Humboldt by Emily Brady Page A

earn a living at it anymore, and people were going to have to get creative and figure out something else to do. He didn’t buy the idea that pot was all there was to do in Humboldt. “Think outside the box,” Bob would tell people. But they didn’t seem to like to hear this much, and sometimes, when Bob was tired of the whole thing, his legalization vision would crumble, and he would just shake his head, sigh, and say, “I am so sick of this pot shit.”
    Bob had worked his whole life and paid his way and his dues, so it was hard to see locals and people from other states rent property and not report their income. Bob was tired of doing the right thing and watching people get off scot-free. He also had so many other things to deal with, all those other things society needed law enforcement to handle—like domestic violence, child abuse, unlawful dumping, burglaries, and reckless driving. The weird thing was, when the home invasion robberies happened, Bob often ended up protecting the growers from the outside man.
    Recently, Bob had shared his frustrations with a reporter for the Los Angeles Times . The story, “In Humboldt County, Deputies’ Jobs Can Get a Little Hazy,” earned Bob a lot of grief in the coastal town of Shelter Cove, where he lived part time. He had already recently both amused and annoyed some people by playing a joke and showing up to a community fund-raiser with confiscated pot plants tied to the top and bumper of his sheriff’s SUV like some kind of hunting trophy. After the article appeared, people in the Cove had T-shirts printed that read “Don’t Be the Local Bob,” with multiple sets of nosy eyes peering out on the front. On the back they said “& Burst Our Bubble.” One of Bob’s points in the article was that not all dope growers with medical cards were growing only for their pain management, and that most, if not all, were growing for the black market.
    Back on the bluff, as the angry sound of a chain saw roared to life, one of the men in charge of the inmate crew checked with Sergeant Kenny Swithenbank to see if they should cut down the oak trees that were scattered among the brush.
    â€œNaw, leave ’em,” Kenny instructed.
    With the brush clearing under way, the sheriff’s deputies set out to check on another homeless encampment down by the river. Bob followed Kenny in a two-car convoy down a steep road toward the river bar, a wide strip of rocks that covered the banks of the South Fork of the Eel River. As they passed under Bear Canyon Bridge, the overpass that separates Garberville from Redway, a man standing by the river next to a white sedan exhaled a giant cloud of smoke into the air.
    Before the smoke had a chance to dissipate, both deputies hit their lights and bounded out of their SUVs. While Bob frisked the smoker, and the two men who had been sitting in the car next to him, Kenny ran their names through dispatch to see if there were any warrants out for their arrest.
    â€œAnd the Meek Shall Inherit the Earth” was spray-painted on a concrete block a few feet away from where Bob patted down the men. Next to that, someone had written, somewhat less profoundly, in pink paint, “Go Hippies.”
    The smoker, it turned out, had not been hitting a crack pipe, as the deputies had suspected. He had taken a hit of pot from a pipe he had stuffed into a sock and hidden among the rocks. Since there were no outstanding warrants, Kenny and Bob left the smokers by their car and continued back down the river bar, the rocks crunching noisily under their tires.
    About half a mile downriver, they pulled to a stop. Bob led the way through the bushes to a trail that was lined neatly with river stones. It wound past a bed of purple pansies, a few tomato plants, and a hand-painted “Welcome” sign, to a clearing where large tarps were strung up over pop-up tents. Two men were sitting in chairs there sipping