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nonprofit community will be unable to provide services to suddenly displaced peoples, and the golden goose will be dead.”
    She looked up at the crowd.
    â€œWe will all face this economic decline together. For the sake of our region, it is time to begin planning for this upheaval now, together.
    â€œWhat will we do?” she asked.
    There was dead silence.
    â€œWe have all the talent and all the answers we need right here in this room.”
    Among the ideas that bubbled up that evening was an advisory panel of pot growers that would meet with local elected officials to discuss how to regulate their industry. One couple came away from the meeting inspired to form the area’s first collective to try to sell organic, artisanal Humboldt pot legally under the state’s medical model. Some audience members expressed the long-held fear that legalization would bring the corporatization of the industry and that the market would be flooded with cheap, mass-​p roduced weed, and they wouldn’t be able to compete. Others, including a local government official, saw it as an opportunity to take advantage of Humboldt’s legendary brand. Across the country and beyond, the Humboldt County name had become deeply linked with pot.
    â€œWe’ve had this name association for thirty or forty years now,” County Supervisor Mark Lovelace remarked. “If this is a newly legitimized industry, shouldn’t we be looking at capitalizing on that?”
    There was talk of creating an appellation, modeled after the world’s great wine-growing regions, to designate that local pot was Humboldt homegrown. The way Hamilton saw it, the future of the area was either “appellation or Appalachia.” Should marijuana become legal, Humboldt County could become the Napa Valley of Pot, complete with “marijuanaries,” where tourists could visit and sample the latest harvest. The business possibilities were endless: “bud and breakfasts,” where rooms overlooked fragrant green gardens; a marijuana museum, detailing the history of the area’s decades-long experiment in civil disobedience; food and pot pairings at local restaurants; and some kind of four-wheel-drive trolley service, like the limos of the Napa Valley, to cart intoxicated tourists up unpaved roads to tour the pot farms.
    â€œI’m not dying until there’s a tasting room in Humboldt County!” a woman with a brown bob and glasses passionately declared.
    She was greeted with an enthusiastic round of applause.
    That evening, Mare Abidon wasn’t worried about the price of pot or how she might brand herself; instead, she was bursting with hope. She had always expected that marijuana would become legal one day, and when it did, she planned to plant big pot bushes in plain sight between the cherry trees around her deck. In fact, she’d never imagined it would take this long. She never really understood the whole War on Drugs, or why the government considered marijuana such a menace. She thought it was great medicine, and even safer than alcohol as a way to unwind at the end of the day.
    With the coming legalization, Mare thought that all the jails were going to be emptied of people arrested for pot, and that she and her friends who grew it were finally going to become legitimate members of society.
    Much was discussed that night, but what Mare took away, what she’d always remember, was that giddy rush of emotion, the feeling of pure liberation as she stepped into the light and walked toward that growers’ table. “It was like crawling out from under a rock that I had been under for decades,” she later confessed.
    But, of course, not everyone felt that way.

Chapter Two
Crockett
    A gainst the shadowy outline of the mighty redwoods, the speeding Ford pickup looked like a toy powered by some far-off remote control. A balmy, late summer wind whipped through the truck’s open window and through the sandy