Hector in the Redwoods
By Matthew Gavin Frank
“Hector in the Redwoods” appeared in Rooted: the Best New Arboreal Nonfiction
It is ill-advised to stroll aimlessly around Weckman Farm at night. I suspect this is the same with most marijuana farms. Charlie the Mechanic, the guy who fixes the one-seat tractors that haul the trimmed weed to the curing sheds, fancies telling stories about the “Great bloodbats of the redwoods, brother. Suck yer neck limp as a rubberband.”
I think of airborne rodent teeth traveling at considerable velocity and bite at my fingernails. But there are certainly worries more logical. After all, in darkness, I am a human shadow, easily mistaken for an intruder—government official, militiaman, neighborhood raider. There’s a sniper about. I’m friendly with the daytime sniper, an insect-hating sweetheart named Hector. But Waldo, Hector’s graveyard-shift replacement, remains a mystery. Rumor has it he’s an epileptic. With a rifle. Waldo is somewhere up in these trees, having scaled the rope ladder to the sniper station—a misappropriated tree fort of sorts—surely staving off a fit by massaging the trigger. This does not for peace of mind make.
We have fled, my wife and I, to small-town Northern California, to seasonal jobs as, respectively, a massage therapist and bud trimmer on a medical marijuana farm after having spent the last year living in my parents’ house on the outskirts of Chicago, nursing my mother through her battle with cancer, our marriage desiccating in my old childhood bedroom. We have fled from something definitive, and toward the sort of cultural underbelly and marital nebulousness that manifests itself as intoxication on the local plants, and crew of recovering drug addicts, ex-cons looking for a second chance, doctors, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids looking to earn enough money to spend on a season of hotel rooms and restaurants, revolutionary war veterans, people who used marijuana to weather illness and who now want to give back, and limbo-bound assholes like us. Neurotically, we have been overusing the word, recover.
*
Tonight, I have to walk. My heart needs calming. I already realize that Johanna and I will not be staying until the end of the harvest season. We already have the gasoline in our veins, the conversations about leaving the farm, that can not be undone. Somehow, we’ve been branded flighty, the iron having left its mark on more that just our skins. I don’t know where we’re going to go after this, and it’s not necessarily back to Chicago. Maybe we’ll return to Taos, New Mexico, where we lived a couple years back, out of our tent along the ski valley road for the summer, bathing in the frigid Hondo River with environmentally-friendly soap and shampoo, shitting in a pit toilet where the only paper were the Subway sandwich napkins that a neighboring squatter left as a courtesy and mark of his day job. Maybe we could get our old restaurant jobs back at the Sagebrush. Maybe we’ve lived that life already.
So I am compelled to wander the night-Weckman, I think, as a way of collecting goodbyes. Tonight, it recalls the lullaby of a children’s book: goodbye redwoods, goodbye crops, goodbye food tent, goodbye sniper tower... I have to walk. Johanna is not happy about this. Now, she rests on her side in our Coleman Cimarron back in the Residents’ Camp—the community of tents that house the seasonal crew—hopefully rediscovering sleep. I had the dream again, of my mother drowning in a volcanic lahar, frozen into position, a Pompeii refugee, exiled to Illinois. As always, natural disaster has quite a reach. Tonight has been nothing if not pyroclastic.
I woke with the typical cold sweats, something manic, but moribund in my chest, and the need to walk the dream off as if it were a cramp. A good night’s sleep remains a marathon’s distance away.
“Please be careful,” Johanna whispered as she retraced her steps back into a good dream—maybe the one she always has about canoeing in Sweden along the Kalix and Angesan Rivers, on the back of a benevolent roan cow.
Unzipping the tent tonight is the loudest thing in the world, the Residents’ Camp draped in a chorus of snores. The nose whistle must be Bob. The grunting must be Charlie. The low moony moans must be Lance and Ruby, finding, in sleep, the open spaces of each others’ necks, and some dream-meadow lit up in lunar white.
I find the wind tonight only by walking. The air at this hour is an otherworldly brine, the moon pregnant with the Pacific and wetting its bed, the dampening sky rewriting the tide tables in fatigue and discomfort. Each star is a blossoming rash. I imagine the longhorns a few miles away, their snores not unlike Charlie’s, their heads resting on each others’ spines.
And beyond them, the matchstick cemetery, the dead so modest under this leaking moon. Tonight’s light is one of outlines, the shapes of trees perfectly edged, but their middles murky. Tonight, like expensive linen, is lined with silver. Tonight is the optimist’s wet dream. In it, a lone crow calls out to the lost murder, who do not answer, underlining its loneliness with beak-yellow highlighter.
I pass Hector’s tent. It lies in place like a carcass. By the way the wind caves it in, I can tell that it’s empty; its ribcage picked clean by the vultures. I wonder where he’s gone tonight, envisioning a red-eye shift as a soccer coach, a wayward and lengthy drive into an all-night Los Angeles; the push to make it to Mexico. Where does he go? I imagine the laminated postcard on his tent door, autographed divinely:
Dearest Hector,
Best Wishes!
The Virgen de Guadalupe
*
I turn from the tent and walk beyond the Residents’ Camp, turning from the crops and toward the redwoods, standing like pillars on a plantation house for bloodbats and their caged birds. Across from the trees, Lady Wanda’s mansion sits dark and quiet, a mere footnote at the bottom corner of this forested page.
The night, even in the trees, is blissfully mosquito-less, the insects likely having latched onto Hector, carried out of Weckman by the magnetism of his sweet blood. The redwoods rock slowly as if in genuflection to the night, creaking with history, haunted and antique. Surely, in these trees, and in their nighttime ability to frighten by swaying, nothing bad can happen. Surely, in these trees, the world is safe, all wayward bullets absorbed into the warmth of their trunks.
Lady Wanda, reefer heiress and owner of Weckman Farm, has been employing snipers since 1997. Though an avid gun collector herself (her antique gun collection includes such weaponry as an 1865 Belgian cavalry snap hook and an 1891 Argentinean navy nickel-plated rifle—both fully badass), she used to be anti-firearm on Weckman, believing their presence would provoke violence. After the passing of the Compassionate Use Act in 1996, Lady Wanda was the victim of a governmental and grass roots backlash.
During 1996’s harvest, Weckman Farm was twice invaded illegally; once by CAMP, California’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, a division of the Department of Justice and Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement; once by a private vigilante militia, whose guns were neither Belgian nor Argentinean, were not from the 19th century, and were not safely locked behind Lucite. According to Lady Wanda, these private militias are increasing in number, staging armed raids on numerous marijuana farms both commercial and medical. For security’s sake, she brought in guys like Hector and the clandestine Waldo, both, according to rumor, ex-military.
I stand, one inch tall, at the bases of the redwood trunks, roots thick as a pipeline. The marijuana crops flitter in the distance, trying to sneak me the exit key. But tonight, I don’t want to be sprung. Not just yet. I embrace these trees over sleep; their scariness has nothing to do with my sick mother. There is no real grief in putting oneself in danger. Goodbye grief...
In these trees, their tops muddled in darkness and a soupy moon, I listen for the cocking of Waldo’s rifle. In these trees, I imagine the clicking of a weapon could be nothing but gentle. I tread lightly, in these trees, listening. I hear only the wind. I wonder if Waldo has fallen asleep at his post.
Tomorrow is another day in the fields. I think of this past year, our fleeing from Midwest to West, lopping off a prefix as if decapitating a stage in our lives. Strange, when the same thing sickens and heals us. After that stint in Midwestern realism and all of its spiritual bratwurst, California seemed to us the physical manifestation of a cosmic high-colonic. The cleanse, unfortunately, didn’t fully take. For Johanna and me at this point, whimsy has gone the way of my mother post-chemo, having drowned in my parents’ suburban Chicago sump pump, seeded green into their manicured lawn. Their birch tree is dying. The one I climbed as a child, fell out of, carved vulgarities into. They’re going to have to call the city to remove it. The neighbors have been complaining.
What else can I do, but handcuff myself to this melodrama as punishment, as, perhaps, protection. It is my wetlands, my glossy ibis, and I stand between it, and the flock of tractors who want to turn it into a megamall.
But the redwoods, if not that birch, seem to have the power to resurrect whimsy, as do the marijuana crops and encampment of tents, the sleeping bodies inside breathing small contentments into larger eccentricities, all of us as plastic and immobile as Resusci-Annie, waiting for some holy drunken paramedic to crack our sternums in the name of heroism.
The seasonal crew: In all of our desires to escape—from alcoholism and Vietnam, AIDS and cancer—we find a collective empathy. Maybe this isn’t whimsy per se, but it’s something whimsical, dissolved into our fucking up.
I run my palm over a redwood trunk; dig my fingernails into its meat. In it, I find a wetness, old rain or sap, the moon’s diesel. I breathe and hear behind me a snapping—not of a twig or of a gun shifting its bullet, but of a bottlecap twisting open. I’m sure of it. I hear a sipping sound, the wet smack of lips pulling from a glass mouthpiece; a swallow followed by a tired exhale.
Aaaaaaaahhhhhh...
I am nervous, but oddly comforted, in a parental sort of way. Before he became the sad man standing over the blue wastebasket of his wife’s shed hair, my father’s personality was embodied in his flamboyant Aaaaaaaahhhhhh... after a long sip of Diet Coke.
I want to call, Hello?, but don’t. My voice freezes, my breath pumped cold and smoky from my lungs. Instead, in an act that calls equally on self-preservation and destruction, I weave through the redwoods toward the sound. I half expect to see my father, thirty-five again, doing push-ups between the trees.
Soon, against the base of a medium redwood (which, for a cypress would be like 10XL), I see a strange shape floating about three feet off the ground. In this light, or lack thereof, it appears to be a giant disembodied brain, something that broke from the oversized pickling jar of a 1950’s B-movie and hid out here, filtered through Gabriel García Márquez, on the outskirts of Weckman, protected by an epileptic sniper. Is this guilt made manifest? Some ghostly return of the Latin contritus, ready to grind us into pieces, crush us with the weight of our own skewed decisions? If so, it looks pretty fucking small, not up to the task; I hope this isn’t one of those sci-fi cases wherein the beautiful siren, when approached by the lusty man, morphs into a larynx-ripping alien with a thirst for frontal lobes.
I squint into the trees, and the shape mutates into something less solid: a plume of seafoam escaping the moon and the ocean. Stepping closer, the shape shifts once more. I can see now that it is a head of hair, and that it is Hector’s. He’s sitting against the fat base of a redwood, sipping from, what in outline appears to be an Erlenmeyer flask. This is a surprise.
“Hector?” I manage.
His hands fumble with the air between them. He loses his grip on the flask, then regains it. I think I can hear his heart stutter.
“Oh, fuck it,” he cries, trying to scramble to his feet before settling again into a seated position, “You scared the shit outta me, man. My God...”
“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep,” I say.
I don’t think he hears me yet, the blood beating in his ears.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
“Yeah. Right,” he says, his breath and his heart calming down, “Well, you’re welcome to a slug of this.”
He raises his bottle. It is Agavero, a tequila liqueur of sorts, infused with fermented damiana flower tea. I sit next to him, the girth of the redwood trunk more than enough to accommodate us, and three conversion vans besides. Hector exhales again, still in the process of regaining his internal peace. Given his unfortunate insect magnetism, I’m shocked to find that the air around him is mosquito-less as well. The Agavero must be a repellant. But not to me. Not tonight.
I sip from the bottle this thick mixture of cactus and petal, running over my throat and into my belly, a desert snake slithering with satin skin. I exhale. Like the snake, I want to rattle. Hector begins telling me how the ancient Mayans in Mexico used the damiana flower as an aphrodisiac.
“They would smoke the flowers, man, and go, go, go,” he says.
“Wow,” I muster, my throat regaining its elasticity.
“Good shit, right?” Hector asks.
But he knows the answer. Anyway, though he can see only the outline of my head, I nod.
“You could find a lot of shit in New Orleans, man, but you couldn’t find this,” he says.
He raises the bottle and toasts the moon.
“You can’t hide, you fat white fucker!” he shouts, and I wonder if anyone in the Residents’ Camp wakes up. I know Johanna can sleep through anything. If she sleeps.
“New Orleans?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Hector says, and takes another sip.
He passes the bottle to me. In the moonlight, the bottle is green-black, skinny at the top and flared into a sphere at the bottom. Tonight, in these trees, Hector has attached a siphon to the globe, and is sipping from the core. If he chooses to share this delicacy with me, I can not, in these trees, say no. I take another swig and feel poisoned, poisonous.
“That’s the good thing about California,” Hector continues, “You can find almost anything you can find in Mexico.”
I cough agave sugar.
“Well, not everything,” he clarifies, voice trailing.
“What were you doing in New Orleans,” I ask as soon as the Agavero loosens its grip on my throat.
Hector exhales. His breath tumbles over itself, balled-up lace in the cool, and the white of the moon.
“Livin’ there, man,” he says.
He exhales again, a shorter breath this time.
“I lived there,” he says.
*
It is ill-advised to dwell on the bark patterns the redwood trunk has burned into Hector’s forearms. They cycle his wrists, scribbled highways devoid of blood, a testament to the impressions, sometimes ditches, nature digs into us. More to the point, I’m getting drunk, and the struggle to see such patterns makes me nauseous. At any rate, I’m thankful to the cosmos for granting me this strange goodbye.
I picture Hector in his treetop perch, having scaled a rope ladder to get up there, this wooden fort, large enough only for a barstool, a tattered movie poster of Russ Meyer’s Supervixens, Hector’s boombox. He tells me he listens to Dr. Judy on the radio, that advice show that duels between medicine and morality.
“Have you heard this shit, man?” Hector asks, “It’s unbelievable.”
The sniper station: just enough room for this, and the gun. Hector never had to shoot anybody. Not here. Never spotted a trespasser. In the sniper station, he reads all the bestsellers about lawyers and doctors and serial killers and detectives. He comes to his job ready to commit himself to plot mechanics—stationing his gun in the corner, sitting on his stool, putting his lunchbox on the floor, taking in the panorama, turning on the radio, pre-tuned to Dr. Judy dispensing bad relationship advice. He reads a paragraph, looks around, reads another paragraph, looks around, takes a bite of BLT, looks around... his daylight hours spent at the treetops, with the birds who fight and love and fuck and feed there.
He hoists the bottle of Agavero and talks about it. By it, I mean this:
Hector was one of those rooftop shadows the Hurricane Katrina relief helicopters passed over. He waved a soaked white sheet that twisted in on itself like a braid.
He waves a moth from his hair and says, “It was like a fuckin lead vest, man. That X-ray shit. That’s what they don’t tell you. That everything was heavy as shit.”
As he says it, I can hear his voice thickening. Or maybe that’s my ear. I’m getting pretty wasted. He nods, folds his fingers into what may be a prayer, and bobs them back and forth, fishing for God without a lure. The wind is cool and, as if we were candles, nearly blows us out.
He lost two daughters, six and eleven, and a wife who was threatening to leave him.
“She never got to do it,” Hector says, his breath deflating in the air. He drowns it with another sip of Agavero.
He was going to community college, wanted to be a guidance counselor at a high school. I imagine the smaller trees he drove under on the way to class—the Southern magnolias and live oaks, the Cherrybarks and Sawtooths, the Overcups and Cows—trees I will never get to see. Katrina, Hector tells me, wiped out two-thirds of the city’s trees. Certain wards lost every one. In the aftermath of the hurricane, in regards to the decimation of New Orleans’ urban forest, Tom Campbell, spokesperson for the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry, summed it up with all of the gentility a Midwesterner could never muster, “It looks like the dickens.”
Here, the wind curls among the redwood trunks, carries with it the sound of a false piano, the smell of false roses. If it wasn’t for these trees, I could close my eyes, be at a Preservation Hall funeral. The electrons between us shut us out, close the door on an atomic orgy, ions passing into an opium coma. The littlest of things, having the time of their lives, abandon us. I pat Hector on the thigh, thick as the roots under us, but not immune to uprooting. Hector pats me back with a great social worker’s generosity.
“Lady Wanda found me in Phoenix,” he says at last.
“What were you doing there?” I ask.
“Family,” he says, “I have some family there. Distant family, but, you know. And I stayed with them for a bit before moving to this refugee camp, set up in the Coliseum there.”
He pauses, runs his index fingernail over the ridges in the Agavero bottle. The sound is like the sound of chains dragged over a tile floor. The stuff of ghost stories.
“All I took,” Hector says, “was this white laundry basket. Plastic.”
“Why a laundry basket?” I ask.
“It was what I kept my things in.”
Phoenix, like many American cities, turned their gymnasiums and concert halls, fairgrounds and basements into refugee camps for those displaced by Katrina. In these camps, people slept and woke and ate donated food, drank donated water, their sweat asserting itself more every day, children becoming restless, clothes getting dirtier. In these camps, people died for lack of medication and medical supplies—no insulin or IV drips, tetanus shots or Tylenol. People died of minor cuts that grew with infection.
The number of people who had yet no bid on a future reached approximately 1.4 million. Local people tried to give what they could, crowded the animal shelters, adopting dogs with names like Gumbo, Jambalaya, Beignet, Po’Boy. A culture dying. A language surviving in the names of its rescued pets.
Much of the federal relief went to the restoration of New Orleans hotels and casinos, chemical plants and (as we all know by now) upper-class, predominantly white neighborhoods, while Hector and many, many others waited in hours-long lines to get into buildings with names like Sky Harbor and Superdome. I wonder what he thought of Phoenix’s relative treelessness. I wonder what he thought of the saguaros.
“We had to wait outside in the rain for like five hours, while they searched everybody,” Hector says.
Inside, people staked-out their places in chairs or on floors. The spaces against the walls were particularly sought after, where people sat and rocked, missing things like a glass of milk. Unlike Johanna and me, these folks were not granted the luxury of choosing to flee.
I picture Hector in Phoenix, in the Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum, lying in a hallway crowded with survivors, a cavern that once hosted Bruce Springsteen concerts. I picture him deep into a sleeping bag against a dark and caged concession stand, its beer taps empty, popcorn machine unplugged. I picture his trying to find sleep amid the ghosts of his family, beneath a neon banner sign advertising Pepsi. It’s been much more fun picturing him in his sniper tree.
“You can’t even imagine the bathroom situation, man,” Hector says, mustering a laugh.
“I hadn’t even thought about that,” I say.
“It’s nothing to think about.”
He swats an insect from his ear, feebly. The more Agavero he drinks, the more tolerant he becomes.
He says something about lying down there, this four-year-old kid stepping barefoot over him. I look up to these giant trees and the giant sky beyond it, and imagine a tiny bare foot in their place.
He hiccups on the liquor a little, but doesn’t make a sound, like he’s hiccupping in a silent movie. At any moment, I expect Charlie Chaplin to descend from the treetops and fumble with a parachute, reminding us how hilarious and precarious all of this shit is.
It’s too dark to see, but not dark enough to miss the Coliseum, how he struggles to sleep there. The rustle of the displaced and misplaced drops over him like leaves. Children pad the hallways, climb over arena seats. Local volunteers plastic-wrap a metal tray of white rice, refrigerate it for tomorrow’s breakfast. One-hundred and fifty women wait behind a velvet theatre rope to see the ob-gyn nurse, on duty for another forty-five minutes. The next shift comes in for the night, taking the flashlights and key rings from those who are going home to empty apartments and houses full of families. These nights: no stage or light-show, no rounds of applause. The encores are across the country, buried under water.
Into this arena and many others like it, came the farm owners of the American West, hiring these former Louisianans as apple pickers in Washington, cannery workers in Alaska, snipers in California.
Hector exhales.
“Lady Wanda herself came in there recruiting. A lot of people running marijuana farms came in there, offering jobs...and not for shit pay, either. Without her, man...” he says, shrugs, shakes his head, unzips his neck with the back of his finger, “This industry helped so many Katrina victims, man. It’s fucking generous.”
He sets the Agavero bottle between his feet. The glass catches the moon, lights up like a crystal ball. In it, I see tomorrow’s hangover, the nauseating cling of marijuana resin to my hands. I see Johanna massaging in a room I’ve never seen, and Hector putting together his rifle as if a toy, a hobby horse, a remote-controlled car, long since running autonomously, without a battery in the world. We sit. In this silence, I realize how exhausted I’ve become, my mouth petalled with alcohol, a cactus rung out.
“Oh,” Hector says, breaking the silence like a bottleneck. But he doesn’t go beyond this. This is the sound, an old writer friend of mine once said, that is at the center of all poetry and, therefore, should never appear in a poem.
I wonder about Johanna and me. About my family. About what is and what isn’t inherent in us. Somewhere, beyond these trees, Lady Wanda’s mansion lies dormant and dark, and beyond it, the food tent, the curing shed, the tractors asleep like gorillas on their feet. In this inventory is some kind of abundance, or its surrogate.
Hector, by my side, reaches once more for the bottle between his feet. I think, together, in these trees, in this dark, we’re trying to feel full. The shit just keeps heaping itself on. Drunk, I lean my ear into Hector’s shoulder, giving him an awkward hug with my head. He’s as sturdy as a menhir, warm with booze.
“Well, like they say...” he says.
I nod.
“So what’s next?” I ask him, lifting my ear from his shoulder.
He holds up the bottle.
“Let’s finish this little bit and head back to Camp,” he says, “I’m tired.”
I picture his big empty tent. The Virgen de Guadalupe postcard whistling in the wind. I picture Johanna splayed diagonally across the floor of the Cimarron. I feel lucky for such pictures.
“I mean,” I clarify, “Where are you going to go from here? After the season?”
Somehow, I think his answer may help to inform mine.
Hector pulls from the bottle, tilting his head back grandly. I silently pray he will howl at the moon, give me an excuse to join him—two guys being stupidly, happily male. He just holds an upturned palm to the sky. The night lights dapple his arm with shadow, the redwood tops draped over him like vines.
“The moon, man,” he says, “I’m motherfucking Neil Armstrong.”
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of six nonfiction books, including Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast, and Preparing the Ghost, and three poetry books. His new nonfiction book, Submersed—a blend of literary prose, science writing, and true crime about the amateur submarine-building community and our obsession with the deep sea—will be released June 2025 from Pantheon Books.