Vineland County in Northern California is a landscape of converging rivers, difficult roads, and contested ground. It links the work of Takeshi Fumimota and DL among the Thanatoids with the threatened cultivation community of Holytail, where local warning systems confront the growing reach of CAMP. The county’s geography offers refuge, but its skies and roads also become routes by which outside power closes in.

Geography and Access

A Thanatoid village lies at the confluence of Shade Creek and Seventh River, in Vineland County in Northern California. When Ortho Bob Dulang was heading there, he offered to arrange lodging if Takeshi Fumimota and DL drove him to the village. Their unscheduled stop by Shade Creek would later be remembered as the beginning of their karmic-repair business.

The county’s more remote cultivation country is described as coastal, persistently foggy, and well suited to certain crops. Road access is difficult: after the Great Slide of 1964, travelers must zigzag along both banks of a river and depend on ferries, which are not always available, and bridges said to be haunted. These obstacles help explain how a community could persist beyond easy reach, while also making its isolation precarious rather than secure.

The Thanatoid Village and Karmic Repair

The village at the Shade Creek–Seventh River confluence gives Takeshi Fumimota and DL a new direction after their troubles in Tokyo. They arrive amid the prospect that Professor Wawazume may have to pay damages for the trampled laboratory and the manhunt set in motion by his strategy. DL recognizes that they will need a cover; instead, the detour brings them into a town full of Thanatoids and a potential abundance of clients.

The business develops from that encounter, though many Thanatoids cannot pay much because heirs and assignees are greedy. As the laboratory case becomes less urgent, Takeshi Fumimota and DL are drawn into complicated disputes involving expropriation and betrayal, land and inland-water rights, gangs of thugs and extortionists, vigilantes, landlords, lawyers, and property speculators. The injustices they hear about are not merely relics: they remain active in the present, while CAMP’s promise of continued aerial protection makes the threat of future intervention part of the same landscape.

The pair establish a regular public presence nearby. They rent a meeting room at the Woodbine Motel for Saturdays and Sundays; on weekdays, they meet in a back room at the Zero Inn, where anyone can enter and add testimony to the day’s account. Vineland County thus becomes more than a backdrop for their work: its meeting places turn dispersed grievances into a continuing practice of listening and repair.

Holytail and the Campaign Against Cultivation

Elsewhere in the county, Zoyd finds a community living on borrowed time as CAMP intensifies its destruction of marijuana crops from season to season. State and federal agencies join the effort, the Eureka grand jury issues subpoenas to more residents, and friendly deputies and safe towns are neutralized one by one and returned to government control. Against this advancing pressure, Holytail becomes the anxious question of what place will be targeted next.

Vineland County Sheriff Willis Chunko has had Holytail on his blacklist for years, though reaching it is unusually difficult. Each autumn, he reappears on television beside piles of marijuana plants or in a field with a flamethrower, turning eradication into a recurring public spectacle. Holytail’s residents nevertheless receive warning whenever he decides to come: observers watch the county seat of Vineland, some waiting outside the sheriff’s office with rolls of coins ready to make calls; others monitor patrol radios on local roads, while lookouts scan ridges and mountain peaks with binoculars and converted fishing-boat radar.

The campaign also takes to the air. As the crop grows, small unmarked blue aircraft appear overhead, sometimes nearly invisible against a clear sky. Their pilots include former aviators, vigilantes, anti-drug student activists, undercover government consultants, deputies, and off-duty police officers, all under CAMP contract and led by Karl Bopp. Reconnaissance has been under way for weeks; each morning, aircraft and helicopter crews gather near Vineland Airport and wait for Bopp to announce the operation’s day. The sequence makes the county’s open sky change from a condition that supports cultivation into a means of surveillance and prospective destruction.

A Landscape Under Pressure

At Piggy’s Tavern, Holytail’s growers debate whether to harvest or wait. Waiting may improve the crop, but it also increases the chance that CAMP will destroy it; frost, a downpour, and each person’s threshold for paranoia complicate the decision. The dilemma gives the county’s seasonal rhythms an immediate political edge: the harvest’s growth measures both opportunity and exposure.

The threat hanging over Holytail is transformation as well as crop loss. The passage anticipates that, after a full CAMP operation, the community could become part of a pacified territory reclaimed for a zero-tolerance, drug-free future and absorbed into the official economy. Set beside the Thanatoid village’s open meetings and work among unresolved histories, Holytail’s watched roads and skies show two different struggles over what the county will permit to remain: testimony about old dispossessions, or a community and livelihood designated for removal.