5November 2023
The Rest of the Story: Mt Zion Seed Cooperative, Return to the East
It’s the spring of 2002, 9/11 has just happened, and I’m a high school senior about to graduate in upstate New York. The time was one of shock and fervor, an American coming of age. I’ve been raised a good latter day saint boy, don’t smoke don’t drink, respect women, all the things etc. Laying in bed one night, a long debate with myself ends. With the end of the school year looming, I’m going to be leaving my beloved region and heading to a very strict Mormon school in Idaho. From there, I will be heading on a two year mission to who knows where, which turned out to be Brasil. I lay in bed, not really praying in the traditional sense, but reasoning with my highest self about the ethics, morality, and sense of smoking cannabis. I weigh the data and consider my body, my parents, and what I’ve been taught, moment by moment calculating the truth through the lens of a propagandized child. At some point, the fear washed off me as I said to myself, “It’s settled, tomorrow I will ask my friends to let me smoke some ganja.” With that intention set, the initiation was confirmed. I went to school the next day, walked right up to Ryan and Brian, and asked to be “smoked out”. To this day, the faces on these seasoned stoner artisans, when the Mormon boy asked to get high, is priceless. Shock, with a bit of juvenile devilish delight, turned into excitement, and then quickly to problem solving. We went together and found Devan, an old friend who had been very close in elementary and middle school, but who had drifted into the normalcy of the age which we lived, while I stayed sober. Funny, because we grew close as part of the elite group of a few kids who had to go get our second dose of “medicine” in the middle of the school day. We sprouted up during the height of the mid 90’s amphetamine craze, funny to develop a friendship that’s strengthened by being told you are too different, and that you have to be drugged up in order to comply. My old buddy was happy to oblige, and so off we went to skip school and smoke weed at Brian’s house.
I still don’t know whose cannabis it was, probably Devan’s, but the rest of the details of me getting high for the first time are history. Those kind souls took pity upon their brother, shared their weed, and set me on the path to enlightenment. I am eternally grateful to my friends, and still hope to repay their kindness someday in full. In some part, everything I am doing now is linked to their charity that day. They taught me by selfless action, cannabis is a free gift from God. I tend to make sure it stays that way.
Fast forward to the summer of 2021. Even as a stoned 18 year old, I couldn’t have seen myself ever needing to live in Oklahoma, but there I was. I’m walking a legal field of 10,000 seedlings and clones. Since I started growing the sacred herb in 2012 I’d been divorced, raided by the cops and lost everything, gone to jail, remarried, moved to Oregon, had our first son on the farm followed by another raid, moved back to Utah, been raided again, had our second daughter at home, and moved to Oklahoma. In Oklahoma we lived a wild ride, to go from civilly disobedient dissident thrown in jail for growing a plant, and then be told through the plandemic that we were essential workers and didn’t need to lock down, was surreal as it was expected. After our family farm was put out of business by changing legislation, we landed one contract after another with sundry individuals of varying honorability. With each contracted grow, dispensary consultation, or processing facility build, we grew our seedstock with our experience. I really felt completely dominant in the marketplace when it came to cannabis genetics, and carried that confidence in my stare and my gait. Even though I had better and more than most, we found clones and seedstock flowing through us from all sides. From my first grow til now, I have maintained the principle that every seed deserves a chance, that each seed carries a cannabinoid lock for some person specifically, and as growers its our obligation to grow each seed to its greatest potential, and help the medicine find its way to the right people or persons. Despite my espousing of that principle, there are plenty of abused and neglected plants I’ve got under my negative karma belt. We did our best, but there was no way to save every single genetic profile that came our way, especially with all the crosses and breeding we were making along the way needing to be hunted. This made us hold to the good things, to the strong ones. We played “Strong Will Continue” by Damien Marley and NAS, to the plants and ourselves, as we walked through the fires of corporate cannabis hell on the road to Zion. To be continued….