Fishing boats are docked at a harbor in Humboldt Bay in Eureka. Ocean waters 20 miles off this coast have been leased to two energy companies to develop wind farms. (Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local)
EUREKA — If the American West represents the “geography of hope,” as author Wallace Stegner wrote, then what better place than California’s far north to illustrate the eternal tension between the limitless potential of big ideas and the brutal disappointment of broken dreams?
The Golden State’s verdant North Coast, a great empire of trees and home to the Yurok, the state’s largest Native American tribe, has seen centuries of boom and bust — riches taken from above and beneath the earth. When gold miners brought their nuggets from the foothills to the coast, Eureka’s broad bay became a bustling transit hub.
After the gold was gone, it was replaced with timber, “red gold.” The region’s massive redwoods made many locals rich; when the forests were clear cut, the pulp mills came. They, too, went bust. Dams harnessed the region’s rushing rivers to produce electricity, causing the collapse of its prized salmon runs. A “green” cannabis revolution arrived, promising to bring a balm to this depressed place. But a glut of legal weed flooded the market, leaving the plants to wither along with the growers’ dreams of wealth.