Ed Denson was still a relative newcomer to southern Humboldt when he arrived in the 1980s. He had spent most of his adult life in the Bay Area. During the sixties he managed the bands Country Joe and the Fish and Joy of Cooking. Later he ran a music school and eventually created Kicking Mule Records, a mail-order folk label much like one he and guitarist John Fahey had owned years earlier. In 1980, verging on middle age, Denson got divorced and sold his house. That same year, the lease on his warehouse expired. “I realized there was nothing to keep me in San Francisco anymore,” he said. “I had a mail-order business that I could run from anywhere in the world.”
Denson and his wife-to-be drove up the coast looking at real estate. It was in southern Humboldt that they found “the most for the least”: 30 acres of pine and redwood, a log house, a large barn and electricity, adjacent to a paved road, all for $110,000. Their plan was to lead a quiet life, but CAMP (California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting) was to convince Denson he would have to go a lot farther than 200 miles to find one.
“The helicopters flew over my ranch as many as 35 times a week during the summer of 1984,” Denson remembered. “They would pass right above my house at treetop height. It brought my business to a stop. I had no illusions about the reality of the situation. I had been in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the early sixties. For the first time in 20 years, though, I felt like doing something, getting involved.”
He called the Federal Aviation Administration first, Denson recalled. “The FAA told me, ‘That’s CAMP and we have no jurisdiction.’ I said, ‘Who does?’ and they didn’t know.” Furious, Denson sat in his office making long-distance calls through an entire workday. The Humboldt County sheriff's department in Eureka said they had no authority; CAMP was a state operation. In the late afternoon, Denson finally got through to CAMP headquarters in Sacramento. “They said the pilot was not a government employee. They said, ‘He’s a contract worker and we really can’t control what he does’.”
But without the helicopters, explained CAMP deputy commander Bill Ruzzamenti in an interview with Humboldt historian Ray Raphael, “we just couldn’t get the job done nearly as effectively. The helicopters provided us with a sense of superiority that has in fact established a paranoia in the growers’ minds and has kept us from getting involved in violence with the growers. It’s not perceived as an equal situation where they might conceivably fight and win. When you come in with a helicopter, there’s no way they're going to stop and fight; by and large they head for the hills.”
So the aerial assaults continued through August into September. Denson lived in Alderpoint, near what had formerly been the community's economic mainspring, the Louisiana Pacific lumber mill. Only a few months earlier, the company had closed the mill, and now CAMP was using the abandoned site as its central staging area. The neighbors whose homes had been entered described a pattern of petty harassment: water pipes cut, closets emptied, refrigerators unplugged so food would spoil. Denson remembered that a friend who worked as a professional musician said that during the search of his home CAMP officers had torn the front board off his fiddle— “ ‘looking for drugs.” they said. “We're talking about an irreplaceable antique, a beautiful instrument. I was incensed.”
For his part, Ruzzamenti believed the residents of southern Humboldt were aware of a deeply felt shift “back to conservative thinking,” as he put it. During the late 70s, a 15-year trend toward increased support for the legalization of marijuana had been reversed. Opinion polls showed people headed in the other direction ever since, and by 1985, 73% of the adults in America were opposed to legalization, said the Gallup organization.
“So what?” said Ed Denson. “I didn’t care if people were against marijuana. It would be all right with me if 99% of Americans got so upset about marijuana they stopped buying it. What bothered me was that the government had apparently declared war on this area and the people who live here.”
After the summer raids of 1984, Denson spent the entire winter brooding: “Nothing had gotten to me like this in a long time. I felt so powerless and violated. The older you get, the more you can let stuff go by. But then something comes along that you can’t let go by, and it becomes very important. Very important.”
Early in the spring of 1985, Denson heard that a group of people calling themselves the Citizens Observation Group was planning to monitor the CAMP raids that summer. The first COG meeting turned out to be the biggest political event in southern Humboldt history, standing-room-only at the Veterans Memorial Hall.
“Everyone wanted to know, “What can we do?’” Denson’s friend Deirdre Ryan (not her real name) remembered. “We didn’t think anything. CAMP said we were all growers, but when the question was put, ‘Who would vote for legalization?’ everybody in the room raised their hands. Big growers, you know, don’t want marijuana legalized; it would take the profits out.”
COG first decided to go to the Humboldt County board of supervisors, but “there was nothing there,” according to Ryan. “Then we contacted the media. But they all write press releases for the government. Finally, we decided to go out and collect our own evidence first-hand.”
The group held a “benefit boogie” in Briceland to raise money, gave each member training in “nonviolent tactics” and began holding regular Wednesday meetings to discuss matters such as the philosophical implications of tying pink and yellow ribbons around a video camera microphone so CAMP troopers would not mistake it for a weapon.
Denson became unofficial team leader for the Alderpoint area, following the drug raiders with his driver, artist Frank Cieciorka, who saw political action two decades earlier during a SNCC voter registration drive in Mississippi. The group saturated southern Humboldt with its “See CAMP, Call COG” leaflets, and “the response was tremendous,” said Denson. “When the first convoy came over the hill toward Alderpoint, I got seven calls before they reached the mill. I heard when they left town, when they made the top of the hill, every mile of the way.”
Going in after the raiders, the first thing you usually saw was “the women and children coming out of wherever CAMP. was hitting,” Denson said. CAMP set up roadblocks that stopped most of the COG teams far from the scone of a raid, but sometimes the watchdogs got as close as the helicopter landing zone. At Honeydew, a COG team that approached the site of a raid became their own evidence after they were surrounded by ten uniformed men with drawn guns, body searched, photographed and threatened with arrest if they failed to provide ID.
In September of 1985, almost a year after Judge Aguilar’s injunction; COG introduced evidence that CAMP was violating it. After arguments from both sides, Aguilar agreed with the people of southern Humboldt that it would be necessary to appoint a court monitor to accompany CAMP on its future forays into the countryside. Minutes after the judge read his order, Bill Ruzzamenti told reporters that CAMP just might not come back to Humboldt County in 1986. “There’s too much bureaucracy,” he said.
“I guess that means us,” said a smiling Ed Denson.
The anger that had set him off the year before was mostly spent. What was left behind was a bemused but cautious scom for “the other side.” After an entire summer in pursuit of CAMP, the emblematic event remained the raid on Rancho Sequoia. Following phone reports that morning, Denson and the Alderpoint team were unable to locate CAMP but found the Rancho’s residents huddled behind a gate. Just up the road, the COG car stopped when someone spotted a document tied with a red ribbon and wedged in a fence. It was a photocopy of an aerial photograph of the area, which showed two rows of dots in a clearing surrounded by trees. Denson assumed the dots were marijuana plants. Attached to the photocopy was a “substantiating statement” filed by a CAMP officer who said that he had heard there were four “redeye missiles” (heat-seeking rockets used in Vietnam) in the area.
“We investigated,” Denson recalled, “and it tumed out that the CAMP guy had been hanging out undercover in one of the bars here, where he overheard several people talking about Red Eyes. It was the name of the local softball team.
Thank you for my Christmas morning laugh. 😂
If I recall correctly, he always listed his name on those Kicking Mule records as “ED” (in capital letters).
Before CAMP it was worse. It was called Operation Sensimilla, they really wanted to catch you. Before that is was even worse. They brought up SWAT from L. A. They would come in before daylight and open fire with automatic weapons on the cabins. Then they would announce themselves. Remember Knock and announce came well after that.