Hight with his debut novel. Photo: Jim Hight.
Jim Hight was trying to quit smoking weed and drinking alcohol when he moved to Humboldt in 1996.
It was the heyday of the “Green Rush” black market, and as a newbie he saw (sniffed?) temptation around every corner.
“Back then, you couldn’t walk around Arcata without smelling the greenhouses – which triggered a strong desire in me,” Hight told outpost in a telephone interview.
Thanks to a twelve-step program, he has now been sober for almost 24 years and has immortalized his struggle in the character Jonah in his debut novel: Moon over Humboldt.
Jonah is a recognizable archetype from Humboldt’s recent past. A young Earth First! guy fresh out of the Bay Area to save Mother Earth. The curtain rises on his struggle to stay off the marijuana amid an Arcata scene full of mysterious springs and generous buddies. Enter Bill, a lumberjack whose son struggles with a methamphetamine addiction, and Jonah’s black-and-white worldview evolves.
Hight said the inspiration for the two main characters, who predictably have differing opinions about best practices in forest management, came to him on the bus between Arcata and Eureka.
“It was raining like crazy, the windshield wipers were shaking back and forth… The driver was doing 45 or something,” he recalled. “And there were two people talking about the rain, different generations, young, mid-20s and 50 or something.”
As the older passenger (who apparently had more experience with the wet conditions on the north coast) reassured the younger one and recalled bad flooding in years past, Hight said, Bill and Jonah began to take shape in his mind.
“I longed for a story about the connection between people who are divided and polarized,” he said.
The social divisions Moon over Humboldt Exploration is familiar territory for Hight. As a former editor for the North Coast Journala job he described as “a paid master’s degree in Humboldt County,” examples of local culture and opinion were his main subjects for years. As the book’s blurb states, the former city boy from Southern California was fascinated by the real characters of our area – “loggers and forest rangers, fishermen and scientists, ranchers and dairy farmers, small-town mayors and tribal leaders, county sheriffs and cannabis growers.”
“I interviewed people from all sides of the timber controversy and really respected and appreciated them,” Hight said. “People who thought clearcutting was the right thing to do and had been doing it for years or generations, and then people who thought it would destroy the landscape and cause flooding and wipe out species and so on… That conflict narrative made me look at the characters in Moon over Humboldtwho are completely divided.”
“But once they met and began to get to know each other through the 12-step program, they realized that not only did they have a lot in common, but they really needed each other in ways they didn’t understand,” he continued.
As Bill and Jonah’s stories unfold over the course of a rainy winter, Hight introduces readers to other characters who might strike a familiar chord in the hearts and minds of the Humboldt brothers: Mike Doyle, the kindhearted, tall director of an environmental center; Owl, the pacifist environmentalist; King, a retired rodeo cowboy with a ranch down in Shively… the list goes on.
For sociable readers who lived through Humboldt in 2000, some of the characters may sound like real people. In the book’s concluding acknowledgments, Hight gives special thanks to Tim McKay of the Northcoast Environmental Center and Bill Boak of Boak Logging – men who “set a precedent of civility and respect for their ideological opponents.”
And for those more interested in places than faces, landmarks like the Orick Peanut or the tree at J & 10th in Arcata support Hight’s realistic world-building. Hight said that working on Moon over Humboldt became a way for him to vicariously visit the places he missed after he and his wife fled the mold that was causing their health problems in 2018.
“It was a great joy to just dive into downtown Arcata or into Eureka on a foggy evening,” said Hight, who now lives in Colorado.
For readers familiar with recent history, Moon over HumboldtThe timing may be confusing: The characters’ attitudes toward “Timber Wars” are more reminiscent of “Redwood Summer” (1990) than the period after the invention of smartphones and before the Willits Bypass movement or legalization of marijuana depicted in the story.
Yet by condensing decades of cultural reference points, Hight creates a present rich in the past—a backdrop of diverse views and events coexisting outside their own timelines, a fusion of the colorful stories that brought Humboldt to where we are today.
“The book is not a historical novel. It is not. It is fiction, fiction,” he said, adding that the book is supposedly set around 2010.
The tensions in Hight’s literary version of the North Coast universe (old hands vs. newcomers, earth vs. economy, New Age vs. Christianity) ultimately set the stage for the story’s central themes: addiction, as experienced by both sufferers and their loved ones, and recovery.
“This is where I got sober, this is where I turned my life around,” said Hight about his decision to set the book in Humboldt.
While the author outpost Although Hight does not claim membership in any particular Twelve-Step community (thus remaining true to the program’s tradition of anonymity), his words in and about the book demonstrate how valuable the steps have been in his life.
And while his characters search for the strength of external forces, the power of the community of programs – and that of Humboldt – comes to the fore.
“I have never read a novel about the 12 Steps that didn’t sound like rubbish,” says one reviewer in the “praise” section on the book’s cover. “This is not rubbish – 100% true.”
It’s not nonsense: Moon over Humboldt was clearly written by a journalist and recovering addict who collected true stories of temptation, regret, and redemption to use as fiction for recreational use.
But when repackaging, Hight also seems to have incorporated a touch of the extraordinary.
For example, Bill and Jonah seem like men with above-average manners, unusual self-awareness, and superhuman abilities for self-reflection—men who respond to difficult things with empathy and compassion, while their real-life counterparts may be overwhelmed by insecurity.
As Hight explained, his characters behave like the man he wants to be.
“In that respect they may be a little unrealistic, but as a novelist you can portray people as more heroic than they may be in real life,” he said.
The combination of Hight’s believable world and his relatable yet ambitious characters is what makes the book such a touching page-turner.
“Jimbo, I used to like you, but now that you’ve managed to make me cry, I’m not so sure,” wrote Mike Hess, a local lumberjack and longtime Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, in Moon over Humboldt Praise.
Especially at a time when societal divisions and hard truths about addiction are surfacing at the surface of our society, it’s incredibly moving (and entertaining) to read about a world that sounds a lot like our own, one in which people are as good as we could ever hope for.
Hight will be in town later this month to hold readings, sign books, sell and chat Moon over Humboldt. Meet him on Wednesday, August 28th at 6:30pm at Fortuna Library, Thursday, August 29th at 4pm at McKinleyville Library, August 29th at 6:30pm at Northtown Books, and Friday, August 30th from 5:30pm-8:30pm at Eureka Books.
(The appearance at Eureka Books does not include a reading – just chatting, signing and selling.)
Information about local 12-step programs can be found here.
