Travels With Buddha 1.6
Travels With Buddha — 1.6 — -On the Road to Blue Lake, County of Humboldt, State of California — “The first one now will later be last….Because the times there are a chang’in”
Once we drive about a hundred miles south on I-5, Buddha’s sour mood finally starts to lift. We take a sharp right turn at Grant’s Pass to head west toward the Pacific Coast. Near the confluence of the east and middle fork of the Illinois River I realize that he is not going to come out of his funk without some prodding. I am sorely tempted to drop him off at Takilma and leave him there. He could live quite nicely in a tree.
Some time in the late 1960’s “hippies” started moving to Takilma and they have never left. It can be described as an “artist’s colony” or “counter culture mecca” but mostly it survived and flourished by the illegal cultivation of marijuana. This has never been any great secret. Pachouli scented long-hairs with heavy garlic breath coming out of the Southern Oregon woods with their large pockets filled with cash (mostly C-notes) was always something of a dead give-away. But the good people of Takilma invested a lot of those horticulture dollars in things like Community Health Clinics, alternative schools and the peace movement. Along with that they supported themselves and others in artisan endeavors like mask making and art glass. So it was a very happening community for a lot of years. Straw bale houses, composting toilets, organic vegetable gardens and swimming naked in the Illinois River. Hippy paradise. I think Buddha would enjoy it.
Ah but things change, don’t they. Ironically the thing that brought significant change to Takilma (and all of Humboldt County, California which is slightly south of here) was the recent legalization of recreational marijuana. I guess it was predictable. The price of a pound of marijuana has fallen through the floor. In the free-fall much of the economic base of places like Takilma is quickly going with it. It could be the end of paradise. Already aging hippies are digging up their back yards hoping to find plastic five gallon buckets of cash they hid decades ago. The further irony of the pot business is what it does to your memory. If you smoke enough of it you can’t remember much of anything let alone how many feet and inches from the old pine tree toward that granite boulder you dug the hole and buried $150K in large bills. Nowadays it is almost like gold mining. People going around digging trying to hit the mother load of tubes or buckets tightly sealed with duct tape. Really, to the people involved, it’s not that funny….
So I don’t stop in Takilma. Buddha and I keep heading south and it is finally very warm and sunny in sunny California. Our next destination is Blue Lake. Where the sky is very blue, but there is no lake.
Until we get there, I won’t even try to explain this to Buddha.
