By Sarah Jane
IG: @projectspacequeen
thespacequeen420@gmail.com
Space Queen in Humboldt is a series of events from the perspective of a chick working on a pot farm in the magical Emerald Forest Wilderness.
Late summer greetings again from Humboldt y’all:
So my dude and I got up here about a month ago. We headed up from San Diego in Big Baby Blue (translation: the pick-up truck with a camper shell that we more or less live out of). We blasted up the central valley, kicked it with a buddy in Petaluma for the night (translation: a good friend’s house we always crash at pre-mountain and post-mountain for creature comforts such as Netflix, bomb dispensary weed, pasta dinners, clawfoot bathtub soaks, and a cush private bedroom with blackout curtains). Then ventured up towards the Emerald Triangle once again. It’s a drive we’ve done what feels like hundreds of times; from sweet Sonoma and it’s horse farms and quaint wineries, to the rolling hills of Mendocino County where the Juggalo bros roam the downtown streets of Willits in broad daylight, past Laytonville with all it’s new yuppie transplants from the city chasing the Green Rush, onward up into the enchanted land of redwood giants beyond Leggett, Garberville, Redcrest, following the windy river beds into Rio Dell, and finally salty Eureka spitting us into the arms of Arcata.
We stopped to get last minute supplies: Tobacco. Rolling papers. Bug spray. Boxed wine. Cheap beer. It was typical Arcata weather – chilly, gray, damp. Our buddy from the farm was going to meet us in town so we could ride back together, so we all met up, hugged, talked shit for about 20 minutes and hit the road. It was no more than 5 minutes outside of Arcata when the temperature rose about 30 degrees, and the sun was instantly blasting us through the windows. It’s the road to Willow Creek, which is where
we worked last year, so the twisty mountain highway was familiar in a charming way while we blasted Deep Purple and said goodbye to the outside world. I had no concept of time and suddenly took a sharp turn off the highway onto a no-named dirt road.
And then, in an instant, everything changed.
People familiar with cannabis culture have heard their fair share of pot farm folklore by this point. Sketchy farm bosses. Trimmers going missing in the middle of the night. Living communally with a bunch of stinky hippies. Three-month-old mold growing in your tent and all of your belongings. Chronic depression from the rain. The constant malodor of all things hash. Black helicopters, and thinking about which way to run into the woods when they decide to drop in. Cartel. A nightmare or two about a weed monster following you to your camp spot (maybe just me on that one.) Regardless, there are cliches with this stuff, but this road felt different than any other random dirt road that had previously led me to a pot farm in years before.
Perhaps it was the strange portal-like road that lead us here. In reality, it was a 7-mile drive down this dirt road to the property. However, it felt as if I was plucked up by a traveling cloud and dropped into this low valley in the middle of the redwoods. The road wound around hairpin turns and switchbacks, all the while passing trees that were covered in an opalescent milky-white dust as electric blue dragonflies wove in and out of the sunlight streaming through the random foliage. After what felt like either two minutes or two hours with beer cans in hand we made it to the property. A typical set-up on 40 acres consisting of the main cabin, gardens, and random tree canopy spots for tents and truck bed homes. Plus two private swim holes that we encountered shortly after arriving that straight up looked like Fern Gully.
I was plagued by strange sensations and secret thoughts of parallel multiverses for days after we arrived and I don’t even really know why. Like I said before, it was just this feeling I couldn’t shake. Perhaps it was the strange flashes of light in the clear night sky that followed me alone up to my truck camp on three different occasions; maybe it was the awareness of unusual hot air randomly blowing around me in the normally mild afternoon while I sat in the middle of the creek. Maybe it was the way the vibrant dragonflies hovered right in front of my face as if they were genuinely trying to communicate with me. It could’ve also been the general vibe at this pot farm:.Although I had just met my new strange mountain family, deep down it was as if I had met all these people before and we had been connected in some abstract way.
Whatever it is that brought me to this place, and what it’s making me feel, well, I don’t have a definitive answer. I suppose since childhood I’ve always had an overactive imagination, so all of this could be total bullsh*t that my overzealous brain projects into my reality. But it could also be so much more. Deepak Chopra said, “The mind and body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one.” For now, I will meditate on that. Maybe I’m getting signals from some other world reminding me to stay present. Or, it could also be the dab I just took (personal opinion, of course.) I’ll see ya in a couple of weeks.
Peace and Love from the Mountain,
Space Queen
