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 most of the time 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 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 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 coke 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 in 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 actually 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, just ended up rotting it down to the frame. It took us all 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.
Follow the story:
Kingdoms of the Radio: Serafina’s Gift
Kingdoms of the Radio: Charlie Perigo 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Kumalo 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Meets The Stick
Kingdoms of the Radio: Ride a Painted Pony
Kingdoms of the Radio: Fadeout (Rock Hound Magazine, 1970)
Kingdoms of the Radio: Tibetan Bells & a Bird from Hell
Kingdoms of the Radio: Enrique Bravocado 1
Kingdoms of the Radio: Zongo Khumalo 2
Kingdoms of the Radio: Karoline Rosenda 2
Román Leão 
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