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Turkey Hunting on a Weed Farm

We packed the ATVs with layman's hunting gear--half a bottle of whiskey, a Winchester, and a 12-pack--and sped off to find our prey.

A friend who’d been working as a trimmer on a weed farm invited some folks up to the grounds in Humboldt last weekend, offering to let us slaughter our own turkey there. This place is known amongst friends as “the Farm,” and it wasn’t quite as murdery as I’d expected.

Humboldt County is known both for its dairy farms and for its exquisite California marijuana growing. The latter activity in the state of California can be best described as “socially accepted and quasi-legal,” meaning that most pot farmers have a certain bootlegger appeal to them. They are the rugged pioneers of our day, living at least partially off the grid, and for the most part leading quiet lives, though hovering in the background is the threat of complex legal systems that sometimes with a certain amount of arbitrariness threatens their freedom. Because of this, being invited into their world can feel a bit lit like entering a secret society.

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The Farm is a two-hour drive away from civilization into the mountains. First stop is the grocery store, where we loaded up with beer, whiskey, cookies, sashimi, pita chips and other provisions. Besides normal hippie Northern California food, the grocery store also featured an elaborate fancy scissors display, a “bagging” display, and an array of fertilizer.

Once you leave town (with its single Occupy Wall Street protestor) and flurry of gutter punks with tribal face tattoos, you travel for an hour on a barely-maintained road circling higher and higher, and just when you think you’re about to drive off the edge of a cliff you turn onto a private dirt road scattered with rocks, mud, and pot holes that is carved into a system of steep, wooded hills. As the sun started to set, we saw a flock of wild turkeys by the side of the road and I knew that I was in the right place to fulfill my goal.

The crux of the farm is an old wooden A-frame house surrounded by nothing other than moss-covered trees, mountains, and river. Water comes from a mountain spring, electricity from solar panels, heat from a wood-burning stove in the living room, and a cat named Clawdious, who lives in the lofted-bed area and hunts mice. Around this, the Farmer has satellite fields of weed he is legally growing, as well as sheds to trim and store the weed in. Everywhere you look are trimmers, fuel canisters, and old plastic storage bins for the weed.

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The Farmer didn't smoke weed. He is an old-fashioned mountain man who chops his own lumber, owns a collection of guns, and knows all sorts of secrets about the woods—including the best caves to hide in if the Feds did ever decide to raid.

We woke up early the next morning hung over from drinking Irish coffees, racing ATVS, and setting off fireworks, and made a bacon breakfast to get us ready for a day of hunting. By now, the morals of hunting had become a constant campfire topic.

This is the same campfire over which I imagined I’d be roasting my Thanksgiving meal. I have always been a pretty adamant meat eater—I like salads and all, but refuse to imagine a world without Chicago-style hot dogs or bacon wrapped s’mores. And I have always thought I should be able to see the whole process through: I want to hunt, kill, butcher and cook myself a slab of meat. It is almost as if doing this would bring me to an ethical crossroads, where if I couldn’t do it myself then I would have to give up (or at least simmer down) my meat eating.

Some people in my group said that I wouldn’t be able to go through with it, that I should wait until I was back in civilization and buy a turkey with the giblets already packed in a plastic bag stuffed inside of it. Despite some hesitation, we packed the ATVs with layman’s hunting gear (half a bottle of whiskey, a Winchester, and a 12-pack) and sped off to find our prey. Winding around the roads at crazy speeds on the ATVs was fun, but suddenly fields that had only yesterday been filled with turkeys were utterly empty, save a few decadent feathers. Seeing and gathering the feathers of birds now presumably dead and in the process of being plucked filled me with confidence. “Fuck yeah, I can do this.” But after hours of casually hunting and not seeing a single living bird, or even a boar, we gave up and headed back to the cabin with our guns shamefully full of bullets.

Still full of the murdering instinct, I made fake turkeys out of rotting squashes and the feathers from the field. My friends and I sneaked up on our still-life meats and blasted them to pieces with a shotgun. The feeling of the gun kicking into our shoulders and the deafening blast of gunpowder echoing through the empty mountains gave us a slight feeling of being woodsmen. Since there was no meat to butcher, I ate a baked potato and spent the night helping “buck” (that’s trimmer lingo for “cut into smaller pieces”) the last pot of the harvest while listening to the Farmer tell us stories of seasons past.