UNFINISHED DOCUMENTARY, KINGDOMS OF THE RADIO | 1995
I don’t like to fly, let me just put that out there. The day I met Zongo, I was a wreck, having just got off the flight from McKinleyville. We hit some pretty gnarly turbulence over the coastal range and I was doing my deep meditation for most of the trip to keep from freaking out. It would have been a real drag if I had lost it, as I was carrying enough primo seeds from Humboldt County to revolutionize the entire situation out at Spy Rock.
Can you believe that when I started helping some of the local farmers grow, they didn’t even separate out their female plants? When I started pulling out all the males by their roots, they thought I’d gone loco. After that first harvest, though, they all got on board.
Anyway, after Zongo and I did all the speed he was carrying, we were rapping and he started telling me about the Girassol property. I’d never heard of it, and I had been around the county for a few years at that point. He said that some old lady he worked for from time-to-time in the City had inherited what remained of a ranch she had lived on as a kid and asked him to go check on the condition of the house that was there. Seeing how we were wired to the gills, we set out to find it as soon as we left the airport parking lot.
I was still bouncing around in my dilapidated VW bus in those days. The salt air finally killed that beast, it ended up rotting it right down to the frame. Anyway, it took us until late afternoon to finally find what we thought was the turn off to the property.
I immediately could see why I had never noticed it; the whole place sat behind an impenetrable thicket of blackberries with no way of knowing just how deep it was. There was no way the bus was going to make it through, so we took off on foot hacking our way through with machetes.
Román Leão 
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