Here starts what is the last segment of this little series, but certainly not our story. We left off just before Christmas last time, after we sent off our boss with some dab cookies with the expectation of much further work to come. He was going to have the dabs tested, but we both believed the results would come back fine in the things he was concerned about, like mold or contaminants. He had just given us a brand new heat gun, as ours had just failed, with a comment basically saying we were going to need it to work for him again after the holidays.
This series happens simultaneously as being stranded in Oregon, and stranded we were. We had mailed dabs to a friend back home, as the prices we would get there was almost triple the price of what we were getting in Oregon. We wanted to use at least some of our pay from the job to get the funds to get the hell off that property, as things were really just getting worse. As time wore on, things got more tense. It seemed clear that they were looking for a reason to kick us out, so we were doing our best to get out before that could happen.
We got some money back, in the form of bitcoin which helped a lot. We ended up trading weed for a truck, which is a whole story in itself. I mention it only because it became essential in our plans to leave, although our plan wasn't to go south to the border like we ended up doing.
We kept in regular contact with our boss at first and he was working on finding us a temporary place to stay. The plan was for us to stay nearby and come to work the job on his property until it was done. He offered to sell our portion with his so we could get the cash together to get our own place, whatever that meant for us. His intention at that time was to keep us around for the next season as he was looking for help with everything from the farming to trimming. He was in the process of applying for his recreational growers permit, which was actually his excuse for the delay in work. It was nearing the holidays, but he said he really needed to focus on getting that handled before it was too late.
Had this all panned out, we would have made a lot of money and might have stayed in Oregon as opposed to being stranded. Being on the run made us nervous, but the fact that Oregon had little pockets with no cops gave us hope. We weren't intending on staying forever, but the possibility of the money to be made made staying a little more worth it. Even if we didn't stay in Oregon, we would have been way better off on our trip south. Our concern would have been focused on making it through the border, not making it TO the border in terms of money. It's hard for me to fathom how different a trip with money would have been, more like a vacation and less like a survival mission I figure for sure.
He eventually found someone that would take us in temporarily, but warned us that the guy was a little weird. His friend, the one that came to the first several meetings and cooked terrible weed cookies, was put in contact with us to make it happen. She claimed to be an older hippy, well known in the area and sympathetic to us. She honestly pretty quickly became pretty disrespectful to us, even going as far to say that she saw lice in John's dreadlocks. Out of paranoia, we checked each other thoroughly and couldn't even find dandruff, the lady just seemed to be a bitch. She eventually told us that we would have a place to stay, but that it wouldn't be nice. She went from trying to help us to acting like we were a burden.
The communication became pretty cryptic from the both of them afterwards. Eventually, we just called our boss and asked him what was going on. He told us that after doing some tests with RSO, which is an alcohol based concentrate, he found that making that would be more lucrative because of higher weight yields. The end product could be made into edibles which were pretty expensive in Oregon at that time. We tried to explain that the same could be done with dabs, we shared that the cookies we sent him off with were made with dab. He responded by saying he never actually tried one, that he gave them to his friends.
It was really annoying because it was clear that his bitchy hippy friend had weasled her way into our gig. She reportedly owned a house run marijuana bakery, so naturally she wanted the job of processing his trim herself. She convinced him the RSO was better and he went for it. What made it worse was that he randomly rambled about the taste of her edibles being bad. That's pretty annoying because the ones I sent him off with had little to no taste of the cannabis, something I'm known for with my edibles, and he never even tried them. If he had, he might have reconsidered her business idea, maybe substituting me instead.
He basically told us we didn't have the job for the trim, but if we could stick around there'd be work in the near future. He said we could still go stay with his friend, although his friend was a bit of a creep that liked to bring home different younger women every night as well as hit on everyone he comes into contact with. It seemed like we'd be going from a bad situation to a worse one, so we told him we weren't going to bother.
With that, we retired back to our shed. We had to make phone calls outside because we were using an internet phone app and needed to be really close to the router for it to work well. After a few dabs, letting the reality that we no longer had a job, we were forced to face facts. It was time to make a decision, and it seemed like it was time to just go south. We both decided that if we needed to, even if we had nothing, we'd run for the border. It seemed like there wasn't much left in Oregon for us. The stress of living in the US on the run was really getting to us and we determined the only way to make it stop was to go south.
We spent the next several weeks getting ready, something to be shared another day. What matters is that we made it out of Oregon and out of the United States, a feat that surprises me to this day almost a year later.