“Rocky Mountain High” reminds us of how we
sat around a campfire everybody getting high on Colorado in the summer of ’72. John
Denver’s melodic version of Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley. Longhairs from
all over stoned on this beautiful slice of paradise. I was there, a traveler
from flat, muggy Florida. The air was sweet. So were the sights. The Rainbow Family
gathered a few mountain ranges over. Longhairs clogged interstate on-ramps.
Meanwhile, our parents’ generation was all in a dither, nervous about drugs and
sex and rock’n’roll, nervous about the fate of their offspring.
We got jobs, married, and had kids that
don’t listen to us. The marijuana that was such forbidden fruit then is now
available at your corner dispensary in Colorado and many other states that
aren’t Wyoming. The other cannabis sativa, hemp, grew into a commodity akin to
oil, gas, and coal, subject to the same boom-and-bust cycles. Guys who looked
like hedge-fund managers (they were) began showing up at farms along the Front
Range asking where all the hemp was and did the farmers have any for sale?
If the present situation seems ripe for
dark comedy, Finn Murphy spells it out in “Rocky Mountain High: A Tale of Boom
and Bust in the New Wild West.” Murphy’s a Boomer, an enterprising capitalist
and Ivy League grad from Connecticut. He sees hemp as they new big thing and moves
to Boulder County, buys a 36-acre spread, and strolls out in his Wall Street
suit to greet his rural neighbors.
It didn’t go well. There are some high
times to celebrate but, as the reader knows from the subtitle, both boom and
bust await Mr. Murphy and his colleagues in “The Hemp Space,” the
countercultural term for this new business.
First, the boom. Hemp is a cannabis
product that cannot register more than 0.3% of THC, so says the Colorado
Department of Agriculture (and the one in Wyoming). The CDA inspects your
crops, makes sure that you are not growing smokeable marijuana because that’s a
whole other thing. That’s being grown a few fields over. Hemp is made into CBD
among other products. CBD was a thing in the 2010s, the cure for every Boomer’s
aching joints. CBD stores popped up on every corner. Many of us bought the overpriced
oils, put drops under our tongues, rubbed it on aging body parts, and eagerly
awaited the cure.
Murphy saw the promise of legal hemp. Over
the decades, he had birthed and sold many businesses, some in areas he knew
little about. In the book, he leads us through his decision-making process and into
the growing, harvesting, and selling of the product. He thought the harvesting
end would be the most lucrative. He told his neighbors (he calls them the “Weedwhackers”
– and they shall remain nameless) he would harvest their crop and since nobody
knew the costs of such a venture, agreed to settle up when the work was done.
Murphy spends way too much time telling us
about the costs of this enterprise. But it is instructional. Farmers need farm implements
to harvest fields of five-foot hemp trees. Murphy buys three big hoophouses in
which to dry the hemp. They are $10,000 each. He later has to buy thousands of
dollars of tools and equipment to erect the hoophouses. He spends more than the
$150,000 he budgeted for equipment on bucking and trimming machines, fans,
generators, and humidifiers. He hired a band of trimmigrants to do the tough and sticky work.
But it’s the author’s self-effacing humor
and eye for life’s strange contradictions that kept me reading. He also knows how
to keep the reader turning the page. He concludes the “Start Me Up” chapter
this way:
We’d all be rich and happy. We agreed then and there on handshakes to go forward, and the room was awash with good fellowship and excitement.
My thought: This is really going to be bad,
isn’t it?
And it was. Nobody died but the “fellowship”
didn’t last.
Murphy’s first book is “The Long Haul,”
also by Norton. It’s about his foray into the long-haul trucking business.
For information on the Wyoming “Hemp Space,” go to the Wyoming Hemp Association.
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