Deep in the mountains of Northern California, cannabis blooms among the redwoods, farmers live in rustic cabins with meandering dirt driveways and padlocked wire gates, and there’s a quiet filled with both “an urgency and a void,” according to Mendocino grower Justin Calvino, who serves on the board of the California Growers Association. Up here in NorCal, amid the skyscraper-tall trees, where cell-phone service fails, the air smells of fresh dew and fresher bud, and off-the-grid growers quietly tend their crops, the absence of everyday society, of the government, of the mainstream, is a celebrated way of life.
But at the same time—and at any given moment—helicopters can swoop down without warning, and law-enforcement agents can seize the plants, bust the farmers, and leave broken families in their wake.
That’s…
