About Jim Hight
Jim Hight is an old journalist who finished his first novel—Moon Over Humboldt—the same year he qualified for Medicare. So, he’s one more boomer hoping for a bit of literary glory before he fades further into obscurity.
The above paragraph is true. And the self-deprecating tone is also Jim pretending that he doesn’t care about how his book is received. The truth is, he does care. Deeply. He put his soul into this book for 10 years, and he hopes it touches the hearts of thousands or even tens of thousands of readers.
The idea for Moon Over Humboldt germinated on a bus ride along Humboldt Bay. Two men of different generations were talking about the endless rain, and something that Jim saw—or imagined—in their connection led him to create Bill and Jonah. On opposite sides of the central conflict that divided Humboldt County, the two men have something deep in common: addiction had shattered their lives.
Jim was more than 10 years sober when he invented Jonah and Bill, but he was still in many ways just emerging from the shadows that addiction—his own, his parents’ and grandparents’—had cast over his life since childhood. As Jim wrote about his main characters, he was walking with them, growing up with them.
Like many journalists, Jim is an old leftie. But he also values fairness and objectivity in journalism. He brought that ethic with him when he became staff writer of North Coast Journal in 1996 and began covering the epic Pacific Northwest timber controversies. Along with timber company bosses and spokespeople, Jim found regular foresters and loggers to talk to. He learned that many of them loved and cared about forests and wildlife. They were proud of their work, although it was often a wounded pride—a result of being made the bad guys in the dominant narrative.
Jim also interviewed environmentalist leaders as well as rank-and-file forest defenders—young people who literally put their lives on the line to protect old-growth forests. He hung out on the Arcata Plaza (sometimes working, sometimes trying to score pot), listening to them talk about the “Babylon” of suburbia they’d fled, and coming to Humboldt County to protect the virgin forests.
These competing interests and perspectives are woven into Moon Over Humboldt as authentically as Jim could manage. And according to one of his editors—Rachel Eve Moulton, author of The Insatiable Volt Sisters—he did a good job: “The cultures of logging, weed, and activism are made more complicated by this story in the best of ways, and this lends beauty to a place—Humboldt County, Calif.—people have often made into a single image.”