I wanted to become a writer, so I could become a good reader, so I would know great writing when I saw it, to see the armature, the slant of light, to understand how texture casts shadows, to be someone for whom the whole earth of language was quite round.
Author's statement...
In the years from 1979 until 1990 there existed in Northern California a thriving outdoor marijuana industry. A tri-county area, Mendocino, Humboldt, Trinity Counties became known as the Emerald Triangle. People grew gardens out in the far hills, in wildcat locations. I worked in this outlaw culture for a while, and began to see how similar it was with the Moonshine Era, another distinct time in the country's history.
During these special times a whole society emerged, people with eloquence along side hairy buggers who kept gas cans strapped to the top of their trucks. But most people tried to look ordinary yet live outside the law.
It was never my intention to glorify the marijuana culture. I see my book as a new-era history document, the inside story of a unique bunch. No cops and robbers here. I looked at my fellow travelers with awe and tried to write the story honoring their places.
Although the armature of my book is the "pot-growing world," the work has many cross members: gambling, my grandmother, dancing at the Red Fox Casino and a deserted graveyard. It is also about growing old and watching your hands knot up.
NOTEBOOKS is a contemplative book. It takes a while to read as the images are highly charged. People remark that they have read it twice. I take this as a sign of good writing, the desire to re-experience, notice small things in the background, perhaps a new thing.
Employing a notebook/paragraph form, the reader is introduced to certain voices, characters who slowly emerge until their journey erupts into a fictional story where the reader will be familiar with the inner workings of the various protagonists.
Bill Bradd Reading excerpts from his book Notebooks From the Emerald Triangle with “Bessie Mae Mucho” hosting for Jamie Roberts’ “Radiogram” program on KZYX.
Reviews
Emerald Triangle Review - by Sharon Dubiago; Big Bridge - 2011
I've said for thirty years that poet Bill Bradd is the true voice of the Mendocino Coast and the Emerald Triangle. The advanced engaged consciousness typical of the populace, the high creativity, the meditative, visionary, stoned outlawry, the profound environmentalism, the poets who have not sold out for career, for that "money tree," but have honed their art to stay true to themselves and to all of Earth...
My writer friend in the plane seat beside me reading Bradd for the first time keeps laughing out loud, "this so good, so funny!"
And brilliantly gifted in language, insight, imagination, vision, stories. Heartrending in its lyricism and imagery, metaphors so mindblowing you feel at times you really will explode. Joy is the purpose of the universe, not human happiness. Steeped in incredible nature and its critters, this is a memoir of one who never loses sight of that axiom, who lives that joy. "This book had a lot to do with the moon. Grandmother wanted to be the moon. She said 'reflect of me , boy.' It's about getting old. Seeing my hands in the soil." The awesome feeling for the environment, espcially the plants, the seeds, the mice, the ants, the spiders who arrive by truck, the trees, the bears and mountain lions. "What will I do when they pave the planet, covering the secret places that whisper to me, guide me on my journey?" If you've never been out there, this book will take you there.
Sharon Dubiago - Bio 2010
Sharon Dubiago's memoir, My Father's Love/Portrait of the Poet as A Young Girl, Volume One, November 2009, was a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards in Creative Non Fiction, 2010. Volume Two is forthcoming. Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems, was published by the University of Pittsburgh, November 2008, and received the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poet Award, and was a finalist in the PattersonNJ Poetry Prize, Feb 2010. She has written two dozen books of poetry and prose.
The Redwood Coast Review, Fall 2010
Green Thumb by Jonah Raskin
Bill Bradd knows the marijuana land from the inside out. He also knows the fine line that separates the real from the unreal. Ambiguity and mystery tug at his imagination, and in Notebooks from the Emerald Triangle he presents a mystery story whose roots are tangled up in ambiguity. Nowhere does he come out and say point-blank, "I grew marijuana." Most criminal defense lawyers would pat him on the back for his caution. After all, the possession, sale, transportation, and use of marijuana are illegal by federal law. Since 1970, there have been more than 20,000,000 arrests for violations of the marijuana laws of the United States — and mostly just for possession. So confessing to crimes of cannabis, as it is now increasingly called, could lead to an arrest and possible conviction.
Committing crimes in broad daylight is, of course, a very American way of passing the time, and "renegade gardeners" and "guerilla farmers" take their place in a rogues' gallery of heroes that include Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and the smugglers and bootleggers who operated during the prohibition against alcohol, which taught the nation almost nothing about prohibitions of any kind.
... He is an uncommon writer — unromantic and clear sighted, though he also writes poetically, and in a kind of stream-of-consciousness way befitting a "notebook" as this book claims to be. "This time on the edge of my right ear, the ear I tug when I'm thinking about the river, the passage, the water hawk's search, the otter, the nest," he writes eloquently. "This kind of stuff, trying to weave it in, make it current, solve the puzzle of rent by understanding the angle of drop, by keening the terror from above." No one else could possibly have written with that language, and that rhythm.
Notebooks is one of a kind, and because it straddles frontier that links the woods of oak and manzanita to the fabled woods of the "money trees," it will endure. In a rare moment of nearly full disclosure about his crop and how he handled it after the harvest, Bradd writes, " I give each bud one snip. It came from the jungle, so it should look like the jungle, not some Ivy-League haircut." Fortunately Bradd is no neat and tidy Ivy-Leaguer. His memoir is no ordinary garden-variety book either, but a wild narrative that takes the readers down into the tangled under-brush, and into the life of a crazy, beautiful, sad, funny woods worker in the backcountry that is our own big comic, tragic backyard.
- Jonah Raskin is the author of Field Days: AYear of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California.
Reviews of Bill‘s other works
Kirpal Gordon‘s Review
- I Tried to Sing In My Grandfather‘s Voice, A spoken word CD byWilliam Bradd - appearing in Bigbridge, 2005
Excerpts
The mail lady steers with her feet. You're driving to town counting the white horses in the different fields, when out of the laneway, from amongst a wild bramble of raspberry bushes, careens the mail lady. You know it's her because there is no head behind the steering wheel. The car seems to be empty, enjoying a day on its own.
Harvest Time The Melon Dance
We were on the brink of flags flying, streamers, blue luminescent, white percale. The crowd opened up before us. I suggested we have an aperitif. I remembered blackberry cordial was a great favorite with your family.
Ever notice how the wind slaps the rope that runs up the flag pole, a metallic clank, clank, unfit for any form of civilized goodbye.
It wasn't the celebration of the great bicycle race; that was a Lower Saxony native rite. You suggested that we should dance like draft horses. We would stick our necks through big round collars and pretend to have feet like melons. Your family was adept at close-order maneuverings.
Nevertheless, it was possible to do a kind of melon dance to the unusual clank, clank of a rope as it strikes a metal pole. Like the one in your courtyard, many clanks, a host, an orchestra of clanking, many ropes, many poles, many flags, many melon steps. I said I love you and I don't know nothing about Lower Saxony.
If I have a good year, I think I'll buy some new boots and hot water. The cat just slumped down on the art. It's September and I've had the fire going since nine o'clock this morning. Fog and drizzle. It's hot in here, paper crackles. Outside it's sleazy.
Over Alert at Harvest Time
I hear voices now, distant things call out to me, just as I'm about to speak another speaks, a disembodied voice, outside the cabin, somewhere. I go to look, climb on the woodpile, observe the roof. There was no one, no speech was said, it was my own voice, distant, I spoke when I spoke, from outside, a dog bark, there must be someone in the bushes, it's me.
I heard a strange bird whistle. I thought it might be someone I knew.
"Shut the Niners off the radio so we can listen to the Coast Guard weather station."
"You're drying them into crispy critters."
As we got closer to the end, people started confessing. My goods are buried under that willow tree in case anything happens to me, because now, near the end, there's an everything-is-up-for-grabs feeling as harvest comes closer
Sometimes in gray October sunsets the clouds parade by in a sad, slow manner, remnants of a confused, giant army, knowing the battles are taking place somewhere else.
The Wind and the Lost Coast Moon
These nights, at harvest time, two full moons come up at the end of the canyon. One follows the other by forty-five minutes. On these cold nights, moons find each other for warmth. These days there is light without warmth. This cold sun follows after the full moons, up the Lost Coast, clouds the eyes of old dogs.
Waiting To Be Picked Up
I sit on a high hill by an old cemetery, waiting for full dark before I venture out. From where I sit I can see the highway, the ranch road in, a few cars light up for a moment the telephone line, the curvature of the earth and the flights of pelicans, low riders from the Mission.
And I watch, the moon comes up on Mars, out of the western sea, round as a bug, tight as a carrot. It becomes entangled in the blue tick bushes. Having failed to reach escape velocity, the western moon of Mars almost sinks back into the dust, but bug-like it manages to scramble clear of the tick bush and tight as a carrot, it begins to follow its own length into the ink black night. A kind of carrot/comet, the western moon, that comes from the sea on the shore of Lake Arid on Mars-
The Red Fox Casino Has a Go At Poetry
"I don't recall your name, but your cigarette smells familiar A Turkish blend, I think and if it wasn't for the stink."
Hidden in the Zebras of a Full Moon Night
Under the full moon, the face of night in the deep woods blinks a lot, a shuffling, an uneasiness, as if night were nervous, perhaps the owls are about this evening, perhaps the terror from above is close, disguised as a zebra or a rapid switching of the ON/OFF button. Fear of darkness is a visceral thing, you're either afraid of the dark or you're not. I see quite well in the dark, after all there were nights at the carnival grounds, late, where meth and cigarette smoke blurred the neon message, the circus is here, join our colors, lose yourself in the blinking black.
If you can see in the dark, you can come down my hillsides, drop down to my creek bed, follow the path that leads to my waiting place, deep shadows under long fir tree limbs, sit there, wait 'till it's safe. As I sit and wait, the meadow that lays before me is mottled, the thistles are enlarged by the moon's shadows. As I move out towards the cemetery's backside, I avoid the thistle and watch for cow pies. I look ahead around the bends that follow the creek, I see into the darkness. As I move, I hum to myself, "don't the moon look good, mama, coming through the trees, and if I don't make it I know my baby will." I hum this tune as I climb up the road behind the cemetery. The zebra of night has flickered the road before me with light, puddles of moon. I step in and out of these lighted Puss-and-Boots steps. I feel small in each illumination. I'm a dot, again, and if I don't make it I know my baby will. I sing below my breath, I crest the hill and stand by the cemetery fence and look out over the pitch black and faded white pasture, try to discern which is a bush and which is a cow out there, a look at the highway below for headlight traffic, see how busy it is. I check my watch. I got twenty-eight minutes to the pickup gate, I can get from here to the gate in twelve minutes in a brisk walk, if I don't have trouble getting over the ranch fence and get hung up again. So under the full moon and its overpowering gravity pull, I sit down, lean against the wood picket fence of the graveyard, whisper good evening to the little Foresti kid, buried here these many long years.
This is what happens with the zebras of the night, jostling in their herd, raising a fog dust over the meadows. Letting the wind off the ocean carry in the music. "Don't the moon look good mama."
As I head home at night, there are times I hear voices in the dark by the creek. Lots of times I may be sitting at the edge of the woods waiting for dark so I can head home, climb up the backside of Cemetery Hill and dash down the open meadow to the highway. When I'm sitting waiting for dark, it could be hunting season besides everything else, lots of times the wind brings voices. Sometimes the creek sounds like people talking out there in the gathering dark. Severed heads talking, laughing. There's a woman's voice. I lean back into the blackness of the forest's shadow and sit stiff, still. It could not be, not relaxed people, talking, laughing, out here, at the forest's edge at dark.
It gives me a chill actually. I know that one voice, coming up through the dark from the stream down there. It couldn't be them partying. They're all dead. But that's Elinor. I'd know her voice anywhere. I heard it in the birth canal. I think I remember, it must have been a cribbage hand. I think I heard her say, "That's three to peg out, I win." Nobody plays cribbage in the dark by the forest.
We were on the brink of flags flying, streamers, blue luminescent, white percale. The crowd opened up before us. I suggested we have an aperitif. I remembered blackberry cordial was a great favorite with your family.
Ever notice how the wind slaps the rope that runs up the flag pole, a metallic clank, clank, unfit for any form of civilized goodbye.
It wasn't the celebration of the great bicycle race; that was a Lower Saxony native rite. You suggested that we should dance like draft horses. We would stick our necks through big round collars and pretend to have feet like melons. Your family was adept at close-order maneuverings.
Nevertheless, it was possible to do a kind of melon dance to the unusual clank, clank of a rope as it strikes a metal pole. Like the one in your courtyard, many clanks, a host, an orchestra of clanking, many ropes, many poles, many flags, many melon steps. I said I love you and I don't know nothing about Lower Saxony.
— From Notebooks From The Emerald Triangle
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