Pubdate: Sat, 01 Jul 2000
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: The Vancouver Sun 2000
Contact:  200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3
Fax: (604) 605-2323
Website: http://www.vancouversun.com/
Author:  Jean Greene
Note: Jean Greene is a pseudonym for a writer living somewhere in B.C.

DARK SECRET OF RURAL LIFE

Jean Greene grew up in a poor interior B.C. community. When the pot 
ranchers moved in, life changed for the better -- for the growers, at least.

There are some things you don't ask in the place I used to live. One Sunday 
afternoon at a soccer game, I sat at the side of the field exchanging 
gossip and petting various dogs. There were a lot of really great looking 
young men and some kids playing soccer that afternoon -- and because this 
was a bucolic rural B.C. town, there was also a sprinkling of tourists 
snapping photos, petting the dogs and taking it all in. A tourist turned to 
one of the young men and inquired as to what he did for a living. The 
person he asked pointed to another guy and said, "I'm working on his house."

His friend solemnly pointed back and said, "And I'm working on his house."

Life here looks idyllic, even utopian and  much of it is. The pace of 
things is peaceful, slow. Everyone knows  everyone. Everyone has time for 
coffee, visiting, parties -- lots of parties. The school, which has grades 
Kindergarten through 12, is terrific: good curriculum, committed, caring 
teachers. There's pickup co-ed soccer in the summer, hockey in the winter, 
people to play music with, lots of community concerts. Often there are 
classes in things like pottery, or dancing, or Tai-chi, or Yoga. There's 
hiking, fishing and skiing and endless miles of wilderness to play in.

Almost everyone has land, a house they're building, a small business. 
People are busy, involved in community work. A lot of them used to go tree 
planting, although that's changing as they age. Now a lot of people have 
kids who go tree planting.

Over the years, I have seen many people come and many people go but the 
core community remains unchanged. It could be anywhere in the rural B.C., a 
small community lost in a sea of mountains.

What people here also do, among all their other activities, is grow 
marijuana -- really good stuff and lots  of it. I'm  always amazed at how 
well kept a secret it is even though at least 60 per cent of the community 
are growers. The rest are retired people who probably wouldn't know a 
marijuana plant if it came up in their petunias.

This place, like other towns in the B.C. interior, has developed a culture 
and a way of life where the counterculture, undaunted and unfazed by being 
ignored, has developed into a hybrid of leftover hippie-ism, new age 
mysticism and rural survival work ethic. The result is both entertainingly 
eccentric and economically sustainable.

There are no obvious rules and no way of defining what this new culture is. 
It's been forming since the first years of the '70s, when people crawled up 
the hills out of Vancouver, or north from the U.S., inbuses, vans, step 
vans, trucks and ancient Volkswagens, to find a place that had clean air, 
clean water, cheap land and isolation.

A standard joke -- although it really isn't a joke in this community -- is 
that when the right time comes, all  we need to do is blow up the roads and 
we'll be fine on our own. The idea isn't to keep people in, it's to keep 
everybody else out.

Like so many other towns in remote parts of B.C., this place went through a 
lot of changes in the '60s and early '70s. What had been a small, quiet, 
backwoods redneck community, with an economy based on logging, mining and 
just plain getting by was suddenly inundated with new people. They lived in 
buses, tipis, yurts, uninsulated cabins -- any place they could find. Over 
time most left, but many stayed, put down roots, built houses, had families.

Not many options exist for employment in rural B.C. if you're not a logger, 
miner or government employee. But most people here, through both necessity 
and desire, are terrific farmers and gardeners. Organic and alternative is 
the norm, an accepted way of life.

Slowly the word spread: growing is a way to make a decent living, to pay 
for your land or your house, to support a family, to afford an independent 
life close to the land, close to nature -- and not pay taxes.  What could 
possibly be wrong with that?

Marijuana growing has become a refined and intricate form of agriculture. 
It is also the economic base of many small communities. Without the income 
it draws, car and real estate dealers, health food stores, restaurants, 
corner stores would soon disappear.

Growing is hard but lucrative work. The great thing about marijuana growing 
is that anyone can do it. Marijuana growers are single moms, older women, 
young men and women with families, kids in high school, older guys. It's a 
healthy life and a rewarding one. The math is easy. Given that one healthy 
pot plant can produce a half-pound to a pound of bud that sells for up to 
$3000, given that most people grow anywhere from 100 to 300 plants, there's 
lots of pot and lots of money to be spread around. The  money goes in 
various directions. People get paid as trimmers and couriers. The growers 
rarely sell, someone else does that. Someone else also takes the chance of 
running the pot across the border, where most of it goes.

It's an intricate, secret, robust and completely unstoppable network. In my 
community, the police drive  over from the neighbouring town once or twice 
a year to set up roadblocks. They check driver's licenses and seat belts 
and go away again. Paranoia creeps in at harvest time but no one ever seems 
to get arrested, unless someone calls the police and demands they do 
something. One man down the road with a hydroponics operation that had been 
doing well for 20 years got busted when his ex-wife's boyfriend called the 
police. He lost his equipment and paid a fine. He moved away after that, 
began spending the winters in Mexico.

It's difficult to estimate how much money goes through the place at any 
given time. No one looks rich.  People drive old cars but most of them own 
land and have built, or are building, new houses. Some spend the winters in 
Thailand or Costa Rica or Mexico. It's odd how rarely the question of money 
ever comes up.

But while money isn't usually a topic of conversation, what your neighbour 
might be up to -- other than working on his neighbour's house -- always is. 
As a non-grower, it's been difficult to find acceptance. I always felt I 
belonged there because I was born there. Everyone else had come after me. 
Although I welcomed what their industry brought to the community, when a 
joint went around I waved it away. I never became part of the booming 
marijuana-growing cottage industry, and that relegated me to a kind of 
awkward place on the fringes.

One night I was at my friend Allison's house. Allison is someone I know 
well. Some medical researcher should do a study on her. She's been smoking 
six to 10 joints a day now for almost 30 years. She looks great and has an 
amazing garden, although I must admit, sometimes her short term memory is 
almost as bad as mine.

I did a search once, at her request, through a bunch of medical abstracts 
on the deleterious effects of smoking marijuana. I was amazed to find that 
almost no up-to-date research had been done. What there was mentioned vague 
symptoms like lethargy and confusion. I thought of all the people I knew in 
my home town who were busy building houses, raising kids and raising crops 
and wondered if the researchers had any real idea what they were talking about.

Allison had been in one of my writing classes; we'd shared hundreds of pots 
of tea and hours of conversation. On this particular day, when I came in, 
her house smelled like a skunk had gone off in the basement. I didn't say 
anything. It was trimming season. Her small room in the basement would be 
full of plastic garbage sacks of carefully dried marijuana. We had just 
settled in for a pot of tea and a game of Scrabble when the phone rang.

"It's T. and J.," she said, looking worried, "they're coming over but they 
wanted to know who was here."

"Fine," I said." It'll be great to see them."

"They said they'd wait at the bottom of the driveway until you're ready to 
leave."

I didn't finish the Scrabble game. I wasn't angry, but I knew when I was 
out of place. This question of belonging became particularly acute when it 
involved my own children. As much as I had no objections to what people 
were doing, it was not a life I wanted for my kids, as I tried to explain 
when they asked why not.

" Look," said my son, "Every one I know has land, they're building houses, 
they drive Jettas. What's wrong with that?"

"But then what do you do?" I asked. "What about when you look around and 
want something more in your life. What if you want to use your brain? What 
if you want more opportunities, or want to talk about more than what your 
neighbours are doing? What happens then?"

He didn't answer, but he's at university now. He misses his friends, he 
gets homesick a lot. Once, when I asked him if he had thought about moving 
back he looked at me. "Don't let me have that option," he said.

"All right," I said, and meant it.

After I moved away to go to school, I met someone who had lived for a year 
in this tiny place. "Oh," I  said, pleased, "we must know a lot of the same 
people."

"I lived there for a year," he said. "No one talked to me. I moved."

I nodded. "I understand what you mean," I said, and we went our separate ways.

Jean Greene is a pseudonym for a writer living somewhere in B.C.
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