You Talk to Me

AARON COMETBUS: When did your parents move to the land?
YAEL: In the early 80's.
AARON: Not till then?
YAEL: Yeah, 1980.
AARON: Where had they been all through the seventies?
YAEL: In Southern California. But my dad, he went to Vietnam. And after that, he couldn't really hang so much. So he went to Alaska a lot. He was working in Alaska nine months out of the year, and coming back, and not really digging the city.
AARON: What was he not digging about it?
YAEL: Just people, I guess. Maybe it was just the 70's. He was just like, Fuck this, I want to do it all myself. You know, be self-sufficient, grow weed, and get out of the tax bracket, or whatever. I don't know if it was the economics that was tripping him out, or if it was just society, people in general, the hustle and bustle. He had trouble trusting people in business. He just wanted to trust himself, I guess.
For my sister though, she was just starting to go to high school. She was cutting school and going to the beach, and she had tons of friends. Life was good for a teenage girl at that time and at that place too, and then it's like, BOOM! Up to the top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
AARON: Is it a conflict, a parent's need to be self-sufficient, and your needs as a kid? I don't think kids would rank self-sufficiency really high up on their list.
YAEL: No, not at all. No, they want to be, I wanted to be at school or go with friends, and stuff like that, but just didn't have time because we lived so far away from town. It was like, get up early, drive an hour and a half to school. Go to school, go back home, kind of do a little homework.
AARON: Did you remember the city?
YAEL: I was just a little ass kid. I was like, preschool. We came up first for a while and tried to build a house and stuff, started to build our house. We had a teepee and an army tent. And then one storm wiped out our army tent, so we had to go back. I was living with my grandmother down in Southern California for almost a year.
AARON: While they built the house?
YAEL: Well, we came back and the house wasn't built yet. But they had one of those trailers that you can put in the back of your truck to make your pick-up truck a camper, they had one of those up on blocks for me and my sister. And they were in the tent, another tent. The house was being framed and stuff. But I was there when they built it.
AARON: How many acres was it?
YAEL: 36.
AARON: That's twice what the White House has.
YAEL: Hmm.
AARON: Did your parents adjust well to leaving the city?
YAEL: The hardest thing was learning how to grow weed. The first year we only got an ounce. For the whole year. Maybe two. And I'm sure my dad smoked more than that, you know, so it wasn't a cash business until the third year, we finally got enough to pay for sheetrock and visqueen. We had visqueen on our windows for a long time.
AARON: What's that?
YAEL: The plastic stapled to window holes. "Hippie glass," they call it. And "hippie shingles" is tarpaper.
AARON: On that mountain, were there a lot of people whose families were native to it, or was it almost all back-to-the-landers?
YAEL: There was maybe one or two families who had been there for very long. And then there's the ranch families up on there, and they're old school, like third generation. And they had nothing to do with pot farming. Supposedly.
AARON: Was the fact that you were small farmers, did that eventually cross social and cultural lines so that you got along with other farmer's families who had regular crops?
YAEL: There are no regular crops there. The only other kind of farmers are like ranchers, there's a couple cattle ranchers. There seems to be a lot of hicks but not a lot of farms. Just hicks living in trailers, living the same as the hippies, they just don't like the hippies. The only ones that crossed to both were the bikers. The bikers had friends in every single faction, from the hicks to the hippies to the Native Americans. They knew all the people in the cities too.
AARON: Did those barriers reach down to the kids too, or did the kids start to get along more?
YAEL: Well, everyone went to the same school. My parents didn't have any friends that were different, but I did, growing up. Everyone was in the same school, no matter what your parents did. Thre was a pretty incredible amount of respect, actually. Because, the main thing is, your kid isn't supposed to lie. That's the weird thing about doing something illegal for a living as a family. Like, I feared cops. I feared authority. Still, if a cop gets behind me when I'm driving, my knees start shaking. A helicopter, you hear a helicopter, you hit the trees. It's just the way it is.
AARON: Do you find yourself stuck with some of these fears that are a little out of place now?
YAEL: Yeah, and I think lying about what you do for a living too, it can't be that good for you in your growth as a person. It's like, some lies are cool, some lies aren't right. All the pot farmer kids, they shut the fuck up. They didn't talk about it. Everyone kind of knew who was the pot farmers and tried to keep it secret.
AARON: What would you say your family did?
YAEL: Carpenters. There's more carpenters in that town than anywhere else. Everyone's a carpenter.
AARON: As the week growing becomes more successful, are there class distinctions?
YAEL: Of pot farmers? Oh yeah. Who grows the best weed.
AARON: No, I mean, don't the hippies eventually become richer than the people who'd been on the land before, and there's resentment towards that?
YAEL: No, but you see some people that grow for their families, and maybe have a good crop, and you see they get a new truck, or they finish their houe, or they get a TV or something like that. But that's normal. Everyone wants everyone to do well, you know. It's not like you're in direct competition. There's only so many people that buy the stuff.
AARON: But what about the people who don't grow weed? The ranchers and stuff. The ranchers see your dad's house go from hippie shingles to the real thing.
YAEL: They don't see that. They never come anywhere near us, they never come up there. Only the people that even get in the gate, through the driveway, are friends.. Only thing is, you can't get fancy cars, and you can't have nice clothes. That's the thing. Living where you are, you can't have a fancy car anyway. Just a good truck is all you need. Or a Subaru.
AARON: What do you think are some of the good things and some of the drawbacks of having a closed community? Most of the people in that area were transplanted.
YAEL: M-hm.
AARON: So you get this transplanted culture and it's sort of insular. Out of necessity. Because you couldn't have outsiders too much. So does it become xenophobic? Does it become, like you don't get new blood in?
YAEL: Well, when you're a kid you don't really realize any difference because there's nothing to compare it to. But, you know, it's boring as fuck. There's the same kids, you know what kids there are that you can play with when you're growing up. And they're always a few miles away, so either you gotta walk, minimum 3 miles, or 15 miles, whatever.
AARON: But I mean like, with the adults, do you notics that there's not different cultures coming around, there's not new people, a new infux....
YAEL: There's a lot of cultures. There's people from all over the place on the same mountain and all have the same sort of bond. It's like self-sufficiency, and weed I guess.
AARON: I was just wondering if as people grew older, as the relationships changed, the culture kept reinvigorating itself, or if it started to get kind of moldy and freaky.
YAEL: Yeah, I don't know. I don't think it reinvigorated itself. It definitely fizzled out and did its own thing. It wasn't like there was ever a sense of permanence with anyone there. Everyone was kind of like, "I'm doing this for a while." But the community wasn't really a community, it was like different families. It was like tribal, more. We were up there, we had cousins, aunts, my mom's family moved up there, so all her brothers and sisters were there. So it's like real tribal, cousins and things, their family, our family, and you know who belongs to what family.
AARON: Did you like that?
YAEL: No, I hated it. It fucking drove me crazy. I wanted new people every day. I wanted freaks and experience and, you know, interaction with people. I really wanted to meet some girls, man.
AARON: Dating must be kind of rough on the mountain.
YAEL: Oh yeah, it's impossible.
AARON: That idea of self-sufficiency, in a way, if you're growing weed and you're selling it to other people, you're not exactly self-sufficient. You're part of a society. You're doing something which needs other people.
YAEL: See, that was a contradiction that I realized early on, like "This is kind of bullshit, you know?" I knew it was bullshit. I knew that everything serves a purpose and everybody's using everyone else, one way or another. And I just wanted to be on the right side of that, I didn't want to be the one that's getting the boot stomped on my ass every fucking day. I wanted to be somebody that either doing the stomping or just floating free, away from all that.
AARON: You think that's what society is?
YAEL: Society is completely a web of entangled favors, deals, ripoffs. There's a consequence for everything in society, no matter what it is. And somebody always gets the short end of the stick.
AARON: Don't you think it's sometimes based on mutual benefits?
YAEL: There's not always benefits, though. It's like, I'm fucked this way or I'm fucked this way. Which way am I fucked less?
Read the interview in its entirety. Pick up Aaron Cometbus' fantastic zine: _Cometbus #48 - Back to the Land_. Kid seems to always ask the right questions.

You Talk to Me

Aaron Cometbus talks to Yael about growing up on a pot farm