Preamble From My New Book "Love At First Crush: Four Years In The Olive Groves"
How did I come to this point? How do I get there, the place from whence I last came, to here, the place from where I am now writing? I will give you the brief answer first.Begin by saving the current document on the laptop. Slide the chair back from the desk and turn off the light. Deftly make your way out of the poorly lit, ramshackle garage at 1815 Wood Street, Alameda, Ca. 94501 making sure not to step on any of the rakes or shovels that lie pell-mell near the doorway. Leave the backyard by the side entrance, making certain that you latch the gate behind you, and proceed to the car. Fasten your seatbelt and exit the driveway following Wood Street to Buena Vista Avenue. Take a right on Buena Vista and head to Constitution. Take a right on Constitution and follow Constitution through the Posie Tunnel into Oakland. Follow the signs to San Francisco on I-880 until you see the ones pointing to Sacramento. Follow I-80 past Emeryville and its magnificent Ikea, home of $1.50 breakfasts, Swedish Meatballs, and furniture made from materials that are more akin to papyrus than they are wood. As you drive past Berkeley heading north look to the right for the Campanile at UC Berkeley and savor its view.
Follow 80 past Golden Gate Fields to 505. Follow 505 to I-5 and head north toward Mt. Shasta. Be careful to negotiate the College City turn correctly lest you breathe your last breath at Arbuckle. You are now in the heart of the magnificent, fertile upper Sacramento Valley. Notice the vast breadth of the valley. {If you can time your trip right, try to catch either the sunrise or the sunset as you make your anabasis as this is truly one of the most powerful sensory experiences to which you can be privy in this region.}
Follow I-5 north past Grimes, Williams, Willows, Artois (which I have always mythologized as the Frankish center of the north state complete with its miniature Eiffel Tower), Orland, and Corning, the self-proclaimed “Olive Capital Of The World.” Take the Gyle Road exit and head east toward Tehama taking a right on Truckee Ave. Follow Truckee avenue until it doglegs to the right.
You are now on Gerber Road. You will pass some young walnuts on the left which were planted by my friend and former colleague Brendon Flynn followed by older prunes which were planted by his father Vince. The house on the right with all of the floppy-eared, boer goats, which fetch prices exceeding $150/head and are often served at banquets, weddings and quinceniaras, is owned by Pomposo Vasquez, I worked with him too. Keep your eyes open for a sign on the left that reads “Pacific Farms and Orchards” and turn left into that driveway. You are there.
Take a look around you. If you stay here long enough, you will experience a level of beauty that may often shock you. You will see fantastic and puzzling signs leading to points unknown. Once, while driving down Truckee Ave., I saw a hawk scoop up a rattlesnake from a ditch by the side of the road. I was still shaking my head in disbelief of this omen when I witnessed another hawk snatch another snake from a ditch on the other side of the road. I laughed as I recalled that the Roman historian Livy had recorded that such a portent foretold of great victories to come. I was anxious to taste those victories.
If you ever find yourself here in the middle of the night, take a walk out into the middle of the orchards and look up at the stars. Also, take time to notice the deafening silence. Drive down the levies on the first sunny day after a storm and marvel at the saturation of the bright, blue sky and the crispness of the mountains on either side of the valley. Make sure to look north to the towering mass that is Mt. Shasta and east to Mt. Lassen and the remains of Mt. Tehama. Days like this are the reason why some many local streets and schools are named Shasta View and Lassen View.
If you stay up here long enough, and if you think like me, you will eventually feel wonder at the fact that such a wide-open area can feel so closed. You might feel breathless at times because the weight of the place seems to carry you down. You might feel shut out of the thought process or locked out of the inner sanctum. You may notice open doors that lead to open eyes leading to closed minds. Sometimes you might feel as though you are living at the end of the world. The fact that over a million cars a week drive right through the middle of it might make you feel lonely, or trapped. You may notice a profusion of bumper stickers that might threaten your sensibilities; the provocative confederate flag, the puzzling “Redneck and Proud,” the bellicose “You Can Take My Gun When You Pry It From My Cold Dead Fingers,” the innocuous “Git Er Done.” At times you might find it difficult to keep your mouth closed as your jaw drops to the floor. Just remember, never go to Walmart under the influence of illicit substances and never assume that everybody has a sense of humor and can take a little “good-natured” ribbing.
Please realize that these less savory facets of life are frequently endemic to rural America. Take time to meet the people. Get to know as many of them as possible. Talk to them. Engage with them. Become friends with them. They are beautiful people. They are the salt of the earth.
As you make you way up the driveway at the farm, the first shop building that you will see houses the Olive Oil mill. The project that Brendon and I started, Pacific Sun Olive Oil, was responsible for this building. In a very real sense, Brendon and I built this building. Although the farm paid for it, and other people constructed it, we built the entity that justified the capital investment in the building and the equipment that it houses. We helped pour the concrete foundation with many of the other men on the farm and we made oil in that building that won awards and was served in some of the finest restaurants in the country. Brendon had the idea and the two of us made it happen.
The second shop building that you see, the one with the American flag flying proudly before it, is the main office and shop building. This is the nerve center of the farm where all of the business decisions are finalized and where all of the day-to-day work necessary to manage a diversified agricultural operation happens.
In four short years, Brendon and I went from writing a business plan to sell California Extra Virgin Olive Oil, to making olive oil for some of the more influential players in the California market and for some of the most esteemed chefs in the country. We worked hard, we worked fast, and we cared deeply about the work. For better or worse, my work at the farm became the focus of my life for those years. It was my crusade; complete with its own set of victories, pyrrhic and otherwise, its own failures, and its own losses. Many of the defining moments of my life happened during my tenure at Pacific Farms and Pacific Sun.
Do I miss the farm? Absolutely. Do I miss the responsibilities of raising a crop and turning it into a world-class, artisinal project? Indeed. What do I miss most about that life? Other than the people with whom I was fortunate to work, I miss the fact that every moment spent on the farm seemed to count. Every decision seemed to have some immediacy to it. Every task seemed fundamental.
People often consider the farmer’s life to be slow and methodical. My experience was the opposite, fast and improvised. I never studied agriculture in school but I made a concerted effort to be a student every day I spent on the farm. I was a manager, so I took it upon myself to learn how to drive as much of the equipment as possible and to understand how everything worked. I wanted to understand it all on a theoretical level in case I ever needed to understand it in a practical manner.
Although I was titled “Sales and Marketing Manager” I felt that the best way to sell a product was to make it and to know everything about it. Since I never knew what was going to be the most important thing to know or say or do in the sales and marketing part of my job, I chose to master the production part of my job in order that I would never be in want of an answer. I did my work on the farm and I followed the signs in the marketplace.
Brendon often said that I moved with my eyes open, playing the field like a child plays the “WACK-A-MOLE” at Chuck E. Cheese’s; push the buttons, see what pops up, try to hit it, never over-commit one place, watch out of the corner of your eyes, and pounce as soon as the mole starts to emerge toward fluorescent lights and the neon glow. I always enjoyed that description and I strove to turn improvisation into a workable business methodology.
When harvest time would come, the immediacy would become chronic. I often felt like I was riding on a train on one set of tracks with the window open and a football clutched in the hand of my cocked throwing arm waiting for the train to pass on the opposite side of the tracks. When the train would start to pass I would have to find the open window and throw the football through it. If the ball should make it through the window, I might be able to win Gold Medals, accolades, press coverage, respect and bragging rights. If it were to bounce out or miss the mark entirely, I would get to think about it until the next harvest, which would be one year away, and would have to listen as people told me that my silver medals meant that my product was inferior to the gold medal ones.
However, none of that really mattered while it was all happening. The palpable chill of the dense late-fall, winter, and early-spring air and the attempts to fend it off with Winchell’s coffee while watching the sunrise over the valley provided one half of the bookends that encased the frenetic process of harvesting and milling fresh olives. The glorious sunsets, with their red, orange, yellow, and white overtones spilling over the Yolla Bolly mountains and swirling into the cobalt blue sky provided the other half and encapsulated the arduous days in a sort of cosmic wonder that made the next day’s work much less of a daunting chore and sometimes, a welcome treat.
The dust, sweat, and exhaustion of harvesting the olives was coupled with the pleasant tedium of operating a forklift to load and unload them and driving a truck and a trailer to haul them over rough, scenic, country back roads. There was mariachi music on the radio to dull the ever-present fear of a blowout, a tie-down malfunction, or some other kind of logistical calamity. There were impromptu labor disputes that had to be negotiated in broken Spanish in the fading light of day. Sometimes knives would have to be sheathed with the assistance of a case of frosty Bud Ice, hastily purchased from a nearby convenience store. Trucks would occasionally have to be extracted from the vacuum, red-clay mud by broken shovels or tractors, and those tractors would occasionally get stuck as well, creating a chain of misfortune that could only be broken by a bigger tractor, or an even bigger truck.
All the while, the real work, that of extracting the green or golden oil from the fresh olives was yet to be done. There were an infinite combination of olive varieties, degrees of ripeness, methods of irrigation, and philosophies of optimal extraction with which to contend. Custom milling customers had strong, sometimes mystical, and frequently unsubstantiated, beliefs about how their oil should be made. Mill engineers had the desire to exceed the customer’s expectations, and managers had to watch the bottom line and keep the process moving forward in the best manner possible. Frequently, the sunrise and the sunset simply marked transition points in the day rather than acting as hemeral bookends. Mornings frequently began when late-night carousers were finally finding their sleep and days frequently ended where they began. There were over-deliveries when twelve tons arrived instead of six and under-deliveries when there were no olives or the olives were rotten or otherwise irreparably damaged and unfit for milling. The goal was always to mill the olives as soon as possible after harvest in order to produce the finest oil possible and to keep the mill running as long as possible, since stopping the mill meant cleaning the mill, and cleaning the mill was serious and messy work.
Through it all, the flavor of the olive oil is what ruled the day. The flavor was all that mattered and many nights and mornings, many hours of sleep, and many moments of leisure were sacrificed to make the best tasting olive oil possible.
Frequently, we shipped oil directly from the final stage in the milling process to chefs around the country. This was what made all of the effort worthwhile. This was the grand payoff. Instant Karma. Once you have tasted olive oil that is less than 20 seconds old made from olives that you have picked with your own hands, nothing tastes the same again. It is “Love at First Crush” and it can change you worldview and your purpose in life. At least that is what it did for me.
There is a strange sort of energy that comes from utter exhaustion. It propels you past mental barriers. You know that you can get to some new plateau but you think that you are too tired to do it until you realize that you are already more tired that you thought imaginable, so why not push it a bit farther? Logic is warped by the thought of having your current level of exhaustion and the progress that you have made wiped away by your inability to push the thing over the edge to where it needs to be. You feel like Sisyphus and your desire to break the curse overpowers your desire to call it a day.
This is what propelled me for four years. This is what pushed me through the initial salvo of slings and arrows launched by callous grocery buyers and the incredulous distributors I had to convince to push me past those same callous buyers. Trips were made in the wee, small hours of the night to make early-morning meetings with potentially-willing buyers who decided to take the day off instead. Many times I stood, bleary-eyed, with the BBC cricket highlights still buzzing in my ears, suppressing my anger and politely grasping for the life-line that would allow me to keep my head above the waters of crippling self-doubt long enough to find the exit that might save my trip from being an utter failure.
Sometimes it would mean staying over-night in order to catch the unsuspecting buyer unaware as they entered the building the next morning. Other times it would mean mustering the courage to traverse the stairs leading to the inner-sanctum of the store’s management offices in order to find an assistant manager or some store team-leader with whom I could attempt to strike a chord. I would go to virtually any length to keep the trip from becoming a failure. This was not the stuff of a salaried sales manager, this was the stuff of a true believer.
I quickly graduated from being intimidated by the sales process to endeavoring to persevere in spite of it. I learned that the miserable people in this world are miserable because they need love and they need friends. The power-mongering, condescending tyrants are self-conscious and terrified that someone might find them out and expose the fact that they know that they aren’t nearly as good as the want everybody to think they are. Everybody has their own defense mechanisms and their own way of expressing that transcendent sentiment; “Don’t Tread On Me.”
Over time, I realized that it was easier for me to be kind to the miserable strangers to whom my industry forced to grapple than it was to be giving and conciliatory to the people who really mattered in my life simply because the stakes of operating with miserable strangers were so low. However, I thank the industry for teaching me these lessons, I thank my family and my friends for dealing with my proclivities, and I blame no one for my own shortcomings.
There is a lot of my blood spilled on I-5 between Redding and the San Francisco Bay Area but it never necessitated a transfusion. It simply drove me harder and, in the words of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, ”Furthur” out of a fear that stopping would indicate failure and a pathological belief that failure was not an option.
Bob Dylan once said “There’s no success like failure/and failure’s no success at all.” I will leave the curious to search Dylan’s work for the origin of the quote. After all, this is not a scholarly work so there will be no footnotes. Besides, everybody can learn something from Dylan, this is the essence of his greatness. I pondered this line interminably until life taught me that success leaves one with two choices; to either maintain the same level of success or to enjoy the slump.
Our culture loves to tear down success stories. Once someone wins something allegations of cheating, theft, or blind luck are soon to follow. The winner will be scrutinized and every move that they make will be recorded by those folks who want to debunk the myth of their excellence.
If you ever find yourself in this fortunate position, enjoying the first pangs of fame and notoriety only to resent them later, take heart as you are in esteemed company. This story is meant to illustrate the fact that failures can lead to successes and successes can lead to logical ends. Paths always have a beginning and an end. Zeno postulated that you can never actually get anywhere because you are always getting half-way there. I like to think that, although end points sometimes show themselves when we are not ready to receive them, they always mark the beginning of something new.
Turning again to Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”
10/07/05 Alameda, Ca.
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posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 2:07 AM
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