LETTERS FROM HOME: NEW IN TOWN

January 6, 1994

Dear Pat,

You've known some uprootings in recent years -- New York to Florida to Japan, back to Florida and on to Virginia. Usually it seems to take me six months to get used to a new place, where the best takeout is, the most bearable Laundromat, the shortcut to work, a good cup of coffee. Garberville, pop. 1,200, should require such a lengthy investigation since most of the town's businesses huddle along a five-block section of Redwood Drive.

Three gas stations, five motels -- it's a tourist destination in the summer -- 10 or so restaurants, two radio stations, the Garden of Beadin' (beads are big here), a hardware store, a bait-and-tackle shop, two video stores, two banks, one supermarket, a natural food store and the Astral Travel Service.

Yes, Garberville is what happened when the bacchanalians from San Francisco's Summer of Love abandoned Haight-Ashbury to get back to the land. Many wound up in a little logging town that was Main Street, U.S.A.

During the 1980s, the town gained an unwanted reputation as the marijuana-growing capital of America, drawing both outlaws and the people who hunt them. During the harvest season, drug enforcement helicopters swoop in to make commando-style raids on the hills.

These days, many of the original marijuana farmers run legitimate businesses. The annual harvest party in the fall is the social event of the year among growers, and an invitation is prized by those who make a living more prosaically.

When I lived in the northern part of the county in the 1980s, I naively jumped into my pickup truck one day and drove to Garberville to do a story about the already-famous harvest party. My guide, it turned out, knew no more about finding the hemp trial than I did. He did know a likely-looking local who led us up and down some hills for a few hours, then mysteriously disappeared once we were entirely lost.

Last fall, one of DC's patients escorted her over an hour's worth of dirt roads and past one armed checkpoint to the very same party. Three bands, a big tent and a hundred gaily-dressed people dancing on the side of a mountain by the light of the full moon. She said everybody look like they'd leapt from a Renaissance painting. Except for the guy in drag.

I love the look of Garberville. Reminds me of Nelson, the town in Steve Martin's "Roxanne." The hills in Missouri don't quite nestle you the way these do.

But DC reminds me that Garbverville is not the upscale ski resort in the movie. There's a shadowy side to the town I haven't gotten comfortable with yet. The eyes of people on the street don't quite meet mine. There's a wariness, maybe because any stranger could be a narc or a desperado.

Or maybe because the owner of the only pizza parlor in town was executed last month -- seven bullets to the head -- leaving behind a husband and five kids. Nobody says so but everybody figures drugs are the only thing anybody cares that much about.

A man I met at a New Year's Eve party reasons that Southern Humboldters simply are people who like living with fewer laws than other people do. A curious rationale, I think, but then I'm new here.

Love, Sam