What is a Humboldt hippie? It’s a term I use to refer to the marijuana farmers who grew the legendary bud of Humboldt County in the 1980s. They were a tight community of peaceful outlaws ensconced in the rural hills of northern California growing the finest marijuana of the day—and maybe ever—among the redwood forests. But because marijuana was illegal at the time and CAMP (Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) was doing its best to stop them, it was not easy to get to know these people. This is the story of how I, a city boy from southern California, got a peek inside the inner circle of the Humboldt hippies.
These hippies had migrated to Humboldt from the Haight-Ashbury district after the Summer of Love to establish communes in rural tranquility. They began growing marijuana, not only for their own use but also as a way to make subsistence money in a place where timber was the only industry (and even it was on the wane). The plentiful rainfall, summer sun, fertile soil, and isolation made it an ideal environment for marijuana to thrive. By the ‘80s, they were well established in Humboldt County and had developed advanced horticulture, harvesting, curing, and trimming techniques for producing top-shelf bud.
At that time, my partner Scott and I had a tool business. In the early ‘80s, he and I would make road trips to the Emerald Triangle (Humboldt, Trinity, and Mendocino counties, so named for being the largest marijuana producing region in the country) in the late autumn to sell tools. While we would canvas the cities like Eureka and villages like Garberville selling tools, referrals would send us out into the hills of the surrounding countryside. This is how Scott and I ended up in remote places like Honeydew and Alderpoint (of Murder Mountain infamy), where the hippies cum farmers would come down out of the forest to get supplies from the small general store and fuel up at the lone gas pump in front of it.
So when we would meet with these farmers, they would see us as the tool guys. But Scott and I were also marijuana aficionados. And as can happen when fellow potheads get together, even if it’s to discuss business, it’s not surprising for the conversation to turn to marijuana—especially when you’re in Humboldt County. These farmers were very proud of their product. After getting to know each other a little, we would break out some bud that we had with us to share with them. Then some of the farmers would break out their own personal stash—which was, of course, the best of the bud that they had grown—to show off. Before we knew it, Scott and I as the pothead cum tool guys would develop a great rapport with these farmers.
Our trips to Humboldt would coincide with the time when the farmers’ marijuana harvest was finished curing, trimmed, and ready for market. But most of them had not yet sold a lot of their crop, so they were more flush with bud than they were with cash. Our solution was to offer to trade our tools for some of their marijuana stock. It turned out that these deals were easier to make than sales for cash.
The farmers would pull out one-pound bags of their stock, even in public, for Scott and I to choose from. They were unconcerned about getting busted. Granted, these “public” locations were in very rural areas and anybody who might happen by would be the friends and neighbors of the farmers, many of whom were themselves farmers. But even the sheriff would “look the other way” because marijuana farming was about the only thing that sustained Humboldt County economically. Having pounds of marijuana was completely normal in that culture. We could then choose the best of the farmers’ bags and leave them with the tools that they needed. It was a win-win situation.
To paint a picture of the culture in Humboldt County, I’ll tell you about one farmer that I met in Alberpoint. He lived in one of the handful of homes in the village with his parents-in-law, his wife, and his school-age children. Scott and I were fortunate enough to be invited to his home to break bread with him and his family. I regret to say that I do not remember his name, so I will refer to him as the friendly farmer.
Like us, the friendly farmer and his wife were potheads but neither his in-laws nor his children consumed marijuana. Nonetheless, marijuana farming was a family affair. His wife had Bay-area connections to sell their crop to. But before she could do that, the pounds of marijuana that the friendly farmer harvested had to be cured and then trimmed into buds. Trimming is a tedious affair, so they had to recruit the mother-in-law and their high school-aged daughter to help with the task. Rather than doing something like babysitting or working at a fast food joint (which were nonexistent in a small village like Alderpoint anyway), this was how people in Humboldt County who did not have a regular job could earn some pocket money.
To help understand this story, I need to make this sidebar about kief. The psychoactive substance in marijuana is THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). It is predominantly located in the trichomes, which create tiny, resinous droplets on the surfaces of the buds and leaves. When marijuana is agitated in some manner, the trichomes fall off the plant. The loose trichomes become a powdery material called kief. Kief has a high concentration of THC and it can be consumed just about any way the marijuana plant can be consumed.
Trimming bud produces a lot of kief as a by-product. It clings to the blades of the trimming scissors, sticks to the fingertips of the trimmers, and even gets scattered across the trimmer’s workbench. As head of the friendly farmer’s trimming operation, grandma routinely gathered all of the kief it produced and rolled it up into a ball of what was essentially dark purple hashish. Because she didn’t consume marijuana herself, she had gathered a ball of it larger than a golf ball by the time we visited that she saved for special occasions. Scott and I were fortunate in that grandma considered our visit to be just such an occasion. She broke out her purple hashish and shared some of it with us and her adult kids.
After a hospitable visit with the friendly farmer, we left him with a bunch of tools and he gave us a pound of his best bud, then we took our leave. By the ends of our road trips, Scott and I had a few pounds of the finest marijuana that Humboldt had to offer and a van emptied of tools. That left us with the sticky wicket of smuggling our marijuana over 600 miles from Humboldt to southern California. Bear in mind that possession of over an ounce of marijuana was a felony at both the federal and state level in California in the ‘80s. The law would have considered possessing pounds of it a clear intent to distribute it, a major crime at the time. But Scott and I were young and foolish, so we took the risk.
We packed our pounds, which were typically vacuum sealed, into plastic trash bags. Then we sprinkled baking soda inside the bags to absorb odor and sealed them up as tightly as we could. Then we “hid” those bags inside of the empty cardboard cases that had once held tools (for which we had legitimate receipts) and loaded them into the van. We carried a can of Ozium to spray inside the van in the event we got pulled over by a law enforcement officer on the long drive home. But let’s face it, the van would have smelled like a citrus marijuana plantation to any officer approaching the driver window. Fortunately, we never encountered any law enforcement officers on our road trips to Humboldt.
Although things could have ended very differently had Scott and I gotten into any serious trouble on any of our many road trips, ours all had happy endings. So this ends my story of the Humboldt hippies to contribute to the panoply of Humboldt stories. Scott passed away a couple of years ago and I’m the only one left with this fond memory. So it’s been fun writing another chapter into the tool guys chronicles before it got lost to posterity.
The Progressive Zone 