"No," I said. "I've never seen that before in my life."
"She's been growing it right out in the open," Darlene said. "Everybody's seen it. It's ten feet tall."
Officer Kowalczyk didn't turn around. She looked past my shoulder instead, down my front hall, through my kitchen and the sliding glass door at the back, to where my yard showed as a wall of green. Thick stalks stood straight up, and below the flowers the leaves were deeply lobed. They looked like hands with too many fingers.
"Ma'am," she said, slowly, "are those cannabis plants?"
"They're kenaf," I said. "Hibiscus cannabinus."
I was watching Darlene when I said the second word. She had the face of a woman who has been dealt a royal flush and is trying, out of decency, not to fan herself with it.
I wish I could tell you I said something clever next. I didn't. I said, "It's for paper." That was true, and even to me it sounded exactly like something a person with ten feet of marijuana in her backyard would say.
* * *
To explain how I ended up there, I have to explain the kenaf. To explain the kenaf, I have to explain that I'm a paper conservator. I work at the state archives in Boise. On a normal Tuesday I might be humidifying an 1887 homestead patent that has been folded in quarters for a century, or mending a mining company ledger whose spine was eaten by something with very sharp teeth and no respect for history. I repair things written on paper so they will outlast the people who wrote them. It's quiet work, and I'm good at it. The people who are good at it tend to read the fine print on everything, including cereal boxes, lease agreements, and the declaration of covenants, conditions, and restrictions for Larkspur Commons, a subdivision of a hundred and forty homes on the western edge of Kestrel Creek, Idaho.
I bought my house two years ago, after the divorce. Craig kept the condo in the North End, and I kept the dog. The dog died that first winter, at fourteen, of nothing but being fourteen. So by the spring I had a three-bedroom ranch with a long narrow backyard that ran down to the common-area greenbelt, a mortgage I could just carry, and nobody to talk to except my fiber.
Making paper by hand had started as a work thing. A conservator needs to understand how paper is built, the way a furniture restorer needs to understand joinery. Somewhere along the way it became the thing I did instead of crying. You cook plant fiber until it softens and beat it to a pulp. You suspend it in a vat of water, then dip a mould and deckle and lift it out with a sheet's worth of fiber resting on the screen like a thin layer of fresh snow. You couch it onto felt, press it, and dry it. It's slow and wet and repetitive, and it is very hard to be miserable while you are doing it, because you are too busy trying not to drip on things.
I sold the sheets online to bookbinders and letterpress printers, a few hundred dollars a month. It paid for the felts and a hydraulic press I found on an estate sale listing. People liked the kenaf sheets best. Kenaf is a cousin of hibiscus and cotton, with long, strong bast fibers. In a hot, dry Idaho summer with a drip line and a little fish emulsion, it will grow twelve feet in a single season. The bark makes beautiful paper, creamy and crisp, with a faint rattle when you shake it. The botanical name is Hibiscus cannabinus, because when an eighteenth-century botanist looked at those lower leaves he thought of hemp. He wasn't wrong. Kenaf's lower leaves are deeply palmate, five or seven lobes with serrated edges. From thirty feet away, through a fence, to someone who wants to see something bad, they look like what she wants them to be.