I live in a rural Sierra county which stretches from the heavily wooded foothills in the West to the Nevada border near Reno. Interstate 80 and Highway 49 and 20 run through it. There's a lot of oaks and pines and deer and bears here. There's a couple rivers as well. This is the boonies. Around every corner is a surprise. Sometimes that surprise is a bear. Sometimes its a meadow. Sometimes its a gold mine, abandoned when it shut down. And sometimes its a pot garden with a startled hippy reaching for a war surplus rifle to stop you telling someone what you just saw.
North of the South Yuba river is dope grower country, though there's lots of dope gardens everywhere there's tree cover to hide it. Dope became the primary occupation in this county because the electronics industry got shifted to China under the last three Presidents, and caused massive and total unemployment. The poor had the choice to commute into Sacramento for $10/hr and two hours a day on the road, which is quite expensive in fuel and not very much money for all the trouble, and still competing with a million other people with a shorter commute and lower living expenses. $3.50/gal gasoline destroyed SO MUCH of America.
Once you get north of Nevada City, roads get slower and that commute turns into four hours a day on the road instead of two. It becomes too far to commute. Pretty much everybody on the North San Juan Ridge, aka The Ridge, is growing dope instead of driving to Sacramento every day. And many have permits to do it legally, but those who don't can get them retroactively and backdated because the local dope-doctors who prescribe it have the morals of a snake and its a legal loophole that prevents arrest and confiscation. The sheriff, whom I know socially, finds the situation infuriating since the state law violates the Federal law, and he has to enforce both of them while still facing re-election. North San Juan is a 30 mile by 20 mile section of wild territory with gravel roads, no public utilities a little way up, no shopping. It is wild land. Most of the people there are squatters on either BLM or National Forest, which is why BLM has armored cars. Your basic hunting rifle can't shoot through the armored car the way it can a cop car or SUV. And all the pot growers have rifles to snipe the thieving growers who are preparing to invade and rob the grow once the dope ripens in September. Thus the growers are all heavily armed.
So what does this mean? Well, dope growing does not qualify for Federal agriculture subsidies. You are on your own. While the risk of arrest is almost gone, you still hide what you're doing from the neighbors and you still have to physically guard the plants. Whatever you have heard about Burning Man being a free drug party, the drugs aren't free. That's a place to sell dope. Large amounts of it. Its a big event for sales of bricks of the stuff, but I expect the cops like to stop them so perhaps they do their selling in such a way that the showy RVs waste the DEAs time at road blocks.
The better place to sell bricks of dope is the Bay Area. The ridiculously brave and foolhardy dope growers carry it to the Bay Area dealers, in Oakland or Antioch or Vallejo or Dublin (Dub-sack is a $20 baggie of dope) and sell for their annual profit, which they live on and grow the next crop with. Getting cheated in the deal teaches lessons about politics and I promise you, no dealer in business wants to give stuff away after suffering in a tent all summer, baby sitting a pot garden and carrying buckets of water by hand out of the Yuba River canyon, several hundred feet below. Not a warm and fuzzy communist joy luck club.
They do a lot of business planning then too. I loan out lots of books on building cabins and repairing RVs and tiny houses to the North San Juan growers. Trimigrants partner up, many of them gay, and buy old RVs with their shares and live out of a 30 year old wheezing Winnebago they manage to get up the road into the boonies where their garden hides. They buy "hydroponics equipment" to help their grow, not realizing just how much energy that needs and the noise of generators and water pumps all attracts attention from the neighbors. There's also land owners who rent their properties at a higher "no questions asked" rate to growers and get a share-crop of the dope in exchange for denying others access to the property. Lots of nasty behavior there. Double crossing, murders, revenge arrests, confiscation of the crop. The black market runs on trust, but everybody involved is evil.
Growers who survive the first naive summer start wearing camouflage so they are less obvious resting or working their garden. Camouflage clothing is one of the obvious identifiers in public when they come down to Grass Valley to buy food and pick up a few books at my library. Some, oddly enough, read the classics. Yeats, Walden, various classic plays. You'd be completely surprised at what people read while watching pot plants grow for four or five months. Most of these camouflaged people have bulgy jacket underarms and overhanging shirts, so are carrying handguns on them. Many look quite suspiciously at everybody around them while in public. They expect to be mugged by other growers or trimigrants. They know those people are ripoff sh175, homeless addicts and losers. The trimigrants started showing up in the county in the second week of May, btw. It is planting season.
Local pot growers may have gotten into growing dope because they liked smoking it and the cool parties that dope buyers throw with the loose women and the groovy music back in college, but eventually the loose woman files a paternity suit because you were the richest of the men she slept with and she's consistently denying your right for a blood test to see if the kid is yours (and that's not good enough. You need a DNA test to be sure, and $1K is cheap compared to $150K in child support payments over 18 years). I never had to go through that myself, being socially awkward but one hears stories about women who sleep around and lie about the father for money. The kid becomes a suicide or a murderer later on.
Anyway, the camouflaged paranoid hippies are carrying guns and do it because people DO try to mug them closer to home. And its really just a matter of time before there's more shootings on the Ridge. Keeping what you earned is a Conservative value. Giving it away is a Liberal one. Every hippy with a gun is a conservative, falling into it because its the only way to survive Manson-family trimigrants. Charlie Manson would totally live in Ananda commune and murder hippy girls and dump them in the woods to be eaten by the local cougars. If he'd been less showy he'd still be out there. Which is why I think his copy-cats still are. But only hippy chicks die and they aren't missed. There's always more showing up from the city.
It is odd, to me, how the growers expect everybody to pretend they aren't obviously armed, and how they can hypocritically vote while being squatters on someone else's land, and still collect food stamps and disability and whatever else they get from the govt. They eat boiled ramen and read Yeats and plan for a cabin and a fence so they can sleep better, and some are even smart enough to build greenhouses and pay to have a well dug so they don't have to deal with hoses to the river. The really successful ones have new cars and eventually stop wearing camouflage but they have a certain sideways glare they never lose and the gun remains on their person at all times. And the more successful they become, the more people they have cheated and murdered to get there. Don't think your dope isn't covered in human blood and exploitation. Its just as evil as the cocaine in Colombia. Only you can forget about the death and pain in Colombia, and you can't ignore the poor up here. You have to see them around town.
This is Obama's economy. This is his legacy. A pity that the economic losers continue to vote Democrat.
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