The FaRm
Here’s my story from the farm:
After graduate school in Iowa I moved back to the West coast to finish my novel. It was about a dead cat coming back to life. I sent it out to agents, and one of them took it on! I’m gonna call her JC. JC was optimistic about its prospects, as was I, and I thought “Yes! Here we go! It’s dream-come-true-time, baby!” I distinctly remember standing in a parking lot and talking about who I might want to do blurbs on the back cover, and how crazy and cool that felt.
During this period I started working on a marijuana farm in California. A lot of the time I was all alone in the mountains on 260 acres. I lived in a geodesic dome, and after the dome got knocked into a ravine, I moved into the yurt, and then a tent. Meanwhile, JC sent my dead cat novel out, and I started working on another novel about kid whose grandfather dies. The farm was a great place to write. It was like living in Eden, but with marijuana plants instead of the forbidden fruit tree.
The yurt was built on a platform on stilts on the edge of a big hill overlooking a valley. One day I was inside the yurt working on my laptop. It was really hot and I had my shirt off. I heard this sound coming from outside, this like thump-thump-thump.
I thought it was maybe Jeff, the survivalist neighbor from up the road visiting on his 4-wheeler. But when I stepped outside, I found myself facing a black military-style helicopter hovering in the valley next to the yurt. I’d heard about these helicopters. They belonged to CAMP—an intergovernmental law-enforcement task force. (This was back in the bad old days when growing recreational marijuana was illegal) The farm had been busted something like three years earlier with agents rappelling down and everything.
As I stood there with my shirt off facing the CAMP helicopter a lot of thoughts went through my mind. Like how my car was parked not too far away and how they could probably read the license plate and figure out who I was—and how they were probably taking my picture right now, and how any second the door might open and dudes in black jumpsuits with rifles would slide down some ropes and kick my ass.
I thought about going back in the yurt.
I thought about running.
Finally, this is what I did: I raised my hand and gave a wave, like “Hi, I come in peace,”—I remember thinking and maybe even whispering those words—and the helicopter turned and hovered in profile for a couple seconds, and I put my hand down, and then the helicopter flew away. That was the last time I saw it. We heard some helicopters during harvest, but that was it. Things went great with the farm.
. . . But my book about the dead cat was rejected by every publisher JC sent it to, and that kind of crushed me for awhile.
You can read about more of my story here.