Humboldt by Emily Brady Page B

needed to affix to their gate their 215, the doctor’s recommendation that gave them the legal right to grow pot. He needed to be able to read it with his binoculars.
    In the busy season, from late summer and into the fall, Bob did a lot of inspections to make sure people had their 215s and that the amount they were growing was in accordance with the law. His goal was to try to keep people in compliance and from getting too greedy.
    Bob swung his car around in front of Dazey’s Motorsports, a shop that sells four-wheelers and Rhinos, like Crockett used, which are particularly handy for reaching remote pot patches in the hills. He thought again about how the war on marijuana was over. This whole 215 thing was a joke. It was like a license to be a criminal. The government needed to get some cojones and either make pot legal, or make it entirely illegal. He learned a long time ago that nothing was going to stop it. It was better to just get real about it. If Bob knew anything, it was how to be real.
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    Bob Hamilton was born in Los Angeles County in 1961. When he was around seven, his parents moved the family to Ferndale, a central Humboldt town of picturesque Victorians and conservative leanings. It was the kind of place in the early 1970s where a “We Drink Hippie Blood” sign hung in the town’s Hotel Ivanhoe bar. Bob was the eldest of four. His father was a navy man who ran his family with a firm hand. In 1972, when Bob was ten, his father came home drunk, pointed a loaded .22 rifle at Bob’s mother, and pulled the trigger. Bob’s father then walked to the local bar and ordered himself a drink before he told the bartender to call the sheriff because he had just killed his wife.
    Ten-year-old Bob came out of his bedroom that night and discovered his mother covered in blood. Miraculously, she survived the shooting, though she was left blind in one eye and lost her sense of smell. Bob never saw his father again, but heard that the navy sent him to Vietnam, and that he survived the war and later settled in Texas. His mother, meanwhile, moved the children north to Eureka.
    Bob attended junior high in Eureka and worked odd jobs after school to help support his family. In his spare time he loved to wander in Sequoia Park, a patch of ancient forest located in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The grove was a testament to what Eureka looked like before redwoods were chopped down as the city expanded. Bob could spend all day there; it was his own Lost World.
    Inside the park it was quiet and cool, and there were dirt paths to race down that were lined with giant sword ferns. Slimy yellow banana slugs inched along in the shade. Bob liked to climb around on the huge stumps of fallen trees. He loved their massiveness, and their beauty and tranquility. To walk among them felt like swimming among blue whales. Enveloped by the trees and the earthy smell of redwood needles and forest floor, Bob felt safe and at peace. It was in Sequoia Park where his lifelong love of redwoods was born.
    Around this same time, Bob’s lifelong “sensitivity” to marijuana began. He was fourteen the first and only time he smoked pot. He was hanging out after school with his best friend and his best friend’s parents. The family was all smoking weed out of a hookah pipe in the living room. Bob’s friend suggested Bob give it a try. He shook his head. Then the mother started in; she said if Bob tried it just once, they’d leave him alone. So he pressed his lips against the mouthpiece and drew in a lungful of smoke. Then he had a most unusual, almost allergic reaction: he began to projectile-vomit all over the living room. After that, everyone in school knew not to give Bob any pot.
    Bob’s mother died in a horrific fire later that same year, and he was separated from his siblings and sent to live with relatives in Southern California. Bob credits the counseling he received after his