studies wondering how these trees
will survive what looks to be a worsening, climate-change-related shortage of
coastal fogs. Instead, I tried to marvel gratefully that there were still
thousands of these trees standing, not just one on a museum lot enclosed by a
velvet rope.
The trouble with redwood forests, though, is that they are hard on the human
ego. You can’t spend much time among all of that primordial rectilinearity
without starting to feel disheveled, crooked and mortal. I’d had every
intention of going for a hike, but you cannot maintain a pace staggering around
with your neck craned, guffawing like Jed Clampett seeing his first skyscraper.
Back at the car, the dashboard clock said it had taken me two hours to walk a
mile.
Of the nearly two million acres of old-growth coastal redwoods that once
covered central California to southern Oregon, less than 5 percent survived the
past 150 years of logging, and about 80 percent of the remaining trees stand on
protected lands. This is good news for the trees and their admirers but bad
news for the timber industry, whose boom years petered out in the 1980s. The
depletion of the timber stock, coupled with the exhaustion of northwestern
salmon fisheries, has created something of an employment crisis for Humboldt
County, or legal employment, anyway. Sound statistics on the issue don’t exist,
but anyone you’ll meet in Humboldt will tell you that the county’s economic
backbone is unquestionably cannabis. Law enforcement officials estimate that as
many as two in five Arcata homes contain a growing operation. A calculation by
a Humboldt State University economist appraised the county’s marijuana industry
at about a half-billion dollars a year.
These days, what worries the county’s farmers, trimmers, shippers and dealers
isn’t that they make their living on the far side of the law but that
legalization and a consequent price dive are probably close at hand. Tellingly,
Proposition 19, a 2010 ballot measure to legalize marijuana in California,
didn’t pass in Humboldt County. Already, provisions in California’s medical
marijuana law that permit card-carrying patients to keep small gardens have
contributed to a 25 percent price drop in the past five years and continue to
erode the competitive advantage of growers in the north. “It’s a sad thing to
see,” the local cannabis blogger Kym Kemp told me. “The big grower pulling in
$5 million on an acre might be able to survive, but the single mom keeping a
half dozen plants to make ends meet, she probably won’t make it.”
You hardly need D.E.A. training to catch on to Humboldt’s open secret. Driving
along county byways with the windows down, you may suddenly pass through banks
of skunk-gland miasma. Many small towns consist of little more than a grocery
and a horticultural supply store, selling such products as Buddha Bloom bat
guano fertilizer and Humboldt Nutrients Ginormous Bloom Enhancer. Roadside
billboards advertise sales on “turkey oven bags,” preferred by contraband
expediters for their odor-suppressing properties.
If Humboldt’s large-scale cannabis industry has a factory town, it’s
Garberville, an unprepossessing community not far from the Mendocino County
border. Garberville has zero stoplights, two gun stores, a hemp-ware boutique
and several real estate agencies whose acreage listings prominently advertise
“privacy” and “good water flow.” Most of the stores on Garberville’s main
street are patronized by people paying in cash and about whom hang an
identifiable smell. Stopping for coffee at an Internet cafe, I paused to watch
a young couple with Carhartt jackets and grubby hands browsing beachfront
rentals in Hawaii.
The upside of the great pools of black-market cash is a countywide surfeit of
good restaurants, galleries and craft boutiques, not all of which specialize in
redwood burls or drums. “We’ve got more restaurants per capita than San
Francisco,” I was told by Hank Sims, the former editor of Humboldt’s biggest
weekly paper, The North Coast Journal. “There are a lot of places that wouldn’t
be in business if not for pot money.”
One evening, I dined at Cecil’s, the fanciest restaurant in Garberville, whose
unusual market will apparently bear a steak topped with crab meat, shrimp and
handpicked chanterelles for $72. I didn’t get the steak. I got fried oysters
remoulade and some smoked pork spring rolls I’d have eaten my weight in. While
I was making my way through a superb fried chicken salad, a group of
college-age kids took a table near mine. They wore camouflage hats and
long-underwear shirts and looked like they’d been working hard all day. They
got the steak.
Eager to know a little more about Humboldt’s cannabis culture but somewhat
spooked by Garberville’s aura of the underworld, I headed back to Arcata to pay
a visit to Mariellen Jurkovich. Jurkovich, a 58-year-old grandmother with dark
hair and striking blue eyes, was a school board member and former real estate
agent with Coldwell Banker, though now she is the director of the Humboldt
Patient Resource Center, Arcata’s oldest medical marijuana collective.
The dispensary occupies a former auto body shop two blocks from Arcata’s
central plaza and resembles a community center more than a controlled-substance
dealership. Beyond selling marijuana, the H.P.R.C. offers classes in yoga,
massage, dance and tai chi, and invites patients to help in its garden and
learn the delicate art of cannabis cultivation. Contrary to her colleagues in
the south, Jurkovich looks forward to a day when marijuana is legal, hoping it
might draw more visitors to the remote county. Before Proposition 19’s defeat,
the H.P.R.C. and others in the cannabis sector had been looking forward to the
introduction of a pot-related tourism industry. “People could visit the
collective, do some trimming, take some cooking classes and then go walk around
in the redwood trees,” Jurkovich said.
“It was said we were going to be the new Napa Valley of cannabis,” said Tony
Smithers, executive director of the Humboldt County Convention and Visitors
Bureau. “We took it very seriously, and it was an intriguing marketing
challenge: how to do cannabis tourism while preserving our core branding as the
most beautiful place in the world with the world’s tallest trees. In the end,
it was kind of a relief when [Proposition 19] didn’t pass.”
All of the H.P.R.C.’s cannabis is grown on-site. Kevin Jodrey, the H.P.R.C.’s
cultivation director, was good enough to give me a tour of the garden, which
lay in a klieg-lit room just past the reception desk. Brushing past a pungent
canopy of lush, serrated leaves, Jodrey went on amiably and with eye-crossing
knowledgeability about plant genetics, the analgesic properties of different
“medicines” and their observed effects on such maladies as cancer, AIDS,
Alzheimer’s and depression. As the conversation wore on, the room began to feel
less like a pot farm than a research lab at Merck. “What’s this?” I asked
Jodrey, pausing at a plant with sugary foxtails that smelled pleasantly of
grapefruit. “Oh,” he said. “That’s Green Crack.”
That night, I gorged enjoyably at Tomo, a first-rate sushi restaurant on the
ground floor of the Hotel Arcata. Because it was the last evening of the year,
it seemed important to have a night on the town. Up the street, at the Arcata
Theatre, a gypsy jazz band was getting under way. The band was very good, but
the crowd was going in for styles of West Coast whimsy irksome to a peevish
East Coaster like myself. People in the throes of air-palming jam-band dances
kept revolving in my personal space. Someone dressed in a dark shroud with a
spray of foam swimming-pool noodles jutting from the top exhibited his or her
liberty from hangups by painfully whacking the noodles into my and everybody’s
face. Soon, it was necessary to go.
Out on the crowded plaza, the ball had dropped, and the first drum circles of
2011 had formed. Youngsters in dreadlocks had scaled a statue of President
McKinley, whose bronze pelvis was being ground from three sides. Describing the
scene in my notebook prompted two separate people to come over and ask me if I
was a cop, and that, like, according to the Constitution or something, I had to
tell them if I was.
The night and I were getting old. I went to the hotel and was stopped at the
door by the hotel employee who had days ago balked at extending my stay. Before
she stepped aside, she examined my key, asked my name and quizzed me about
which room I was staying in. It seemed to disappoint her that she couldn’t
catch me out as an impostor or a noisy lunatic, but in the end, she let me back
inside.
ESSENTIALS: HUMBOLDT COUNTY, CALIF.
HOTELS
Eureka Inn Aged Tudor-revival gem in mid-restoration. 518 Seventh Street,
Eureka; (707) 497-6185; doubles from $80.
Hotel Arcata Unfussy lodging on Arcata’s downtown plaza. 708 Ninth Street,
Arcata; (800) 344-1221; doubles from $85.
Miranda Gardens Resort Charming cabins in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. 6766
Avenue of the Giants, Miranda; (707) 943-3011; doubles from $85.
RESTAURANTS
Cafe Brio Excellent European-style bistro, cafe and artisanal bakery. 791 G
Street, Arcata; (707) 822-5922. Cecil’s California Creole restaurant, co-owned
by a former disciple of Emeril Lagasse. 773 Redwood Drive, Garberville; (707)
923-7007.
Golden Harvest Café Hearty lunch and breakfast spots with an ample vegetarian
menu. 1062 G Street, Arcata; (707) 822-8962; 1707 Allard Avenue, Eureka; (707)
442-1610.
Lost Coast Brewery and Cafe Tasty pub fare, with a superior selection of
locally brewed beers. 617 Fourth Street, Eureka; (707) 445-4480.
Samoa Cookhouse Prix fixe chow hall cum timber boom museum. 908 Cookhouse Road,
Samoa; (707) 442-1659.
Tomo Inspired sushi in the Hotel Arcata. 708 Ninth Street, Arcata; (707)
822-1414.
SIGHTS AND ACTIVITIES
Humboldt Redwoods State Park More than 53,000 acres of majestic trees along the
Eel River. Highway 101.
Willow Creek-China Flat Museum The place for Bigfoot fanatics. Intersection of
Highways 299 and 96; open May through September or by appointment; (530)
629-2653.
Original Page: http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/the-high-life/
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