Free Hippie Mike

Steady, gentle rain has pelted the surrounding firs and madrones for days on end. Jetta and I have been house-sitting a remote cabin up on Peachland while the tenant is back east for the holidays. He's got two black cats to tend.

Around New Year's we stayed down in the Valley for several days, watching a piano burn at a sushi party and I guess leaving the catfood bag open may have backfired. You can guess what results when two cats eat ten pounds of food in three days. The litter box was inundated first, followed by the bathroom floor. After which they picked random sheets of notebook paper strewn on the living room carpet. They soiled the chorus to a song I'd composed about Jealousy following a New Year's party.

"They knew," said Jetta, giving that defiant look as a shield against my skepticism. “They could sense the negativity.”

"Then how do you explain this?" I exclaimed, picking up a stack of notebook paper on which about ten pages had been scrawled frantically with a ballpoint pen the beginnings of a story about a teenaged boy in the cave country of southern Indiana discovering a small band of albino neanderthals who'd been lurking in the shadows for millenia.

"Only one thing to do with this shit." I opened the woodstove and threw the manuscript and spred it like pepperoni. The fire wasn't going yet. "Kindling."

"You didn't have to do that! You're so passive-agressive."

"It was stupid, anyway. Just like that song. The chorus was original though. Too bad about that letter to Hippie Mike.

"What?"

Sure enough, the cats had also deposited their excess on the letter Jetta had been painstakingly writing out of love for our Indiana bro, Hippie Mike. On one of our trips to town and cellphone service we had leaned that the long-time cannabis advocate on the front lines had finally been locked up after years of court battles in the backwards chambers of Jackson County, Indiana.

Not content with just a letter, Jetta had been adding inspiring images in the margins like the peace sign, a pot leaf, and naked hippie chicks dancing around a fire. Now the paper was stained yellow. "Assholes!" she screamed at the cats. "I knew I should have sent that off before we left!"

So we had to clear the cabin. Since we'd run out of kitty litter I scooped ashes out of the woodstove, a trick I'd inadvertently discovered back in Indiana. Calming down somewhat, I still used the soiled albino neanderthal story, the song about Jealousy and Jetta's first letter to Hippie Mike as kindling along with some splintered redwood.

Once the cabin was cleaned, the fire raging, we both took up pen and paper to write letters to our bro in the overcrowded Jackson County Jail.

He has stubbornly represented himself in court for a decade counting on the incompetence and corruption in the local court and sheriff's department plus his superior knowledge of the relevant laws. Several times marijuana charges against him have been dropped due to improper adherence to procedure on the part of the officers and prosecutor. Having grown up in this southern redneck style county where everyone is more or less kinfolk, Hippie knows the deputies, the district attorney and the judge intimately and used to party with some of those guys. The district attorney and public defender were both aligned with the judge originally. Meth dealers with piles of Ben Franklins can buy their way out of serious charges but Hippie is no gangster. He's an idealist. 45 years old with blond dreadlocks who, if he ever did deal weed, it was mostly to Vietnam veterans on dialysis or old ladies with breast cancer.

You belong out in Mendo, I wrote to him. You deserve a break from the front lines.

Either he is going to do six months or one year on charges of resisting arrest, possession of marijuana, and paraphernalia, all dating back to the most recent arrest last spring.

We had been hitting the vaporizer at the house of our buddy Spark, the Vietnam vet on dialysis, enjoying a calm afternoon until this high school girlfriend of Jetta's, Emily, started getting drunk and disorderly, demanding that Hippie take her home.

Spark, who lives in the middle of the village of Verona in Indiana didn't want crazy drunk girls drawing attention. So he loaded the girl into his beat-up 1980 Chevy Luv truck with a 1969 Indiana plate that had no updated stickers and drove to the city of Seymour about nightfall.

"There's nothing in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that says you need a license and registration," Hippie had informed us, citing examples of libertarian eccentrics who had managed to beat the DMV on such grounds. "We have the right to travel without being harassed."

I had always countered that the state of Indiana, especially Jackson County, didn't see things that way. Some people are born soldiers though, always fighting for truth and justice. So the blueberries and cherries flashed in Hippie's review mirror.

The Seymour city cop must have wondered if the coffee at the police station was spiked with LSD when his headlights illuminated the 1969 Indiana plate. He must have suspected the dreadlocked bro in the driver's seat was on his way to Woodstock, New York. Who knows? Because the cop's body cam conveniently shut off before he opened the door to the Chevy Luv, grabbed Hippie and wrestled him out of the car where he slapped cuffs on our friend before charging him with a crime. Later, once Hippie had been placed in the backseat, the cops discovered a jar containing a few ounces of Mendo Magic.

"You guys don't even know the law," Hippie told the judge and District Attorney back in October.

"Maybe you should go to law school," the judge replied. "Or hire an attorney."

This time they found Hippie guilty on all counts while Jetta and I wined and dined with friends out here in Mendo where weed spills out of the seams like GMO corn along the roadsides during harvest time in Indiana.

Living in the Emerald Triangle one can grow annoyed at all the opportunists easing in on green bud bucks. But now I meditate in forest silence and have to remember all the folks like your buddy Spark in Indiana who really needs medical marijuana. And I have to salute my warrior friend Hippie Mike. Hopefully he's a celebrity by now. At least a small contingent of friends have staged a demonstration outside the county courthouse with pro-cannabis posters including one proclaiming "FREE HIPPIE MIKE."