The Good, The Bad & The Horrific

Marijuana was the surprise ingredient in the economy of the backwoods in the mid-seventies and made a lot of twenty-something dirty hippies, slackers, and university-educated back-to-the-landers rich overnight when awareness of sinsemilla arrived. (The high was instant like snorting coke but without the nasty hundred dollar bills or grimy straws and the need to have more right away. It was also an aphrodisiac, often lead to dancing, and was creatively inspiring, although those stoned ideas rarely seemed so brilliant the next morning.) 

It was the land of BW and AW: Before Weed and After Weed. The pursuit of growing for money was absolutely shameless in the early decades of the boom and few ever said, “Gee, do you think we're trying to grow too much?” (One clever guy coined the term “Senseless me-ing.) 

When the price of manicured sinsemilla rose to three thousand a pound even ten modest plants could net the laidback backyard gardener a cool thirty grand, an opportunity for even lazy artists and musicians to grow some weed and end up owning some land in the country if they were even a little motivated, although it wasn't in their nature to chase the yanqui dollar. 

By the eighties the early arrivals were into their thirties and having children. Something that stood out as these hippie kids matured was their tight-knit community, the bond each age group had and still has on social media: they were all friendly with each other, everyone got invited to the parties, and they got their boyfriends and girlfriends through their groups. There were no obvious bullies among them although when they started to go into South Fork High there were probably townie kids who hassled them, hence they stuck together.

There were few if any overweight kids. Living in the woods they just tended to run around more, walk a mile or two to their best friend's house, and then in their teens hiked vigorously around to water their distant pot patches. It probably helped that the hippie moms, and often pops, prepared delicious and healthy meals while the junk food emporiums were an hour away in town.

The weed-growing teens often started out with one plant in their parents' backyard gardens and then began to explore the wide-open hills looking for a spring and a sunny clearing below it. They set up water systems with a pickle barrel and some hose, and then figured out how to get the fertilizer and plants to the remote patch. Many of the more ambitious boys rode their motorcycles to guerrilla gardens out Usal Road in the eighties, became diesel dopers in the nineties and 2000's (which dismayed their hippie parents and annoyed their neighbors with constantly running generators), and then joined the Green Rushers blowing up multiple light deprivation hoop houses in the 2010's. 

If they saw how some of us lived back in the day in Southern Humboldt USA they would have thrown away the key: 

Nine-year-old boys were sometimes spotted taking hits off fat joints and a couple frisky eight-year-olds memorably hit the liquor pretty hard at a party amusing the adults with their drunken antics. (Yes, there were some casualties.)

Once a mother brought her three-year-old daughter to a Hallowe'en party dressed as “Naked Lunch.” She wore nothing but a brown paper bag over her head with eye slits cut out. (Later her mother sang in a punk-rock band naked, her body painted blue except for her bush.)

Another hippie mama gave her daughter a vibrator when she turned twelve and when she moved to town a few years later she and her friends had contests to see how many boys they could bed in one night.

An enthusiastic amateur enjoyed romping in the backseats of cars in the notorious parking lot at The Country Tavern while entrepreneurial youths sold tickets to whoever wanted to watch her and the drunk boys.

When the dating pool was shallow in the early days, before all the country kids sprouted up, it wasn't much of a surprise when a dude in his early twenties would get together with a fifteen or sixteen year old girl. 

One woman back in the late seventies liked to deflower the eager junior high boys in her neighborhood. No one complained, especially those teenage lads being initiated by this sexy lady.

Pesky mores and laws were ignored and no one got in trouble in a culture where children were taught not to call the cops. Meanwhile out in the real world demand for tasty weed kept the pot patches humming along and our love affair with weed has now lasted fifty years.

(Don't fret snowflakes, those frisky boomers are either boring or dead by now.)