I smiled. “I agree. Not everybody does, though.”
“Not everybody can afford to. Some people don’t have the skills or the opportunity to do anything but raise pot and draw Social Security. I can’t run anybody else’s life; my own’s about as much as I can handle. I don’t worry much about what’s legal and what isn’t, but I don’t want to make my money off marijuana.”
“So where does that leave you? A rebel without a cause? An outlaw farmer without a cash crop?”
Just like that, a sunny grin broke across his face. “Like I said, I think you’ll find this interesting.” Taking me by the arm, he led me into the house, through a sparely furnished front room and a surprisingly modern kitchen behind, then out onto the back porch, which was shrouded in kudzu. From beneath the foliage, I saw something completely invisible from the exterior of the house: the back porch was the entrance to another tunnel of kudzu. The residential version of the camouflaged driveway.
“What’s this, your escape tunnel?” He didn’t answer; he just kept pulling me along, off the porch and through a trellised, arborlike structure that ran for maybe fifty yards. Then it opened out, and I found myself in an immense open space, the size of several football fields, that was dotted with a grid of telephone poles. The poles supported a network of cables, and the cables supported acres and acres of kudzu canopy, which filtered the light and tinted everything. It almost seemed we were in a dome beneath the sea, so green and otherworldly was the space. At our feet, stretching across what must have been half the valley’s floor, were neat rows of plants, knee-high, bearing fuzzy leaves shaped like pointed teardrops. Atop each five-leaf cluster was a knot of red berries.
I gave a low whistle. “Gives new meaning to the word ‘greenhouse,’” I said. “Whatcha growing under all this kudzu? Doesn’t look much like Cousin Vern’s pot plants.”
“Sang,” he said. “Ten acres of ginseng. Street value of about three million dollars, if I harvest it right now. Four million if I wait a year. Five, the year after that.”
I wasn’t following him. “Street value? You talk like it’s illegal. Is it?”
He laughed. “Sorry; old habits die hard. It’s perfectly legal to cultivate ginseng, but this is unlike any other cultivated sang on the planet.”
“How so?”
“Ginseng 101,” he said. “All ginseng is not created equal. There’s a huge market for sang, mostly in China. They’ve been cultivating it there for centuries. But your true Chinese connoisseur turns his nose up at their domestic crop. American ginseng—wild American ginseng, mind you, what’s known as black ginseng — that’s the cream of the crop. Early Jesuit missionaries made a fortune shipping black sang to China; so did the Astors of New York. Even Daniel Boone sold it by the boatload.” Clearly he had done his homework.
“Ginseng grows great up in the Smokies,” he went on. “Likes a north-facing hillside with lots of shade, soil with just the right pH, a particular blend of trace minerals. Some of the best patches actually have names—‘the sugar bowl’ and ‘the gold mine,’ for instance. High-grade patches, even ones inside the national park, are considered heirlooms, a family’s patrimony. The locations of those patches are closely held secrets, and some old-timers wouldn’t hesitate to shoot somebody they caught raiding ‘their’ patch. Couple park rangers got ambushed and killed a few years ago over near Fontana Lake, on the North Carolina side of the park, during a crackdown on poachers.”
“I remember reading about that. I hadn’t realized park rangering was such a risky occupation.”
“Lotta mountain families still hate the government for taking their land to make the national park. And they’re by-God gonna keep digging sang.” He shook his head. “Thing is, over the long haul, it’s not sustainable. Takes ten or fifteen years for a wild ginseng root to reach its peak; takes only a couple hours, with a forked stick or a screwdriver, to dig up hundreds of ’em. Whole hillsides in the park look like they’ve been ravaged by root hogs.”
“But if it can be cultivated,” I said, waving at the proof stretching out before us, “why don’t people just grow it instead of poaching it?”
“Several pretty good reasons, actually. First, ginseng is pretty damned finicky. I’ve been trying to grow it for a dozen years now, with help from some pretty good botanists, and I’m just starting to get the hang of it. Second, it’s not like marijuana, which can give you a huge profit in just one growing season. You have to leave ginseng in the ground for four years, minimum, before you can harvest it, and during that time, it’s not generating a dime of income. The main reason, though, is the price differential.”
O’Conner reached into a deep side pocket of his gray cargo pants and pulled out a root, which he handed me. “Ginseng, I presume?” He nodded. The root had four branches, which corresponded remarkably well to the placement and proportions of the arms and legs of the human form. It looked, quite literally, like a stick figure.
“You can see why the Chinese and the Indians both named it ‘man-herb,’ can’t you?”
“I can. Only thing missing is the head.”
“Look at the texture.” I studied the root; it was smooth and fleshy, rather like a carrot or sweet potato. “That’s from Wisconsin, which produces most of the cultivated ginseng exported to China.”
“Wisconsin? The ‘Eat cheese or die’ state?”
He laughed. “That Wisconsin root there weighs about a quarter-pound; it’s worth about five bucks.” He fished around in another pocket, and handed me another root. This one was slimmer, darker, and nubbier, with rings or constrictions encircling it from its neck down to the tips of its four branches. “That’s wild black sang. Waylon dug that; we probably don’t want to know where.”
I hefted it; it weighed about the same as the other, maybe a hair less.
“That one’ll fetch two hundred dollars,” he said. I looked from one to the other, trying to see how one could be worth forty times more than the other. O’Conner took them from me. “The wild’s more potent, or at least it’s perceived to be by the people who buy it.”
“Ah, the magic of the free market,” I said.
He nodded. “Doesn’t take an MBA to figure out that poaching this root in the wild gives a damn good return on an investment of zero. Of course, the poachers aren’t counting the environmental costs, or the occasional fine or murder.”
I pointed to the cultivated root. “But you’ve figured out a way to get rich on these at five bucks apiece?”
O’Conner bent down and plucked up one of his own plants. He brushed off the dirt, which seemed an odd mixture of black loam, white Styrofoam granules, and mucilaginous goo—“hydrophilic gel,” he said as he wiped the root and his hands on the leg of his pants. “Slimy as snot, but it cuts my irrigation costs thirty percent.” He handed the plant to me. It was nubby with constrictions.
I blinked in confusion. “What — you’re transplanting wild seedlings?” He laughed and shook his head. “I don’t understand,” I said. “You grew this here?” He nodded. “But it looks just like the wild one.”
“Bingo. I’m not cultivating twenty-dollar-a-pound ginseng here, Doc; I’m growing thousand-dollar-a-pound wild sang. If it looks like wild sang and quacks like wild sang, it’ll sell like wild sang.”