Yes, Oaky Joe Munson, the iconic cannabis grower and infamous Nor Cal outlaw, is driving Bruce Anderson’s Honda, which has racked up 326,000+ miles. It’s still running with umph, though not like new. Oaky Joe, not your average Joe, has a lot of miles on his own odometer. He might need new tires for his own battered body, but he is still going strong. I caught up with him in Sonoma County on a day that started out overcast and that heated up. Oaky Joe had just started to harvest his 2022 crop. Several of the plants were hanging upside down outdoors about 50-feet from the entrance to his three-bedroom house, which was overrun with the jade he had gathered in creek beds in Mendo and Lake.
In addition, to the weed he’s also selling firewood - $250 a cord with delivery. “Support your local economy,” he tells the gentry who buy his cords and try to get him to lower the price. No way. “People don’t appreciate the value of labor,” he tells me. With PG&E bills going up (while the price per pound for marijuana has been going down) folks are heating their homes the old fashioned way with oak, madrone and manzanita.
The Munsons are doing very well, thank you. Joe’s wife recently returned from a visit to her elderly parents in Japan. She’s teaching yoga to elderly white folks in Sonoma. Their son is a first year student at the high school in “Seb,” as kids call the town of Sebastopol. He thinks his dad is a bit overbearing. Maybe so. He’s also a good dad. Joe's daughter has a job at a second hand clothes store in Seb, attends Santa Rosa Junior College and apparently has a rich and rewarding love life. I heard some of the salacious details. (I'm protecting her privacy.) Oh, to be an American teenager and not be burdened by the sense that “we’re doomed,” as Oaky Joe puts it. He adds, “Don’t tell my kids we’re doomed. They think they're living the dream.” Actually, I’m glad I’m not a teenager today.
Joe and his wife were recently hired by Sonoma Social Services to serve as consultants, since they have been such good clients. “I told them, ‘don’t be rigid with people who are homeless and are addicts,’” Joe said. “’Don’t treat them like normal people. They’re not. They have issues’.”
When we stopped at a gas station in Seb Joe put $20 worth in the tank and complained that it would set him back $100 to fill it. “You did the right thing by selling your car when you did,” he told me. Maybe so. I got to Sonoma County by the 101 bus from the GG Bridge to San Rafael and then Smart to Cotati where a friend picked me up at the train station and took me to a Peruvian restaurant in Seb where I drank a Peruvian lager. My friend and I shared a Peruvian paella. The next day Oaky Joe and I had lunch at the Willow Wood Market Cafe in Graton. He chowed down on the spaghetti and meatballs; he couldn’t eat it all and took home what sat on his plate.
He was hungry, he said, because he’d just returned from a 100-mile motorcycle run with his son and had worked up an appetite. A man of big appetites and big dreams, he consumes big joints most of the day. While we were driving on Gravenstein Highway he hot boxed the interior of the Honda, which soon filled with smoke, though I didn’t get stoned.
Back at his place, he rolled a few joints for the road. No doubt about it, he has rolled thousands of joints over the course of his lifetime. He rolls them like a pro and a perfectionist. Sitting around the table, we talked about Ukraine, nuclear weapons, prostitution, movies and a friend of his who “goes sideways.” When Oaky Joe uses it he means to go outside the law.
The only topic we didn’t dive into was President Biden’s recent announcement that the feds would expunge the records of people arrested with weed. That was the latest big news in the weed world. Expunging the records was something that ought to have been done decades ago.
On my last night in Seb I watched a documentary by Brian Lilla titled Children of the Vine. The movie tells it like it is and describesthe harmful (and deadly) effects of Roundup and glyphosate. The theater was packed. I recommend the film. I also urge you not to use Roundup. The life you save might be your own. On my last morning in the North Bay, Oaky Joe took me to the Cotati train station and thereby added a few more miles to the Honda that Bruce Anderson nearly drove into the ground and didn’t. These days, one has to be grateful for the little things in a world in which many of the big things are out of control.
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