| | | I just came across this while looking for pictures of grow scenes. Anyway, this was from 6 years ago, and the ballot prop lost. There's another one in Nov, which should pass. The article gives you a taste of what life is like in my little part of the world....
 n the early-morning hours of October 8, 2009, a category-one typhoon made landfall on the southern coast of Japan, killing two men, shutting down twelve Toyota factories, and suspending rail service across Tokyo. Then it pushed back out to sea and vanished over the cold expanse of the North Pacific. A few days later the front reappeared off the coast of Northern California. In Mendocino County, news of the approaching storm rousted a throng of dusty vehicles from the hills, causing traffic jams and long lines at supply stores in Ukiah, the county seat. The backcountry’s marijuana growers, hurrying to prepare for a forced harvest, were out in full strength.
I happened to be riding shotgun in one of those dusty vehicles, a creaking white delivery van driven by a blue-eyed, ponytailed marijuana grower named Matthew Cohen. A lanky thirty-two-year-old with wraparound shades and a goatee, Cohen had agreed to show me the ropes of harvest season.
The inland hills of Mendocino County reliably see no rainfall between the months of May and October, an interval during which the sun blazes, as one 1880 history of the area put it, “as if fully determined to prove to mankind that it can shine more fervidly to-day than it did yesterday.” That plenitude of sun, which is shared by Mendocino’s neighbors, Humboldt and Trinity counties, has helped cement the region’s status as the capital of American cannabis production—known collectively as the “Emerald Triangle.” Topography has also helped. The region is essentially a crumple zone emanating from an offshore junction of three tectonic plates. Seen from the air, it resembles a sheet of green aluminum foil that has been tightly balled up and then only loosely flattened out. The area spreads from the Pacific in the west to the mountains above the Central Valley in the east in a shatter-pattern of canyons, occasional bowl-like valleys, and arcing slopes. It’s virtually unpoliceable.
With full sun, healthy marijuana plants in Mendocino County can reach heights of fifteen feet. But fully grown specimens—gangly things—break up in wet weather. The outdoor cannabis growing season thus becomes a race to bring one’s crop to maturity before the first heavy October rains, whose forecast each year ordains a rare moment of synchronicity in an otherwise atomized trade. Every farmer with plants in the sun has to bring them down at the same time.
Like most of his peers, Cohen was on his way into town to pick up supplies for his trimmers, the laborers who break the resinous crop down into so many perfect little buds, working as fast as possible to get the product out to market. It’s painstaking, labor-intensive work, and getting stoned in the process is hard to avoid—so snacks are important. Our first stop was the Ukiah Natural Foods Cooperative, the area’s premier depot for goods like solar-brewed beer, organic corn chips, and Tofurkey. In one of the aisles, Cohen slowed his shopping cart to chat with another grower about the approaching storm. “Big one,” said the other guy with a hint of melodrama. “Like 1.8 inches, high winds. So—keep that in mind.” The store had the feeling of a base camp before an expedition.
In search of Pepsi, we headed across the street to Safeway. Just inside the automatic doors was a large product display at the head of an aisle. “Turkey bags,” Cohen said. “You ever heard of these?”
A turkey bag, I learned, is a Reynolds product designed for roasting poultry. It also happens to be the industry-standard container for transporting pounds of pot. The chemical properties that keep a plastic roasting bag from melting in a 350-degree oven also make it impervious to the skunk smell of marijuana. “I’ve seen guys buy cases of ’em,” said the checkout clerk, dragging two boxes of turkey bags for Cohen across the infrared scanner. He looked up with a grin. “I mean, I guess they could use them to cook turkeys.”
By now I was beginning to recognize the signs of harvest everywhere. At Home Depot, just down the road, bins near the checkout lanes heaved with Fiskars Pruning Snips—small florist’s shears that are the tool of choice for marijuana trimmers. On Highway 101 on the way out of town, Cohen and I zoomed past several hitchhikers—would-be trimmers—stationed along each of Ukiah’s dry brown interchanges. One of them, thumb out, wore a pair of pruning snips on a piece of twine around his neck.
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