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Show RTVER all that wild empty country just waiting for an enterprising young farmer. Before I got out of bed I was committed. Or should have been. The idea was truly screwy, a good indication of how whacked out I was. Even now I believe that a serious man could grow a lot of reefer on the Mississippi River: in fact, I'm sure if s been done. The climate, soil, and water conditions are all ideal. The wild weed farmer's greatest enemy, varmints, would be kept at bay by the river, and finding a spot with the right degree of isolation would be no problem in the hundreds of miles between Memphis and Vicksburg that are virtually uninhabited. There are hundreds of empty islands and towheads in these miles, not to mention the countless bayous and backwaters that feed into the river. The federal government has a marijuana farm in Oxford, Mississippi that produces 24-foot plants of legendary quality, and I was sure I could do better than the federal government. I was hypnotized by the old dream of going into the jungle broke and coming out rich. So what if the idea sounded a little screwy: as I said many times, it could work. That of all the places in the world the American South was probably, from a legal standpoint, the worst possible place on the planet to grow marijuana did not cross my mind. That I might end up in a state pen-and no ordinary state pen, but lets say a real famous state pen like Parchman-busting big rocks into little rocks did not occur to me once. What I did not appreciate was what a Jamaican Rastafarian told me some time later: "Weed," he said, "is a seeerious bizniz." I did not appreciate the seriousness of what I was doing at all: I regarded it as something of a colossal joke upon myself. A serious weed farmer should have a keen sense of what he's doing. He is, after all, breaking the law and he should be as discreet about his farming as he would be about bank robbery- -137- |
