A trek to Raymond, Washington

You might think the above photo is terribly boring.

You would be wrong.

You’d know exactly how un-boring it is if you drove past that large blue building with the impressive air-handling equipment. The wafting aroma of cannabis will follow you for a quarter of a mile.

I recently made a little expedition to a town in Washington state that’s turning out to have quite a story. That building is part of it.

The building is at the Port of Willapa Harbor in Raymond, Washington. Used to be when you drove by the port you’d try not to inhale because the core port area’s traditional scent is a gaggy blend of fishy (and shell-fishy) by-products. That’s still there, too. You just have to know when to take your breath. There are many places in Raymond now where you’ll breathe in fresh, sweet herb.

The port (which has three or four separate properties around the town, each with a handful of warehouses, processing plants, and derelict lumber mills) used to be a sorry thing as well as a smelly one. Many of its facilities were decaying. Or they housed an ever-changing array of hopeful, then failed businesses. Some port buildings sat almost alone, surrounded by undeveloped land that hasn’t been worth anybody’s while to build on.

Raymond, in deepest rural Washington, has been a hard-luck timber and seafood town for the last 100 years. Repeated efforts to turn it into something — a tourist destination, a bedroom community for a state prison (ugh!), anything but a dying berg rotting under the coastal NorthWet’s drenching skies — have failed.

Now … Raymond is becoming the cannabis capital of Washington. THE cannabis capital. The cannabis capital isn’t Seattle. It’s not Olympia. Not Spokane. Not Yakima. None of the notable cities. Not any of the pleasant ag areas on the fringes of Puget Sound nor the vast, famous ag areas east of the Cascades (think apples). But little, lost, inconvenient, unlucky, out-of-the way Raymond. THE cannabis capital.

I hate, I really hate, to give credit to government. But in this case, it’s simply giving credit where credit is due — although it’s not so much government that deserves credit. It’s one woman named Rebecca Chaffee.

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Rebecca Chaffee is the manager of the Port of Willapa Harbor. She has a long history of being creative and open to new ideas.

When voters made Washington the first state (along with Colorado, which beat WA in actual implementation) to legalize recreational pot in November 2012, a well-funded Seattle nightclub owner, Marcus Charles, headed into the hinterlands seeking places for a big grow operation. He didn’t really mean to get quite as “hinter” as Raymond, which is about three hours from Seattle, but other likely towns turned up their noses. A pot grow? No, thank you!

Ms Chaffee threw her arms open to him. Then, I don’t know how much persuading it took, but Chaffee got the port and the city to open their arms, too. I don’t actually think it took monumental effort. The local law enforcers were against it, of course. But when meetings were opened for public comment, the first one drew just seven commentors — six for and only one against — and by the second meeting the whole idea was so non-controversial nobody even showed up. (Or so I heard.)

Nevertheless, it took creativity and dynamism by Chaffee.

And suddenly, the green rush was on. Marcus Charles was only the first. Word got out that there was a welcoming community and plenty of cheap space and empty buildings, and out of the cities the new pot entrepreneurs rushed.

Washington has strictly limited the number of licenses it’s granting for cannabis-related businesses. Itty-bitty, dreary Raymond, population just a slight exaggeration over 3,000, has 15 of them. Sixteen, according to one of the guys I found working on this grow-house-to-be:

The guy, who was operating a forklift, was wary as he approached me, a stranger taking pictures of what’s to be a high-security operation. But we had a great talk when he realized I was just a blogger (and not whatever else he might have feared — a Mexican cartelista trying to scope out the competition?). Turned out he’s both a part owner of the future grow and a construction worker/supervisor on the project. Like most of the new growers, he’s not a local, but is excited to be here.

They have a habit of talking about the things they’re going to do for the town (“Maybe build a community center. There’s nothing for kids to do around here but get in trouble with meth”). I told him I hope he and his buddies make millions. That will do more for the area than any airy “improvement” intentions.

“I hope this area becomes the Napa-Sonoma of pot!” I said. “Instead of winery tours and wine tastings you’ll have …”

“…ganja tastings,” he grinned.

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Most of the 15 (or 16) local licenses are for grow operations. Virtually every abandoned mill or disused warehouse in the area is either already a pot grow, being remodeled for one, or about to be. The port now lists no vacancies in any of its Raymond facilities. Several new buildings are going up. It’s hard to convey what a remarkable thing that is for a town that’s spent the last century slowly crumbling.

But I’m not kidding about those ops being (you’ll pardon the pun) high security. Not one of them has a sign to identify it. They’re spiky with security cameras. And that big one at the top of this blog has a formidable barbed-wire-topped fence. But once they get going, it doesn’t take talent to recognize what they are. Just a nose.

Here’s a small, less formidable, grow off on a side road.

A year ago, this little beater of a plant produced landscape timbers. Then it sat empty for months. Then … well, I found it by that lovely aroma all these places exude.

Some of you know I have old connections to Raymond; though I don’t live there now, I know the area. I remembered the former landscape timber place and had a hunch about it. Although I IDed its new purpose by guess and by smell, turns out I know someone who works there. “Best job I ever had!” he told me.

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And speaking of that infamous aroma, I have to laugh. While I was in town I stopped at their biggest store. Bad timing; a Christmas sale was going on and the lines were long. As I waited to check out, I couldn’t get that aroma out of my nostrils.

“This is crazy,” I kept thinking. “I know they don’t sell pot here. It’s got to be something else. I must just have cannabis on the brain after this expedition.” Still, the scent was distinctive — not the odor of smoked pot, but the tang of the plant itself, very plain and unmistakable.

Then the woman in line behind me started talking with somebody she knew — talking about the cannabis grows. She had just gotten off work. Guess where? She was permeated with the sweet, skunky aroma of the ripening bud she’d been tending.

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No, they don’t sell pot at that particular store. But … that’s the story for my next blog.

And lest my most hardcore readers object to me seeming to celebrate all this business of state licensing and permitting (and the whopping taxes and stupid rules that go with cannabis legalization) … I don’t like that any more than you do.

But I do celebrate the fact that this lovely, useful herb is no longer a civic sin, no longer a cause for unpleasant encounters with armed agents. And I do find it amusing as all get out that, thanks to the open-mindedness of Chaffee, the port commissioners, and the people of Raymond, Washington, a significant and increasing share of the state’s legal pot is now being grown on government land.