Regardless of the fact that the majority of growers in Humboldt County are operating illegally, thousands of seasonal workers come from all over the world to work in the marijuana capital of the US during harvest season, risking jail time and felony charges to build a little nest-egg with untaxed, unregulated income.

I feel lucky to be here, even if I am breaking the law. Most nights the only sounds you can hear are wind, coyotes, and the white noise of generators.ĭown on the county road, or way out on the freeway, dozens of other newcomers are flooding Northern California looking for a place just like ours: travelers hitch-hikers retirees packs of grease-dark, train-hopping kids hippie couples holding cardboard signs with only a pair of scissors drawn on them. There’s no phone service and no internet. No highway patrol cars would bother to cruise in this far, which is a relief because Jim grows his weed illegally. It’s hard to get to there isn’t much local traffic save for the occasional work rig running bags of soil up the gravel road to one of the dozens of other grows in our little neighborhood.

Jim’s farm is two hours from the nearest city, 90 minutes from a gas station or a grocery store, at the end of a long logging road high in the coastal mountain range of Northern California. I call our place the Farm, though it isn’t ours: It’s Jim’s*. But I’ve worked in enough of these scenes to know that as far as trimming weed goes, this place is as good as it gets. The new girls are new they don’t know any of this yet. Even with 30 of us, we’ll be pushing to get it all done before the end of the year. We’ll sit the whole time, break sparingly for food, and only get up to the go to the bathroom when we absolutely must.

From now until Christmas, we’ll trim 16 hours a day, every day. It’s mid-July in southern Humboldt County, and the first round of the year’s marijuana harvest-all one thousand pounds of it-is hanging in the sheds or newly dried in contractor bags and cardboard boxes, ready for us to start trimming into perfect, salable little nuggets. This time of year, new girls are constantly coming to the property. They are still dressed in their city clothes-tight jeans and cute shoes-and as they shuffle across the dirt and dry gravel they talk excitedly to one another, shielding their eyes as the bright sun slides slowly over the mountain, already coming up to punish us. The new girls got in late last night and are all up at seven, being led around the dusty grounds of the property in the early morning sun.

Weed bud trimmer