Read Already Dead: A California Gothic for Free Online Page B

curve onto a cliff and looking over the dry evergreens and silent dusty arroyos as far as your eye will go, and seeing a stream that cuts through the bottom of the chasm so far below that you can’t hear it, and finding five black buzzards who stand, trembling, in the middle of the air? The wildness of this terrain creates and explains me as much as anything I’ve inherited or been taught. The shape of this land affords brash designs—no, demands extravagant pretensions. I’ve visited cathedrals in Milan, also Sicily, filled with this same sacredness and yet this same cosmic dementia: very dramatic, very biblical, very strange.
    By now I’d come down a hundred fifty feet from the roadside above.
    The canyon’s face curved south here for a space before hooking back north. The exposure was southern, hot and windless, but the route to the garden led into and out of a cool, shady draw made damp by a rivulet trickling through it. Here we kept our spring box, a hundred-gallon cedar vat that filled with water and dribbled it out through a thin black plastic irrigation line.
    I made my way across the slippery draw, braking my downward slide now by grabbing at the fat, comical leaves of bloomless rhododendrons, following the black line around the draw’s western edge out of the shade, and then along a row of twenty-seven marijuana plants that grew on a wide ledge—tall, lush, expensive bushes, pungent in the summer sun. They got hot light fourteen hours a day this time of year.
    The energizing principle of pot cultivation is ecstasy: the 30 / Denis Johnson

    object is to get the flowering tips of the female plant to produce as much as possible of the intoxicating drug tetrahydrocannabinol. The plants’
    sticky resin contains the drug, and the leaves and flowers exude the resin as protection from the rays of the sun. To keep a garden you need water, hot sun, dry air. Beyond that you need only female plants of a hardy, exotic stock, which will be harvested just before they go to seed.
    And you need a garden spot that’s not only exposed to plenty of sun, but also protected, in our Fascist era, from aerial observation. This canyon presented certain hazards to helicopter flight, downdrafts and updrafts, that made it hard to get close. Three years running we’d harvested our plants without trouble from the authorities, an astonishing record of success.
    These days it’s likely your plants will be found. Half-trained yokels, cowboys with Uzi machine guns, hired with state money, will likely jump out of hovering choppers and rip up your crop. Unless you’re standing right there at the time, they can’t arrest you; certainly the state can’t prosecute with any expectation of winning. But still they take the plants, and they can hope the faceless grower goes broke. If you’ve dared to garden in your own soil, the revenue people, federal and state, will treat it as an undeclared cash crop, tax and penalize and hound you, eventually confiscate your property. Our plot grew at the edge of a full section, one square mile, owned by a man named Wyeth who’d been dead for years. His family hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with the land. It borders an area of vast timber holdings. A survey some years ago cut a few yards off Wyeth’s section, and he lost his spring to the Georgia Pacific Lumber Company, at least on the map. But the lines of ownership don’t move back and forth quite that easily, and our garden grew in a legal blur.
    I checked our plants. The water line was functioning. The ground at their feet was wet. They opened their leafy arms, as a grade-school rhyme once had it, to pray. Not twenty feet distant, buzzards balanced in the thermal currents. Nothing to it, step outward in faith and tread the air.
    In my dreams of flying, the power of flight emanates from my heart.
    I had many such dreams last year, while touring Italy. Even when awake, I felt much lighter than that world over there—Europe is ancient, the