Humboldt County -- Come for the Drugs; Stay in a Dungeon

There are a few Humboldt County blogs I follow on a casual basis.  About a week ago on one of them there was a posting about a girl who went missing in Southern Humboldt.  The Garberville area, if memory serves me correctly.  A picture of her was posted, and it gave me chills.

The area she was last seen.  Her blonde dreads.  It was eerily similar to a scene I wrote in my sex and violence manuscript. That's neither here nor there, though.

The girl had been missing over a week and calls to her cell phone went unanswered.  Myself and a few other posters mentioned the fact that Humboldt was not exactly the best place for a missing teen girl due to its dark underbelly ... one I find worse than any other place I've lived.  We all hoped the girl would be found safely.  Few of us believed she would.

And then we were taken to task.

Now, I can understand people wanting to keep hopes up.  I think that's natural.  Others did not feel that way.  We were called "negative" people who said "mean" things.  Those people who called us that wanted the father of the missing girl, who happened onto the blog at some point, to know that Humboldt was a safe place for a missing teen and she was probably sleeping on someone's porch or some such nonsense.  It should be noted that while "negative" is a meaningless term used to label someone who says anything that challenges one's point of view, nobody said anything that any reasonable person could call "mean."  That didn't stop these people, though.  They were very quick to offer what could only be false hope.  After all, they didn't know whether or not the girl would be found unharmed, but they were quick to promise she would be.  Myself and others merely stated that things tend to be grim in that situation.

The girl, incidentally, was found alive and presumably safe, though I didn't read why she was out of contact with her parents for so long, or why a young girl was up here from the Bay Area unescorted by an adult.  It didn't matter, though.  We were mean, negative naysayers who dared to muddy Humboldt's pristine reputation.

Humboldt does have its dark and weird side.  It's not all tie dye, pot and people who still pick up hitchhikers without the expectation of sex.  We've got bestiality, parents pimping out their children, murder-for-hire schemes on teen girls, drug houses like you would not believe, pony girl trainings in the woods, a ripe underground porn industry, serial killers, parents scoring dope with their kids, murdered hookers, alleyway inseminations of lesbians looking to have children, group sex parties in run-down motel rooms with heroin addicted local media stars.  Hardly the Disneyland many would like you to believe, but how does it differ from other places?  Well, that's easy -- it's ignored and in some cases accepted.

I've lived in other places where bad, strange things happen.  But they happen either so deeply underground that you never hear of them, or they are met with scorn and disgust and eradicated.  Here, people are either gleeful to turn a blind eye (to do anything else is to risk being called "mean"), or condone it openly or through silence.  It is kind of sick, and anyone who has had any dealings with it on any sort of level knows it is there and knows exactly what I am talking about.

I once heard a woman say that Eureka (and it could be said of Humboldt in general) was like a small town with big city crime.  I corrected her.  "It's like a small town with country crime."  Country crime is different.  It's weird.  It's off.  It's a previously used ball gag shoved into your mouth and a video camera mounted on a tripod as a German Shepherd is led into the room.

We weren't mean on that blog.  We were realists.  Some may have been a bit more dramatic than others, but we were realistic.  No parent wants his or her child to end up missing, and no sane parent would feel safer with their child being last seen in Humboldt.  If that's negative and mean, I'll cop to it.  But I flat out fucking refuse to be some wide-eyed lobotomy who thinks Humboldt is the epitome of the throwback commune where everyone is about peace and love, and strangers are fed without any evil agendas.  I've seen and heard too much to think that, and I have far too much common sense to believe that is even close to reality.  Sure, there are some people like that ... but wait until you see what they have hanging in the shed out back.

Family and Other Threats to a Child's Health

Recently, McKinleyville, CA was shocked by a crime. A woman is found wandering around naked with abrasions.  She is incoherent.  Doesn't know how she got to where she was or why she was naked.  (This is actually not the first time something like this has happened in the area, by the way.  The rest of the story is new for our region, however.)  The police suspect she has a child, but there is no child with her.  They found the woman's vehicle, and they found items that appeared to have been tossed out of it over a ten mile stretch, including items belonging to a child.

Police begin searching for the woman's daughter.  The woman is of little help at first, but then memories start coming back.  Soon the two-year-old girl is found, dead in a river.  Her mother drowned her.  Obviously, this is disturbing.  Jump forward to this weekend.

I'm with my daughter as she preps to march in a parade.  I'm marching with her.  Another parent is at the meeting place with her daughter.  Eventually the mother says, "I'm going to go off to find a vantage point for the parade.  Can she just stay here with you?"

I didn't say "no," though I was stunned a mother would just leave her daughter with me, a stranger.  Oh, the mother never bothered to get my cell phone number ... or my name.  She had known me all of twenty minutes and had said all of eight sentences to me before she got the wonderful idea to leave her child in my possession.  My daughter thought it was strange, and I had to assure her that I would never leave her with a stranger like that.

Am I wrong in finding this odd?

I'm not one to abuse a child.  This woman didn't know that, however.  She didn't know my name, where I lived, anything.  Suppose I had done something to her kid?  What would she tell the police?  "I left her at the flagpole, officer, with some guy.  No, I don't know his name or his number or where he lives.  I can give you a description.  Middle-aged, white, shaved head, goatee."  That's the description of just about every white criminal out there.  That would be fun for the cops trying to figure that one out.

Strangers are obviously a threat to children.  I think we tend to ignore that family is a huge threat, too.  They are an even more insidious threat because your family is supposed to keep you safe.  When the people you trust with your life and safety turn on you it's terrifying.

The McKinleyville woman who drowned her child has mental problems.  It's not an excuse for doing the crime; it's the reason.  I feel for the child's family,  but I have no sympathy for the mother.  People can question what happened and why all they want, but it doesn't change the outcome one damn bit.  The woman at the parade was lucky (as was her daughter) that I'm not a pedophile or murderer.  She took a chance, though.  A huge chance.  She trusted the safety of what should be the love of her life with someone she had zero clue about.  All for a good seat at the parade.  If that isn't the definition of reckless, I don't know what the word means.  I just hope her kid questions her about that someday.  I'd like to know what answer the mom would give.  To me, there is no justifying it.  There's only apologizing and being thankful her little girl didn't end  in a bad way, too.  What are people thinking?