Nevada City, CA — Burgeoning area writer Roy Riffle recently announced to a small crowd of Millennials at Nevada City’s Cafe Mekka that he intends to write the equivalent of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath called Buds of Wrath. Mr. Riffle has been talking with “trimmigrants” as they made their way through town looking for temporary work, and was inspired by their culture.
“Before I knowed it, I was sayin’ out loud, ‘The hell with it! There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue,” announced Mr. Riffle in an Okie drawl to a largely disinterested group at Cafe Mekka who seemed more interested in Instragram than him. “There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing.’ I says, ‘What’s this call, this spirit?’ An’ I says, ‘It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust, sometimes.'”
Sensing that no one was paying attention to him, Mr. Riffle raised his voice and deepened his accent.
“I figgered, ‘Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus? Maybe,’ I figgered, ‘maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; maybe that’s the Holy Spirit, the human sperit, the whole shebang. Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.'” Continued Mr. Riffle. “Now I’m thinkin’ it, an’ all of a suddent-I knew it. I knew it so deep down that it was true, and I still know it.”
Every fall, young people, mostly in their 20s, come from all over the world to work the marijuana harvest. They come seeking jobs as “trimmers” — workers who manicure the buds to get them ready for market. The locals have a name for these young migrant workers: “trimmigrants.” There are hundreds of thousands of marijuana plants that need to be processed quickly to avoid damage from mold and other issues. So from September through November, it’s all hands on deck. That’s where trimmigrants, also called scissor drifters, come in.
Frequent Mekka customer and fellow Millennial Brent Underwood was enthusiastic about Mr. Riffle’s project saying, “[t]his is great. I’m gonna hang out with him and learn stuff.”
Although his peers seemed to have no interest or opinion about his undertaking, there were some who took issue with Mr. Riffle’s folly.
“I can’t imagine anyone even attempting to capture what goes on here in any coherent way,” said Nevada Union English teacher Garrett Deasy. “Roy has no idea what he’s doing. He’ll never amount to anything but gibberish. I mean, he’s pretending to talk like an Okie now. He needs to apply himself and do something real with his life.”
As for Mr. Riffle, he refused to answer The Fazzler’s questions directly, but rather issued the following statement about his intentions.
And in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the buds of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the harvest. Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, and emerges ahead of his accomplishments.
