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Isobel Reinhardt is a hot mess. The daughter of a wire-walker turned federal fugitive and a high-end sex worker who likes to call herself a feminist, Isobel has failed decisively at everything she’s put her hand to. So she comes to Mendocino County to grow pot for a woman who knows all her family secrets.
When she narrowly escapes arrest while delivering pot for Alizarin, Isobel does a quick risk assessment and decides it’s time to get a legitimate job. Without a marketable skill set or a well-developed resume, she jumps at the opportunity to be one of two live-in caregivers for a dying German woman. As death and madness converge in a lonely country house at the end of a long dirt road, Isobel realizes the role of ferocity and beauty in her life. |
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“A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death is one of those books you can read fast, but will wish you hadn’t when you finish it too soon.” — Jonathan Middlebrook, Review, The Ukiah Daily Journal
"Sarah Reith has written a bildungsroman for the ages. Deploying razor-sharp wit, trenchant observations, and poignant encounters, she details a young woman's struggle to find herself amid a ragged crew of dope-growers, cultists, drop-outs, and one self-professed feminist prostitute who happens to be her mother . . . a wild ride through the California counterculture and through one woman's soul." — R. Werdinger, Amazon review
"Like a carnival ride, Reith slaps us in the seat, fastens the belt and takes us on a wild ride! If you're looking for adventure read this book. Need to escape the holidays, daily routine, or a respite from global warming and impeachment? Get this book. Yep, crank up the heating pad and grab the oreos because you won't be done till morning. Get it, read it, then give it." — Amazon review
"Sarah Reith has written a bildungsroman for the ages. Deploying razor-sharp wit, trenchant observations, and poignant encounters, she details a young woman's struggle to find herself amid a ragged crew of dope-growers, cultists, drop-outs, and one self-professed feminist prostitute who happens to be her mother . . . a wild ride through the California counterculture and through one woman's soul." — R. Werdinger, Amazon review
"Like a carnival ride, Reith slaps us in the seat, fastens the belt and takes us on a wild ride! If you're looking for adventure read this book. Need to escape the holidays, daily routine, or a respite from global warming and impeachment? Get this book. Yep, crank up the heating pad and grab the oreos because you won't be done till morning. Get it, read it, then give it." — Amazon review
THERE ARE PEOPLE who grow pot because it is their calling. They might be serious-minded stoners. Many are brilliant geneticists with no respect for academic hierarchies. Quite a few are entrepreneurs, displaying the creativity and independence that fuel innovation. Some of them are sure that pot will save the world.
Alizarin was none of those things. Alizarin was a pot agnostic. She was as indifferent to the miracles of marijuana as an atheist Bible salesman to the Resurrection of Christ. For one thing, she was allergic to it. Because her endocannabinoids stopped short in her adenoids, she was immune to the passions of pot. She wasn’t unaware of the fact that the drug war is an actual armed conflict. But when Alizarin got a flyover, she glared at the pilot like he was no more dangerous than a wayward husband, in need of a radical therapy session.
“Pour a little more of that right there,” she commanded. She was leaving for Israel soon, and she wanted to make sure the plants got a good dose of fish tar while she was still around to make sure I did it right.
I would find out later that fish tar is controversial in pot growing circles, where a unique strain of geeky redneck connoisseurship has developed in the rigorously amended soil. Some smokers claim they can taste the fish tar in the final product. Furthermore, they insist that this assault on their delicate sensibilities is more than any discerning consumer should ever be forced to endure. There is something imitative about this analytical yet highly subjective savoring of flavor and high, some odor on the breeze wafting into Mendocino from the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma counties.
At Serendipity Organics, the plants got sizzled with a black syrup of liquefied fish bones that had been putrefying in a giant plastic tank all year long, waiting for its chance to unleash the regenerative power of death. There is no pot snob jargon yet for “aftertaste of rotting fish,” so until there is, Alizarin will continue dosing her plants with fish tar. She couldn’t care less about wannabe oenophile stoners, just as the plane at fifteen hundred feet was beneath her notice.
Not mine. I am quick to catch the implications of ecstatic violence in sleek machines and crisp formations. I was almost fourteen when I came home to the apartment I shared with my father and found a level of mayhem beyond even his particular affection for chaos. Mattresses were slashed, with the glee that follows a long session of patiently sharpening knives. Cupboards were ransacked, dishes methodically shattered. Heavy pieces of furniture had been flung across the room, and books were strewn all over the floor, their pages torn, their spines snapped. A list of confiscated items and a copy of the search warrant attested to the orderliness of the operation. But Alizarin had never been raided. The light plane, with its crew of uniformed savages, was a theoretical outrage to her.
“So, ah, what about that small aircraft that just . . . ?” I splashed a little more of the vicious liquid onto the roots of an innocent plant. I was trying not to behave like someone who expected to re-enact a childhood trauma any second now. Would they shoot the sheep when they came? Set the barn on fire?
“Buzzed us,” Alizarin supplied, quickly, the way people do when proper nomenclature is important to them.
She pawed around in the dirt for a few seconds. Then she made a sound of extreme disgust—which made sense, considering the fish in the fish tar had been dead longer than it had been alive.
“They’re from out of state,” she said contemptuously. “From some Neanderthal province where they still spend thousands of dollars a day fucking up a few plants. Do you know there are children dying from abscessed teeth, right here in America? Infant mortality in our nation’s capital is worse than it is in some Third World countries. But let’s not pay for birth control. Oh, no. That would be un-Christian.” She seethed, glaring at the rotten sludge like it represented all the corrupt political morals she could think of.
“So what are they doing here, if they’re from out of state?” I persisted. “Are they federal?”
“No. They are from out of state,” Alizarin repeated. She sounded like she might be getting cross, like a lady in a novel. “They can’t bust us here, because California is semi-civilized. But they can send in their goons from Wyoming and Tennessee to pollute our air and our sound waves . . .”
It was training, I gathered eventually. Mendocino County was a training grounds for out-of-state marijuana eradication programs. The big game hunters couldn’t shoot anything on the wildlife preserve, but they could roar around all they wanted, sighting their rifles and learning how to track down their prey. Recently, wildlife biologists have been studying the effects of a predator’s presence on prey populations; how the expectation of a rattlesnake informs the movements of a gray squirrel’s tail; or how the grazing patterns of the Tule elk adapt when all the wolves are gone.
“So . . . what if they are federal?” I persisted.
Gray squirrels twitch their tails constantly when they believe a rattlesnake is in the area. Scientists hypothesized that it might be a nervous tic, a squirrel version of post-traumatic stress from multiple brushes with death. But then videos with hundreds of frames a second showed that frequent tail-twitchers are far more likely to evade a rattler’s strike than those with a more laid-back approach to things.
Alizarin flicked a chunk of something not quite liquefied out of the stew that was gurgling into the ground. If zombies didn’t eat brains, I thought, this is definitely what they would eat. She shrugged.
“Then they’re federal,” she explained.
“Which means they can bust us,” I finished, surging to the head of the class on a wave of inspired thought.
“Well, yeah.” She looked at me like I’d just proven conclusively that fish tar stinks.
It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say that I was disappointed to be overlooked this way; noticed, then ignored, by a representative of all institutional violence. But it’s a peculiar kind of suspense, to be tallied by some brazen, anonymous authority. It gives you an inkling of why some people believe being photographed is hazardous to the health of their souls.
Something intangible had been taken from us when that aircraft cruised across the sky above us; something that could now be used by someone whose purpose was hostile to our own. I understood that we hadn’t been harmed, exactly, but we could be, at the leisure of that hostile purpose. It’s the kind of awareness that can make a gray squirrel either twitch its tail to the exclusion of all else, or give up twitching altogether.
Alizarin’s home was not inconspicuous. It was perched on top of a steep, alignment-wrecking hill that did not quite qualify as a mountain, nestled in between a couple of imposing formations that did. It could very well have been invisible. But Alizarin had painted it bright Ukrainian Revolution orange—just in case any rookie pilots looking for a pot farm needed a point of reference. I could imagine their dispatcher, directing them to fly east from the house that looked like a giant flotation device, with green trim and purple doors.
There was a theory at work here. I never did figure out exactly what it was, but I think it had something to do with theater, with sleight of hand, with chutzpah and daring and charm. After all, pot is magic; and what is magic if not the discipline of diverting attention?
Alizarin was none of those things. Alizarin was a pot agnostic. She was as indifferent to the miracles of marijuana as an atheist Bible salesman to the Resurrection of Christ. For one thing, she was allergic to it. Because her endocannabinoids stopped short in her adenoids, she was immune to the passions of pot. She wasn’t unaware of the fact that the drug war is an actual armed conflict. But when Alizarin got a flyover, she glared at the pilot like he was no more dangerous than a wayward husband, in need of a radical therapy session.
“Pour a little more of that right there,” she commanded. She was leaving for Israel soon, and she wanted to make sure the plants got a good dose of fish tar while she was still around to make sure I did it right.
I would find out later that fish tar is controversial in pot growing circles, where a unique strain of geeky redneck connoisseurship has developed in the rigorously amended soil. Some smokers claim they can taste the fish tar in the final product. Furthermore, they insist that this assault on their delicate sensibilities is more than any discerning consumer should ever be forced to endure. There is something imitative about this analytical yet highly subjective savoring of flavor and high, some odor on the breeze wafting into Mendocino from the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma counties.
At Serendipity Organics, the plants got sizzled with a black syrup of liquefied fish bones that had been putrefying in a giant plastic tank all year long, waiting for its chance to unleash the regenerative power of death. There is no pot snob jargon yet for “aftertaste of rotting fish,” so until there is, Alizarin will continue dosing her plants with fish tar. She couldn’t care less about wannabe oenophile stoners, just as the plane at fifteen hundred feet was beneath her notice.
Not mine. I am quick to catch the implications of ecstatic violence in sleek machines and crisp formations. I was almost fourteen when I came home to the apartment I shared with my father and found a level of mayhem beyond even his particular affection for chaos. Mattresses were slashed, with the glee that follows a long session of patiently sharpening knives. Cupboards were ransacked, dishes methodically shattered. Heavy pieces of furniture had been flung across the room, and books were strewn all over the floor, their pages torn, their spines snapped. A list of confiscated items and a copy of the search warrant attested to the orderliness of the operation. But Alizarin had never been raided. The light plane, with its crew of uniformed savages, was a theoretical outrage to her.
“So, ah, what about that small aircraft that just . . . ?” I splashed a little more of the vicious liquid onto the roots of an innocent plant. I was trying not to behave like someone who expected to re-enact a childhood trauma any second now. Would they shoot the sheep when they came? Set the barn on fire?
“Buzzed us,” Alizarin supplied, quickly, the way people do when proper nomenclature is important to them.
She pawed around in the dirt for a few seconds. Then she made a sound of extreme disgust—which made sense, considering the fish in the fish tar had been dead longer than it had been alive.
“They’re from out of state,” she said contemptuously. “From some Neanderthal province where they still spend thousands of dollars a day fucking up a few plants. Do you know there are children dying from abscessed teeth, right here in America? Infant mortality in our nation’s capital is worse than it is in some Third World countries. But let’s not pay for birth control. Oh, no. That would be un-Christian.” She seethed, glaring at the rotten sludge like it represented all the corrupt political morals she could think of.
“So what are they doing here, if they’re from out of state?” I persisted. “Are they federal?”
“No. They are from out of state,” Alizarin repeated. She sounded like she might be getting cross, like a lady in a novel. “They can’t bust us here, because California is semi-civilized. But they can send in their goons from Wyoming and Tennessee to pollute our air and our sound waves . . .”
It was training, I gathered eventually. Mendocino County was a training grounds for out-of-state marijuana eradication programs. The big game hunters couldn’t shoot anything on the wildlife preserve, but they could roar around all they wanted, sighting their rifles and learning how to track down their prey. Recently, wildlife biologists have been studying the effects of a predator’s presence on prey populations; how the expectation of a rattlesnake informs the movements of a gray squirrel’s tail; or how the grazing patterns of the Tule elk adapt when all the wolves are gone.
“So . . . what if they are federal?” I persisted.
Gray squirrels twitch their tails constantly when they believe a rattlesnake is in the area. Scientists hypothesized that it might be a nervous tic, a squirrel version of post-traumatic stress from multiple brushes with death. But then videos with hundreds of frames a second showed that frequent tail-twitchers are far more likely to evade a rattler’s strike than those with a more laid-back approach to things.
Alizarin flicked a chunk of something not quite liquefied out of the stew that was gurgling into the ground. If zombies didn’t eat brains, I thought, this is definitely what they would eat. She shrugged.
“Then they’re federal,” she explained.
“Which means they can bust us,” I finished, surging to the head of the class on a wave of inspired thought.
“Well, yeah.” She looked at me like I’d just proven conclusively that fish tar stinks.
It wouldn’t be exactly accurate to say that I was disappointed to be overlooked this way; noticed, then ignored, by a representative of all institutional violence. But it’s a peculiar kind of suspense, to be tallied by some brazen, anonymous authority. It gives you an inkling of why some people believe being photographed is hazardous to the health of their souls.
Something intangible had been taken from us when that aircraft cruised across the sky above us; something that could now be used by someone whose purpose was hostile to our own. I understood that we hadn’t been harmed, exactly, but we could be, at the leisure of that hostile purpose. It’s the kind of awareness that can make a gray squirrel either twitch its tail to the exclusion of all else, or give up twitching altogether.
Alizarin’s home was not inconspicuous. It was perched on top of a steep, alignment-wrecking hill that did not quite qualify as a mountain, nestled in between a couple of imposing formations that did. It could very well have been invisible. But Alizarin had painted it bright Ukrainian Revolution orange—just in case any rookie pilots looking for a pot farm needed a point of reference. I could imagine their dispatcher, directing them to fly east from the house that looked like a giant flotation device, with green trim and purple doors.
There was a theory at work here. I never did figure out exactly what it was, but I think it had something to do with theater, with sleight of hand, with chutzpah and daring and charm. After all, pot is magic; and what is magic if not the discipline of diverting attention?
Book Clubs & Reading Groups Discussion Guide
| A Schedule of Drugs in the Valley of Death Reading Guide |
From the author
It’s funny, how a seemingly whimsical idea can just stroll into your mind and take over your life for the next few years. I was trimming weed alone one day, listening to audio books that a friend had found at a garage sale. Over the course of a week or so, I became fascinated with Red Poppies by Alai, about a feudal Tibetan family that grew opium poppies at the time of the Communist Revolution. Then the same thing happened when I listened to Ava’s Man, by Rick Bragg, about a Depression-era bootlegger. It occurred to me that a) there is a theme going on here; and b) there is not a lot of really good literary fiction about the last days of the Mendocino outlaws. The idea stuck with me, and a few years down the line, I decided to take my BA in creative writing and my now-expired criminality and see if I could change that.
It’s funny, how a seemingly whimsical idea can just stroll into your mind and take over your life for the next few years. I was trimming weed alone one day, listening to audio books that a friend had found at a garage sale. Over the course of a week or so, I became fascinated with Red Poppies by Alai, about a feudal Tibetan family that grew opium poppies at the time of the Communist Revolution. Then the same thing happened when I listened to Ava’s Man, by Rick Bragg, about a Depression-era bootlegger. It occurred to me that a) there is a theme going on here; and b) there is not a lot of really good literary fiction about the last days of the Mendocino outlaws. The idea stuck with me, and a few years down the line, I decided to take my BA in creative writing and my now-expired criminality and see if I could change that.
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Discussion Questions 1. Do you trust Isobel Reinhardt as a narrator? Why or why not? Are there particular points where you think her presentation of a situation might be inaccurate or self-serving? 2. What do you think about Isobel’s mother, Caitlin? Is she purely a performer, or do you see flashes of sincerity in her? Do you find her sympathetic or exasperating, or both? 3. Do you think Alizarin is an honest person? What do you think about her decision to grow pot so she can be an artist and an activist? Why do you think what you do about that? 4. Do you see any similarities between Isobel’s and Reina’s lives? Reina’s friendship with Danica and Isobel’s relationship with Alizarin? 5. What do you think changed Reina’s attitude about her daughter’s decision to have the baby? Do you think Reina’s boyfriend Raymond had anything to do with it? 6. What does Akana, the white wolf, symbolize? 7. Do you think Fiona Jones is a powerful person, and, if so, where does her power come from? 8. Do you suspect that Isobel, knowingly or not, allowed Fiona to kill Mariana Blanchefleur by administering too much morphine? What do you think about the circumstances of Mariana’s death? 9. This book addresses several controversial topics, including cannabis cultivation, in-home hospice death, and sex work. Which of these subjects is most troubling to you, and which of the characters is most compromised? Why? 10. What do you think about Isobel’s attitude towards her parents at the end of this book? |
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