Autumn Tides: Part II
This series reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed, some events have been compressed, and some dialogue has been recreated.
Critters and creatures would find their way into our estuary during big storms. Their relief was palpable upon entry to the marsh’s mouth. Egrets and blue herons would sink into the haven of soft, golden seagrass and calm waters for the storm’s duration. The sinuous inlets carved by giant glaciers at the end of the last ice age provided nooks and knolls of peace. I suppose I was doing what the birds taught me when I decided to go home: return to the nest — seek safety. After years in danger, that was all I wanted. It’s almost amusing to look at the peril I was living in. The pot world hadn’t been a safe space from the get-go, but the danger didn’t phase me for quite some time.
There was a short orientation upon my arrival on the first farm, in 2010 that covered three things:
- What color helicopters belonged to Federal agents (black)
- Where to put a dead body should the problem arise (at the end of the ranch road)
- Why we weren’t allowed to talk to boys (no “fraternizing”)
Hearing the rules gave me pause but no real reconsideration. I’m not sure why — maybe because a guy had smashed my heart, and the no-boys part sounded great. Maybe because I had not yet learned that the hill I lived on had been dubbed “Dead Mountain.” Sure, the helicopter thing got me thinking, but I had just graduated college and was running nine miles a day, so I figured I had a substantial advantage if I had to escape. No, it wasn’t until 2012, the day of the fire, on a different farm, with a different boss, that I felt real fear.
It was around 2 am when my TracFone chirped. I was still awake with the usual suspects, blowing lines of cocaine, drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, and feeling important as we talked about the price of marijuana plummeting, which areas of town were on the Fed’s radar, and what to do about both. Looking at my phone, I took in the message:
“Your Wonderland is gonna burn,” it read.
I interrupted the group to tell them about the threat from “Trevor,” we’ll call him. Trevor was a former grower who felt he’d been wronged and robbed by all of us. His sentiments were the exact breed of resentment that gave Murder Mountain its name.
We blew a few more lines, chatted about whether or not the threat was real, and ultimately decided, he would never.
A few hours later, I opened my eyes to darkness in my 200-square-foot, ice-cold shed. My mornings’ never felt like “waking up” so much as “coming to.” At some point, the coke would wear off enough, the booze would kick in enough, and my mind would settle enough for a few hours of synthetic recharging.
I did a body scan as I pulled myself from bed after three disjointed hours of “sleep.” My thick, blonde-at-the-time pigtails were messy but still intact from the night before, so I left them, pulling a beanie over for the sake of containment. My head was pounding as I reluctantly forced my legs into the stiff frigidness of my black skinny jeans. I found my chunky wool socks and shoved them in my Danner boots, not bothering to tie the laces. Pulling my boss’s XL Carhartt sweatshirt over my head, I took a moment to appreciate his scent, still lingering in the pores of the fabric.
After fixing a few water lines in the patch closest to me, I got into my Jeep to visit the remaining three areas I was growing. Hundreds of plants were in my care, and I cared for them more than I cared for my own life.
The steady blast of heat slowly forced the cold morning air out of the car, and my mind landed on my boss. I hazily swooned over the thought of seeing him again. Sleeping with him was complicated—somewhat because he was recently divorced, a little bit because he was 15 years older, but primarily because we were two addicts and alcoholics, completely in love without any way forward.
Getting to the gate where I would find the bangle bracelet one month later, I paused, smelling smoke through my drug-caked, congested and damaged nostrils.
That’s curious. I thought, getting back in and driving a little further.
I popped out of the trees to the crest of the first hill, and my blood turned cold. Billowing smoke reached into the sky, heading in the direction of the patch where my boss and I had our plants. Trevor’s words reverberated inside the walls of my head:
Your Wonderland’s gonna burn.
Picking up my phone, urging my hands to stop shaking, and cursing myself for being so hungover, I called my boss. He picked up after four excruciatingly long rings.
“Hey,” I said calmly, staring at the plume of smoke coming my way, “um, fire.”
There was a long pause on his end. Then,
“Can you put it out with a pickle barrel?”
Pickle barrels were giant, red, 55-gallon buckets where we’d store weed or mix fertilizer. I was preparing to let him down gently when I gasped—flames licked the top of the hill.
“Fuck, no, it just crested,” I said feeling my heart race faster.
I heard his motorcycle rev almost instantly, and he yelled over the noise of the engine,
“Walk towards it, see how much time we have to get to the patch. We’ll have to do an emergency harvest,” he explained.
There was an out-of-body experience as I saw my 25-year-old self shuffling giant boots down a dirt road, blonde pigtails, into a wall of flames.
To be continued…
