Reporting from Garberville, Calif. — A woman drove into the Humboldt County hills to earn some money trimming the leaves from marijuana buds.
At a cabin, the grower who'd hired her set out mounds of pot. The woman and a friend chatted as they trimmed. Suddenly, an armed man barged in. He accused the grower of stealing his pot.
The invader grabbed some of the grower's cash, handed it to the women and ordered them out. They careened down the road in their truck to the foot of the mountain.
What should they do?
"We should forget it," the woman told her friend, "not think about it, and sure as hell not talk about it. We spent this weekend out in Bear Harbor."
A week later, a girl stopped by the woman's regular job to return the purse she'd left in the hills and to deliver a message: We know where to find you.
Four months later, the woman saw a missing-person poster at a supermarket. On it was a picture of the grower who'd hired her.
This story is fiction but it could have happened — and probably has. It was among a series of tales that began appearing on a mysterious blog two years ago, short stories about life in the secretive marijuana-growing world of Northern California.
The author used the name SoHumBorn (for southern Humboldt-born), and for three months the stories mesmerized the pot growers of southern Humboldt and northern Mendocino counties.
In the mountains of SoHumBorn's world, bodies were buried like secrets. Mothers dressed their children for school while federal drug agents surrounded the house. Growers' posses dispensed frontier justice.
The author knew the specialty coffee that pot growers drink — Signature Coffee from Redway in southern Humboldt — and knew that growers take supplies of it when they travel, certain they'll find nothing as good anywhere else.
Her stories — for many assumed that only a woman would dare be so open about the pot world — exposed a still-wild and clandestine California in a manner reminiscent of the way John Cheever lifted the veil over 1950s East Coast suburbia.
"Part of what makes our community really close-knit is a sense of having to come together to protect our way of life," said Shannon Bridges, a southern Humboldt resident and avid reader of SoHumBorn's blog posts. "She was the first to write about it from the inside in such a public way."
Couples argued over the stories. Chat rooms buzzed.
Then one day in February 2009, the blog vanished like the grower in SoHumBorn's story. Readers were bereft. A rumor spread that angry growers had figured out who she was and ordered her to shut up.
Unsparing honesty
SoHumBorn's stories gathered power from their unsparing honesty about weed life, its giddy freedom, its compromises and disaffections.
In the late 1960s and '70s, hippies arrived in the lumber-depleted mountains of southern Humboldt County, searching for an alternative to mainstream America that was natural and honest.
Then came marijuana. At first, the hippies grew it for their own use. As its price rose relentlessly, they became entrepreneurs and outlaws. They proved surprisingly square. Pot money allowed them to create self-reliant villages. They had Little League and quilting bees and volunteer fire departments.
But in this world, people disappeared. There were domestic violence, greed and betrayal. Methamphetamine, machismo and midnight meetings with buyers. And no one said a word.
On the contrary, pot growers grew defensive. "If you're a grower, you only talk about the good stuff because everybody out there hates you," said Kym Kemp, a southern Humboldt native and freelance journalist, whose Redheaded Blackbelt blog — at kymk.wordpress.com — has pioneered frank discussions about marijuana life.
Kemp has championed SoHumBorn's fiction and published some of the stories on her own blog. She described herself as a longtime friend of the reclusive author, and she put The Times in touch with the woman she said was SoHumBorn.
Communicating by e-mail and later by phone, the woman declined to reveal her name, saying she grew marijuana and did not want to invite law enforcement attention or hostility from fellow growers.
She said she was raised in a home without electricity, surrounded by marijuana. Pot seemed an unexceptional, everyday part of life, she said, until about the third grade.
Then "people started telling us we needed to be quiet," she said.
She became a grower in her teens. Reading filled her quiet moments, though she "barely" graduated from high school. Her favorite author was Stephen King; she liked being scared. "I think that's why I'm in this business," she said. But she never wrote any fiction or kept a journal, fearing police might use it as evidence.
In the '80s, when narcotics agents with the state's Campaign Against Marijuana Planting descended from helicopters to bust outdoor pot farms, she was among those who lost their crops, she said. Her children grew up with a phobia about helicopters.
