DARK SECRET OF RURAL LIFE

Jean Greene grew up in a poor interior B.C. community. When the pot
ranchers moved in, life changed for the better -- for the growers, at least.

There are some things you don't ask in the place I used to live. One Sunday
afternoon at a soccer game, I sat at the side of the field exchanging
gossip and petting various dogs. There were a lot of really great looking
young men and some kids playing soccer that afternoon -- and because this
was a bucolic rural B.C. town, there was also a sprinkling of tourists
snapping photos, petting the dogs and taking it all in. A tourist turned to
one of the young men and inquired as to what he did for a living. The
person he asked pointed to another guy and said, "I'm working on his house."

His friend solemnly pointed back and said, "And I'm working on his house."

Life here looks idyllic, even utopian and much of it is. The pace of
things is peaceful, slow. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone has time for
coffee, visiting, parties -- lots of parties. The school, which has grades
Kindergarten through 12, is terrific: good curriculum, committed, caring
teachers. There's pickup co-ed soccer in the summer, hockey in the winter,
people to play music with, lots of community concerts. Often there are
classes in things like pottery, or dancing, or Tai-chi, or Yoga. There's
hiking, fishing and skiing and endless miles of wilderness to play in.

Almost everyone has land, a house they're building, a small business.
People are busy, involved in community work. A lot of them used to go tree
planting, although that's changing as they age. Now a lot of people have
kids who go tree planting.

Over the years, I have seen many people come and many people go but the
core community remains unchanged. It could be anywhere in the rural B.C., a
small community lost in a sea of mountains.

What people here also do, among all their other activities, is grow
marijuana -- really good stuff and lots of it. I'm always amazed at how
well kept a secret it is even though at least 60 per cent of the community
are growers. The rest are retired people who probably wouldn't know a
marijuana plant if it came up in their petunias.

This place, like other towns in the B.C. interior, has developed a culture
and a way of life where the counterculture, undaunted and unfazed by being
ignored, has developed into a hybrid of leftover hippie-ism, new age
mysticism and rural survival work ethic. The result is both entertainingly
eccentric and economically sustainable.

There are no obvious rules and no way of defining what this new culture is.
It's been forming since the first years of the '70s, when people crawled up
the hills out of Vancouver, or north from the U.S., inbuses, vans, step
vans, trucks and ancient Volkswagens, to find a place that had clean air,
clean water, cheap land and isolation.

A standard joke -- although it really isn't a joke in this community -- is
that when the right time comes, all we need to do is blow up the roads and
we'll be fine on our own. The idea isn't to keep people in, it's to keep
everybody else out.

Like so many other towns in remote parts of B.C., this place went through a
lot of changes in the '60s and early '70s. What had been a small, quiet,
backwoods redneck community, with an economy based on logging, mining and
just plain getting by was suddenly inundated with new people. They lived in
buses, tipis, yurts, uninsulated cabins -- any place they could find. Over
time most left, but many stayed, put down roots, built houses, had families.

Not many options exist for employment in rural B.C. if you're not a logger,
miner or government employee. But most people here, through both necessity
and desire, are terrific farmers and gardeners. Organic and alternative is
the norm, an accepted way of life.

Slowly the word spread: growing is a way to make a decent living, to pay
for your land or your house, to support a family, to afford an independent
life close to the land, close to nature -- and not pay taxes. What could
possibly be wrong with that?

Marijuana growing has become a refined and intricate form of agriculture.
It is also the economic base of many small communities. Without the income
it draws, car and real estate dealers, health food stores, restaurants,
corner stores would soon disappear.

Growing is hard but lucrative work. The great thing about marijuana growing
is that anyone can do it. Marijuana growers are single moms, older women,
young men and women with families, kids in high school, older guys. It's a
healthy life and a rewarding one. The math is easy. Given that one healthy
pot plant can produce a half-pound to a pound of bud that sells for up to
$3000, given that most people grow anywhere from 100 to 300 plants, there's
lots of pot and lots of money to be spread around. The money goes in
various directions. People get paid as trimmers and couriers. The growers
rarely sell, someone else does that. Someone else also takes the chance of
running the pot across the border, where most of it goes.

It's an intricate, secret, robust and completely unstoppable network. In my
community, the police drive over from the neighbouring town once or twice
a year to set up roadblocks. They check driver's licenses and seat belts
and go away again. Paranoia creeps in at harvest time but no one ever seems
to get arrested, unless someone calls the police and demands they do
something. One man down the road with a hydroponics operation that had been
doing well for 20 years got busted when his ex-wife's boyfriend called the
police. He lost his equipment and paid a fine. He moved away after that,
began spending the winters in Mexico.

It's difficult to estimate how much money goes through the place at any
given time. No one looks rich. People drive old cars but most of them own
land and have built, or are building, new houses. Some spend the winters in
Thailand or Costa Rica or Mexico. It's odd how rarely the question of money
ever comes up.

But while money isn't usually a topic of conversation, what your neighbour
might be up to -- other than working on his neighbour's house -- always is.
As a non-grower, it's been difficult to find acceptance. I always felt I
belonged there because I was born there. Everyone else had come after me.
Although I welcomed what their industry brought to the community, when a
joint went around I waved it away. I never became part of the booming
marijuana-growing cottage industry, and that relegated me to a kind of
awkward place on the fringes.

One night I was at my friend Allison's house. Allison is someone I know
well. Some medical researcher should do a study on her. She's been smoking
six to 10 joints a day now for almost 30 years. She looks great and has an
amazing garden, although I must admit, sometimes her short term memory is
almost as bad as mine.

I did a search once, at her request, through a bunch of medical abstracts
on the deleterious effects of smoking marijuana. I was amazed to find that
almost no up-to-date research had been done. What there was mentioned vague
symptoms like lethargy and confusion. I thought of all the people I knew in
my home town who were busy building houses, raising kids and raising crops
and wondered if the researchers had any real idea what they were talking about.

Allison had been in one of my writing classes; we'd shared hundreds of pots
of tea and hours of conversation. On this particular day, when I came in,
her house smelled like a skunk had gone off in the basement. I didn't say
anything. It was trimming season. Her small room in the basement would be
full of plastic garbage sacks of carefully dried marijuana. We had just
settled in for a pot of tea and a game of Scrabble when the phone rang.

"It's T. and J.," she said, looking worried, "they're coming over but they
wanted to know who was here."

"Fine," I said." It'll be great to see them."

"They said they'd wait at the bottom of the driveway until you're ready to
leave."

I didn't finish the Scrabble game. I wasn't angry, but I knew when I was
out of place. This question of belonging became particularly acute when it
involved my own children. As much as I had no objections to what people
were doing, it was not a life I wanted for my kids, as I tried to explain
when they asked why not.

" Look," said my son, "Every one I know has land, they're building houses,
they drive Jettas. What's wrong with that?"

"But then what do you do?" I asked. "What about when you look around and
want something more in your life. What if you want to use your brain? What
if you want more opportunities, or want to talk about more than what your
neighbours are doing? What happens then?"

He didn't answer, but he's at university now. He misses his friends, he
gets homesick a lot. Once, when I asked him if he had thought about moving
back he looked at me. "Don't let me have that option," he said.

"All right," I said, and meant it.

After I moved away to go to school, I met someone who had lived for a year
in this tiny place. "Oh," I said, pleased, "we must know a lot of the same
people."

"I lived there for a year," he said. "No one talked to me. I moved."

I nodded. "I understand what you mean," I said, and we went our separate ways.

Jean Greene is a pseudonym for a writer living somewhere in B.C.