Rancho Marijuana – Where I Live & Breathe

Come and pick your own bud farms! Harvest Season in Rancho Marijuana! The smell of bud permeates everywhere in this tiny community – but you need an invitation to “pick your own”, unless you want to do it in the middle of the night. There are over 350 marijuana farms in a two square mile area – almost none of it guarded or protected – not even basic camera surveillance. Generators are going 24/7 to water the crops. Strangers are driving around taking pictures, stealing plants and taking notes from their cars. The local Sheriff (Tehama County) is afraid to even come near this place – where Ana and I live. It is 30 miles out into the back country and though 1500 people live here, there is no form of public transportation. The “1500” people does not include the majority of marijuana growers – they are, for the most part, transient foreign nationals. They constantly break the laws in regards to cultivation, registration, fencing, water transport (it is against the law to move water from one property to another), distribution and sale. And they sometimes get busted – a few months ago one of them got an 18-year sentence for illegal sale – but he was busted outside the Rancho. His crops here went unattended for….wait for it…about half an hour. We live in the middle of this, foolishly growing our own food and planting fruit trees – hardly the stuff to make us rich. But then the growers don’t seem rich either – battered pick-ups and tents or broken down trailers; generators instead of power poles; and they bring in really cheap whores for weekend parties. Not the Glorious life depicted on Miami Vice. This is where we live – our house is surrounded by more than 50 marijuana properties just in a half-mile radius. We smell the weed, the exhaust from generators and our roads have been, in some cases, completely ruined by constant water-truck traffic. We don’t go for walks any more on the ranch because it isn’t safe and we don’t want to “alarm” any grower who might be sleeping in a little tent next to his crop. Some day he might be rich and we’ll want him for a good neighbor. LOL.