SoHum’s Latest Embarrassment

If you want to see, first-hand, why you can’t build a community with people who cheat the social contract, come to Garberville to see just how dysfunctional a town dominated by drug dealers and real estate leeches can be. From the vandalized and burned-out vehicles along our county roads, to the open hostility towards the poor and homeless in town, to the online comments that stack up, like so many stale crackers, beneath every slab of “Hardin” cheese, SoHum shows off its dysfunction with a breathtaking lack of self-consciousness. It’s embarrassing, frankly.

A number of people approached me on Friday to ask if I planned to write about our latest embarrassment, namely, the hideous orange fence around the new Garberville Town Square. The Garberville Town Square, as the Garberville Town Square Association reminds us, is on private property. So, the owners of the Garberville Town Square have decided that they don’t like the way the public uses their space. They’ve fenced it off with repulsive orange plastic temporary fencing, and asked the Sheriff to evict anyone who dares set foot in it. The Garberville Town Square Committee announced this 60 day closure, just as the annual influx of seasonal workers and cannabis tourists began to arrive to celebrate and bring in the Fall harvest.

Every year, right about this time, every pot-smoking free-spirited freak and hippie in the world thinks about coming to Humboldt County to get high, camp in the woods, and make some money trimming weed. Some of them actually go through with it. Trimming remains a huge bottleneck in the cannabis industry, and with so much recent expansion, the need for temporary workers at harvest time has only increased. People wouldn’t keep coming back if they didn’t find work, and people do come back, year after year. It’s a thing.

Cannabis attracts a really diverse group of people, trending towards the young and enthusiastic, from all over the world. Trim jobs especially appeal to foreign travelers looking for a way to make some money without a green card. Some of them have never seen a mature cannabis plant before. Few of them will make a career of trimming weed, but all of them want to spend a few weeks buried in marijuana and have some cash money to show for it. It’s also a great opportunity to meet people, share stories and make friends.

Every year, these people show up. Every year, they have nowhere to go, so they hang out in town, and every year, people in town get angry, call the cops, and rout them out and fence them off from anyplace they try to congregate. Neighbors’ complaints about people congregating in the Garberville Town Square, especially after dark, prompted the Town Square closure, and the ugly orange fence. I understand that having a whole lot of rambunctious young people in town can impact your life in a lot of ways, and I sympathize, but it’s not like you didn’t know they were coming.

It really amazes me that a community that depends so heavily on the marijuana industry, could treat the people who make that industry profitable, so badly. If you want the people who love marijuana and smoke marijuana every day to think highly of “the Humboldt Brand,” it seems to me that you would want them to enjoy themselves, and feel good about the time they spend here in Humboldt County. Instead, we try to make it into a war zone for them, in hopes that they will leave, but they stay anyway. Thanks to the War on Drugs, they are used to living in war zones, and have come to expect this kind of treatment.

If we had any sense around here, we could turn harvest season into the biggest tourist draw of the year. It could become a two month festival, that makes Reggae on the River kind of money, week after week until it starts to rain. Just open a huge campground, down at the Community Park perhaps, park a few food trucks down there, open a canteen, offer “trimmer training” courses, set up a flea market, a cafe, and plenty of porta-potties, and keep it all out of town.

A lot of people come here looking for work, and the industry, as it stands, genuinely needs most of their labor. The more we cater to their needs, the more of that money we can keep in our community. The infrastructure necessary to accommodate the people who come here every year would not cost that much. It wouldn’t look like much of a status symbol, nor would it provide a scapegoat to vent pent up frustrations on, but it would solve the problem, help the Humboldt brand and create new opportunities for economic diversity which we desperately need.

Instead, we cultivate this escalation of hostilities. We vent. We build fences and hold town meetings. We pass around photographs of human feces like we’ve never seen it before. We pass new ordinances to criminalize poverty, and sleep, and asking for help. We go out into the woods with tazers and video cameras and cops to harass, humiliate and evict our poorest neighbors, and now, for this year’s twist, we fence off our charming little Town Square as though it’s contaminated with radioactivity.

It never works. It didn’t work last year. It didn’t work the year before. It didn’t work the year before that, and it won’t work this year. They’re coming. You can’t stop them any more than you can hold back the tides, or prevent the next earthquake. They’re coming. They’re young. They’re excited. They’re having fun, staying up late at night, taking drugs and blowing off steam, just like you did when you were their age, and they’ll be here until it starts to rain. It’s a fact of life. The sooner we face that fact, the sooner we can solve the problem.

The people who come here for the harvest season really appreciate cannabis. These people love weed, and Fall harvest provides the opportunity to build the Humboldt brand. If people have a good, positive experience while they are here, whether or not they make any money, that could easily translate into a lifetime preference for cannabis products bearing the Humboldt name. Now that prohibition has all but ended, people have lots of cannabis choices. Brand loyalty can easily make the difference between success and failure in the legal market.

If we can just face the fact that people need a place to be, and make space for people, we can solve a lot of problems, relieve a lot of stress, and create a lot of new economic opportunities. We can’t keep pretending that we’re just a normal quiet small town and that we have no idea why all of these hippies keep coming here every Fall. We can’t make them go away, but we can solve problems, make peace, and make money, if we can just face facts and take responsibility. That is, we could, if we were that kind of people.

It’s About the Laundromat

I know a few of the business owners in Garberville, and I even consider a couple of them friends, but when they all get together, it can get ugly, and a few of them make our greed-bag dope yuppies look like Mother Theresa by comparison. I’m not a big fan of the black market marijuana industry, but if you buy a bag of weed from one of our local growers, at least it will get you high. On the other hand, if you try washing your clothes at either of our local laundromats here in SoHum, you’ll pay a premium to use the machines, but your clothes will come out of them dirtier and smellier than when they went in.

Whether you go to the laundromat in Redway or the one in Garberville, it’s the same story. Those machines will ruin your clothes and charge you for the service. I don’t know where she finds those machines, but I’ve never seen weaker, more anemic agitator action in my life, and they just give up if you try to put more than about five socks in one load. You will find no running water at either facility, so if you get laundry soap on your hands, there’s no place to rinse it off. God help you if you need to use a restroom, and the places couldn’t be uglier.

A friend and I were talking. We both live off-grid, and so we both understand the real cost of conventional luxuries. “My washing machine uses a lot of juice.” he said.

“You have a washing machine?” I replied.

“Oh yeah,” he said, “I had to get one. It didn’t matter how much it cost or how much electricity and water it uses, I absolutely had to get one.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I can’t go into that laundromat. I had to stop. I kept getting into fights.” he told me, adding, “I cannot go into that laundromat, either of them, without getting into a fight. I mean, I’m not a violent guy. I could be totally plastered, at a rowdy bar, and I will have no problems, but if I walk into one of those laundromats, stone cold sober, I swear, within fifteen minutes, I’m ready to kill somebody.”

I know how he feels. My partner Amy washes most of our clothes at home, by hand, rather than use those machines. Truth be told, we have no place to wash clothes in Southern Humboldt. Instead, we have two facilities offering coin-operated, wardrobe ruining, anger generators. This we all learn, over time. Pamela Van Meter owns both of them. This petite, elderly woman also owns The Paper Mill, the only copy shop and stationary store in town, and the place where I buy pen refills when I need them.

I would describe Ms. Van Meter as a perfect lady. She always dresses nicely. In the summer, she loves to wear white. I distinctly remember her, strolling down the fairway at Summer Arts and Music Festival, all dressed-up in a crisp, spotless white dress, with a lacy white parasol over her head. She looked great. Many times I’ve seen her stepping out of her spotlessly clean white luxury SUV in a spotless white pantsuit. You’d think she knew something about doing laundry.

She knows something about doing business though. I’m sure those laundromats help her “clean-up” more than they help her customers clean anything. She knows that she’s got us over a barrel, so she lets her attendants catch the shit, while she skims the cream. You can’t help but feel the contempt for the customer when you’re in there.

Even if you arrived at the laundromat in a good mood, by the time you’ve pushed your quarters into the machine, spent an hour or so in the bleak, depressing interior, staring at the cracked plaster walls, and then noticed that big oily stain across the front of your new shirt, the big oily stain that wasn’t there when you put the shirt in the machine, your mood has changed. You could walk into the laundromat as happy as Spongebob Squarepants, but by the time you leave, you feel like Mad Max.

When a merchant sets up a vibe like that, it’s bound to reverberate through town in various ways. Imagine some tourists, who, after emerging from two weeks of backpacking in the King Range, spend their first hour back in civilization, at one of our laundromats having the clothes they hope to clean, ruined, while they wait. They’re pissed about the big oily stains. They want to wash the laundry soap off of their hands. They need to use the bathroom, and they can’t wait to get the hell out of that place.

They’re not happy. If they go to a restaurant after that, they’ve already forgiven about as much as they’re willing to forgive for one day. If the restaurant screws-up their order, there’s going to be hell to pay. It becomes a vicious cycle, as the employees who absorb all of this dissatisfaction, become dissatisfied with their jobs, and the more dissatisfaction people feel, the more hostile they become.

I recall remarking to my partner as we drove through Garberville for the very first time, almost 20 years ago now. “This seems like a very sad little town.” I said. I don’t think it’s gotten any happier. Happy people spend more money, but once you’ve been ripped-off, you’re out for revenge. In this way, a few greedy merchants can suck the goodwill right out of a town.

Personally, I think the Garberville/Redway Chamber of Commerce would do much better to focus on solving these kinds of problems within the business community, rather than scapegoating and harassing the people who live here. The new No Loitering, No Panhandling, No Smoking signs that just went up all over town don’t make the place any classier. If anything, those signs make me want to take up smoking, just so I can lurk menacingly on the sidewalk, in my stained shirt, blowing smoke in people’s faces while I beg them for spare change.

Keep this in mind. If you have an unpleasant encounter with an obnoxious person in dirty clothes on your next visit to Garberville. Don’t take it personally. It’s not about you; It’s about the laundromat.

Choice and Change in Humboldt County

People talk about homelessness as though it were a choice. How many times have you heard someone say, “If that’s how they choose to live…” when talking about homeless people? What a ludicrous idea! Homelessness happens to people. They don’t aspire to it. They don’t plan it, and few are well prepared for it when it happens to them. People don’t choose homelessness. Homelessness is what happens to people who run out of options.

On the other hand, people do choose to become middle-class. The aspiration to become middle-class is so pervasive that it has acquired a nickname. We call it the American Dream. Yes, people choose to become middle-class. They aspire to join the middle-class. They work to achieve middle-class status, and even after they’ve established themselves within the middle-class, they never quite feel middle-class enough.

A lot of people choose to live a middle-class lifestyle, and it’s a choice most people make without giving it a lot of thought. It’s an expensive choice. The middle-class lifestyle consumes people’s lives as greedily as it consumes the earth’s resources. The middle-class lifestyle doesn’t happen by accident. It takes dedication and lifelong commitment to join the ranks of the middle-class.

At the same time, the middle-class lifestyle has a very poor record of making people happy. As anyone raised in a middle-class home can tell you, the middle-class lifestyle ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Still, people throw themselves at the middle-class, like proverbial lemmings over a cliff. Even real lemmings aren’t that stupid. What gives?

You see, most people don’t choose a middle-class lifestyle because it looks particularly attractive. Most people choose to become middle-class because the prospect of homelessness frightens them so much. In this way, the middle-class are a lot like Christians, who abstain from earthly pleasures, not so much because they dream of someday flying through the clouds playing a harp, but because they fear the fires of Hell.

This kind of fear grows into resentment. In the same way that deeply frustrated Christians vent their resentment at gay people and women seeking abortions, the middle-class vent their resentment at the poor and homeless. In both cases it’s a gross display of stupidity, gullibility and cowardice aimed at the most vulnerable. Like Christians, the middle-class have been frightened into believing a fairy tale that controls their lives and makes them resentful of non-believers.

No one forces them to become middle-class. I’m sure they feel a lot of pressure from family and friends, not to mention the media, and society at large. Even the government tries to enforce a middle-class lifestyle through policy, sanction, and ordinance. However, the decision to pursue a middle-class lifestyle remains a personal choice, and one that can only be realized through dedication and hard work. Still, it’s a choice most people make without much serious thought.

We know that most of the serious crises we face today, like global climate change, habitat loss and the extinction crisis, result directly from too many people choosing a conventional American middle-class lifestyle. From a scientific perspective, it seems clear that the single biggest threat to our long-term survival, is our global infatuation with becoming middle-class. If we actually thought about it, we’d realize what a destructive, high-maintenance, low-satisfaction lifestyle the middle-class have chosen. Few of us would eagerly repeat their mistakes. But instead of thinking, we blindly perpetuate a culture of fear and oppression that serves only the super-rich, while it pushes us all relentlessly towards extinction.

Who do we blame for this? Invariably, we blame the poor. We blame the poor for not pulling their weight. We blame the poor for frightening children, driving off tourists, blocking sidewalks, and especially for not going away. Then, when they finally crack, under the pressure of poverty, lack of sleep, poor diet, constant harassment and social isolation, we blame their poverty on mental illness. How does this make sense?

If you ask me, I say, “Blame the middle-class.” Blame the sniveling cowards who turned their backs on humanity and stuck their tongues deep into the rectum of the super-rich, just for the chance to spend the future, today. Blame the middle-class for their greed, stupidity, and cowardice. Blame them for their choices, because the choices were all theirs to make.

Whether it was their lack of imagination, their gullibility, or their infatuation with bright shiny objects that lead middle-class people to make the dreadful decisions that define their lives and shape our world, ultimately, blaming people doesn’t solve the problem. To solve this problem, people have to learn to live differently.

I realize that you’ve heard this before. “Create a sustainable lifestyle” has been a mantra of environmental organizations for decades, environmental groups that rely mainly on the middle-class
for their support. Still, if we manage to survive this century as a species, it won’t be because we developed some new clean energy source, it will be because we learned to live differently.

Do you remember that part of our Humboldt County heritage? You’ve seen the experimental houses, the strawbale, cobb, ferro-cement, and wattle-and-daub buildings, the yurts, tepees, wikiups, and benders, the domes, tree-houses, house-trees, and the thousands of funky, idiosyncratic little wooden dwellings that grace our Humboldt County hillsides. Those houses exist because a lot of people came to Humboldt County to experiment with different ways of living, not to become middle-class yuppies by growing dope.

We’ve seen how these experiments pay off economically. The Solar Living Center in Hopland, and the Schottz energy lab in Arcata come to mind immediately, as examples of how a modest cultural experiment can catalyze change and create real economic opportunities.

We have a long history of experimental, owner-built housing in Humboldt County. We need housing now more than ever, and we need housing that works for people, rather than vice-versa. We need to learn to live differently, and few things reflect the way we live more than the homes we live in.

Here in Humboldt County, we have the opportunity to take a humane approach to our housing shortage, and open a door to the future, or not. People need a place to live. We can continue to deny our neighbors the dignity of privacy and a place to escape the elements, or we can create the kind of cultural incubator that solves problems, sets trends, and creates the economic opportunities of the future.

Class War against the poor will never succeed, and the middle-class will never be happy with what they have. We need to find another way to live, and if we want to know what that looks like, we need to allow the people who need it the most, an opportunity to build it for themselves.