It was then, with fear, loathing, regret and trepidation, that I remembered the dark scurrying forms I’d encountered that first day in the storage shed; a second later I made the connection with the rat traps we’d found scattered about Jones’s main growing area. “Rats,” I said.
We phoned Dowst. Rats, he informed us, live in the city. In garbage. A week later we’d lost upward of fifty plants, and we phoned him again. He looked preoccupied as he stepped out of the van, and I noticed that his skin had lost its color, as if he’d been spending a lot of time indoors, hunched over his notes on the virgin’s bower or the beard lichen. We walked down to Jonestown with him, squatted like farmers socializing outside the courthouse, and showed him the ring of toothmarks that had bled a vigorous plant dry in a week’s time. I watched as he ran a finger round the moist indentation and then brought it to his mouth to taste the fluid seeping from the wound. He was silent a moment, then looked up at us and announced that rabbits were decimating our crop. “They’re thirsty,” he explained, “and here you’ve got a standing fountain, seventy percent water.” He rose to his feet and brushed at his trousers. “The only thing to do is peg down the fences so they can’t get in underneath.”
We pegged. Crawled on our hands and knees through the rattlesnake-, scorpion- and tarantula-infested brush, the sweat dripping from our noses, and hammered stakes into the ground, stretching our chicken wire so tight even a beetle couldn’t have crawled under it. It took us a week. Dowst stayed on to supervise, to potter around the growing areas exuding expertise, and even, on occasion, to lend a hand. When we got the whole thing finished — all the fences in all the growing areas nailed down tight — I observed that we were still losing plants to the mystery gnawers, and suggested that the big bundles of twigs and downed branches we regularly came across in the woods and had as a matter of course enclosed within the confines of our now impervious fences were in fact rats’ nests and that rats, not rabbits, were the culprits. Dowst demurred. But two days later, as the plants continued to wither and the toothy girdles to proliferate, he authorized Phil to drive into Santa Rosa and purchase two hundred rat traps at Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply.
By now it was early August, nearly a month since my fateful scrape with the law. We had something like eight hundred and forty six-foot plants — bushes, trees — burgeoning around us. The boredom was crushing. We alternated early watering chores — two days on, one day off — so that each of us could sleep late two days a week. I almost preferred getting up early. At least you felt alive in the cool of the morning, traversing fields damp with dew, ducking through silent groves of oak and madrone, catching a glimpse of deer, fox, bobcat. We’d get back to the cabin at nine-thirty or ten, the temperature already past ninety, stuff something in our mouths and fall face forward on our worn mattresses. It would be one or two by the time we woke to the deadening heat, our nostrils parched, throats dry as dunes, and joined the late sleeper in the continuous round of drinking, pot smoking, cards, and horseshoes that would put us away, dead drunk and disoriented, in the wee hours of the morning.
Each day was the same, without variation. Occasionally the pump would break down and Gesh would take it to a repairman in town and attempt to be casual about what he was doing with twenty-five-hundred gallons of water a day, or Dowst would pay a visit with magazines, newspapers, vodka and ice. But that was about it for excitement. The cards wore thin, the walls developed blisters from the intensity of our stares, we began to know the household lizards by name. “Gollee,” Phil would say, slipping into an Atchafalaya drawl as we sat silently over our fiftieth game of pitch, “I haven’t had this much fun since the hogs ate my baby sister.”
If we saw Dowst once or twice a week, we rarely saw Vogelsang. As the plants blossomed into hard evidence, he made himself increasingly scarce, more than ever the silent partner. “Look, I’ve got too much to lose,” he told us one night after he’d been summoned to repair the kick start on the surviving Kawasaki. “I just can’t take the risk of being seen up here or identified in any way with this operation. I’ve got business interests, property in three states, a number of other deals in the works …” and he waved his hand to show the futility of trying even to intimate the scope of his interests. We watched that exasperated hand in silence, thinking our own thoughts about how much he had to lose, and by extension, how little we had. To lose.
For my part, the euphoria of being allowed to stay on was quickly exhausted, and I’d come to feel as oppressed as my coworkers by the drudgery and the unvarying routine. During the long slow hours of the interminable sweltering afternoons, propped up in a chair with a tall vodka and tonic and some moronic sci-fi paperback Phil had picked up at a used-book store in Ukiah ("The classics, Phil,” I’d tell him, “get me something fat by Dostoevski or Dickens or somebody"), I began to feel I was aestivating, my clock wound down, brain numbed. It was then, more than ever, that I would find myself thinking of Petra.
One evening, while we stood round the horseshoe pit, winning, losing and exchanging chits, Dowst’s van slid through the trees along the road and swung into the field, jouncing toward us across the brittle yellow expanse of the yard like a USO wagon come to some remote outpost. We were shirtless, bearded, dirty, our jeans sun-bleached and boots cracked with age and abuse. Behind us the sun flared in the sky, fat and red as a tangerine, and a host of turkey vultures, naked heads, glossy wings, converged on the carcass of some luckless creature struck down behind the shed. Puddles of crushed glass glinted at our feet, the sagging out-buildings eased toward the ground like derelicts bedding down for the night, and the cabin, pale as driftwood, radiated heat in scalloped waves until you had to look twice to be sure it wasn’t on fire. For an instant I saw the scene from Dowst’s eyes — from the eyes of an outsider, an emissary from the world of hot tubs and Cuisinarts — and realized that we must have looked like mad prospectors, like desert rats, like the sad sun-crazed remnants of Pizarro’s band on the last leg of the road to Eldorado.
Dowst backed out of the van, crablike, his arms laden, and disappeared into the house. A moment later he emerged, newspaper in hand, and crossed the yard to join us. He was wearing white shorts and an alligator-emblazoned shirt, tennis shoes and pink-tinted shades. “Hi,” he said, gangling and affable, as relaxed as a man who’s just played two sets of tennis before brunch, and then held out the newspaper as if it were a new steel racket or a Frisbee. “I thought you guys might want to see this.”
See what? VOGELSANG ELECTED MAYOR; POT SOARS ON COMMODITIES MARKET; JERPBAK TRANSFERRED TO JERUSALEM. We saw the front page of the Chronicle, blocks of print, a murky photograph. Puzzled, we crowded round him, scanning the headlines, passing quickly over the stories of corruption in government, poverty in the Third World and carnage in the Seychelles, until the following story leapt out from the page to seize us like the iron grip of a strangler:
WAR DECLARED ON POT GROWERS
The Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department of Justice have formulated plans for a federally funded assault on growers of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana along the Northern California coast, the Chronicle learned today. A federal law-enforcement grant of $400,000 has been rushed through to enable the newly formed “Sinsemilla Strike Force” to begin operations before the fall harvest season. The strike force will coordinate federal agents and local police departments in “sniffing out illicit growing operations,” as one source put it, in Mendocino, Del Norte, and Humboldt counties. Aerial surveillance, including the use of infra-red photography, will, it is hoped, pinpoint the locations of so many of the large-scale farms, while a program of special cash rewards for turning in growers is expected to help in exposing others.