[part I here]
After tossing his tool belt in the bed of the pickup, Resin Nate slides the cooler onto the back seat and climbs in beside it, balancing a heavy nursery tray on his lap. The clear cover of the tray is fogged over with condensation.
Nate pulls the door closed and accepts the pipe from me. Ted accelerates hard into the fog, spitting gravel into the ravine, while Nate smokes in silence, seeming pretty calm for a guy whose truck had just been seized by the police. He refills the pipe from a huge bag he takes from the cooler. Well into the second bowl he passes to the front, coughs, and tells this story:
CHP finally noticed I never registered that rig* and pulls me over...and after he runs my license and it comes back clean, I tell him I never register my vehicles, don't believe in it, but I have the bill of sale--
Doesn't matter, the trooper says. After this long, it counts as stolen. I have to impound your vehicle today, I'm sorry. Explain it to the judge. Then he called the wrecker and asked if I needed a ride to the job--and I call you instead, and thanks for picking me up--
While we wait, the trooper tells me to get whatever I need out of the rig. So I grab my tools and I'm laying the belt on the road, and he asks if that's it, did I get everything?
Well, no, I tell him, I got clones--
And he doesn't miss a beat. He just says Well, better get 'em out of there, so I get the tray and put it down by my tools, and he asks if there's anything else.
Well, I say, I got my stash--
And again, he's just Well, get it out of there, and doesn't even try to look in the cooler. I sit down, the tow truck comes, and they weren't gone two minutes before you arrived--
Ted listens to Nate's tale like it's a weather report, nonchalantly nodding throughout and stroking the red beard. I sit stunned, staring, incredulous, and forget to pass the pipe. Ted glances at the bowl in my lap, my expression, and shares a long look with Nate in the rear-view mirror.
The brothers burst into laughter. The truck swerves a bit while Nate thumps me on the back.
Welcome to Mendo, man--
That afternoon, in the hot sun of the work site, Seven Thunders** simply shrugged when I repeat Nate's story, shoulder tattoos brushing the sides of the over-sized french drain trench. We dug with pickaxes, cutting roots and chipping rock, the sweet smell of harvest trimming and curing wafting from a nearby barn. Seven Thunders was a Navajo, an alcoholic, married into the Pinole tribe, and required to work full-time as a condition of parole. Ted hired him when he took a crew to bury a shipping container grow on the Pinole land.
Seven Thunders shrugged again. That's typical:
I'm a volunteer fireman, okay, and last month we got a call from Covelo to transport a woman who'd given birth outside in her garden. Covelo's remote, and it took awhile to get out there and find them. She was lying on a tarp, the baby on her chest, in the middle of hundreds of plants when we arrived. Both were fine, and like I said; they just needed a ride to the hospital to get checked out. But while we're lifting the stretcher into the ambulance, a county cop shows up, searching for us in the middle of this pot forest after overhearing the radio call.
Now the plant limit there is 100, okay, and this is way over, more than enough to call the feds. So we expect him to follow us in, or take our names as witnesses, but he leans out of the cruiser window, looks right at me, pulls off his shades--and winks.
Doesn't look over 100 plants to me, he says. You gentlemen drive careful to the hospital, now--
Seven Thunders chuckles. Now why do you suppose he'd do that, when he had her, dead to rights? Nobody asked, but you stick around, you find the police pretty much leave the locals alone. Backbone of the economy, understand? Guerrilla grows in the woods, on public land, the Mexican mafia--those guys are the real pisser.
He stops digging and reaches for a cluster of water bottles sweating on the lip of the trench near his head. He tosses me one, gets another for himself, and we drink deeply. He sparks a joint and points overhead with it.
Sure, he says, grinning through smoke as we climb out of the trench and head to the barn for a break--I'm a just a convict, a ditch digger, a laborer. But I get twenty an hour, cash on the barrel--
He gestures around with his free hand at the mountains, the sky, the trees. We enter the barn and his grin widens as yet another group of pretty manicurists (separate from Isis and Spirit's crew) look up from the trimming tables, several rising to share the joint.
--to dig ditches in paradise.
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* In most of the U.S., "rig" refers specifically to semi-trailers (or "big rigs"--articulated lorries for you limeys). In NorCal and throughout Oregon, "rig" refers to any form of ground transport, including cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and definitely Resin Nate's pickup truck.
**Seven Thunders' Pinole brother-in-law, also on the crew, later filled in the details: He gave himself that name. The Navajo tell us the real translation is closer to "Seven Farts."
