Revised Prologue From "Love at First Crush: Four Seasons as an Olive Oil Producer"
PrologueThe numeral 20 was clearly visible to the right of me. I was laying on the bed propped up on my side with my head facing the video monitor to the left of me, but I could still see it there hanging in the air in the farthest reaches of my peripheral vision. I tried to focus on it but it was no use, the medicine was too strong. Every time my heart beat my field of vision would shift slightly. My instinct told me it said 20 but as the cable moved, the numeral was moving out of my field of vision. It was moving toward me.
I was very high from the medicine, so much so I hardly noticed the blasts of air that were assaulting my interior every so often. I was wearing a wry smile and my lips were stuck to my teeth. I remembered a bumper sticker I once saw in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert in Oakland, California. The VW bus was so covered with rust and primer that it would be a miracle of the thing could actually drive. The Vermont license plate hinted at the miraculous as the Cheshire cat perched on the face of the bumper proclaimed “I Love Your Smile.”
I couldn’t stand the silence any more. “Doc,” I wearily intoned “does that cable say 20 on it?” The Doctor replied in the affirmative. “I can’t believe I let you put a camera twenty feet up my ass,” I stated with a very stoned chuckle, “you didn’t even take me out to dinner. Don’t tell any of the other boys, they’ll think I’m easy.” The Doctor muttered something and a mysterious gloved hand appeared, sliding a syringe into my IV cable. “”Light’s out, Brian,” the Doctor said. Lights out indeed.
I have the faintest recollection of the remainder of the procedure. Mostly, I remember watching the camera traverse the deepest recesses of my person. I know that I asked the staff if they could give me a DVD of the big show, although I don’t remember if they replied. I also remember dropping some heavy philosophical banter on them as well. “what do you think Abe Lincoln looked like on the inside,” I enquired at one point, “does my colon look presidential?” I also remember spotting Jimmy Hoffa a few times. However, the most prescient thing I remember uttering was the simple question, “how the fuck did I get here?” One of the nurses responded that I had driven myself there. “I guess I’ll have to take my magic carpet home,” I replied.
My Dad was there for the post-procedure debriefing. Dear old Dad, such a reassuring presence for a kid, such a keen mind, such good principles, such an excellent friend for an adult. “Now John,” Dr. Reddy stated, “Brian is not going to remember any of this so you are going to have a talk with him when he comes back around. The good news is we only found a few polyps so there does not appear to be any cancer in his colon. We should have the biopsy results in a few days, but he appears to be in fine health other than the massive inflammation. All of the troubles of the past few months appear to be stress related; your son needs to change his life before this problem gets really serious.”
“Doc, I’ll make sure he gets the message,” my Dad responded, “how serious of a problem is this?”
“Well, let me put it this way, I have observed your son at work and I have seen how quickly this problem has progressed. He needs to take care of himself and he is in such a mindset now that he can’t go half-speed. He needs to step off the treadmill and get his health in order.”
“Would it be accurate to say that he needs to do this as soon as possible?”
“John, he needs to do it now.”
My Dad drove me home. “Well,” I started, “I guess I have my work cut out for me.”
“Yeah,” Dad stated gravely, “you need to figure out what you are going to do to get yourself back on track. The Doctor said that you are on a crash course with heart disease or a stroke and the inflammation is just an early indicator of this.”
“Shit,” I muttered, “I don’t really remember that part. I am still pretty spun from whatever medicine they gave me.”
“Well, take it easy today. We can talk about it tomorrow, there is a bunch of stuff I need to tell you,” he said as we pulled into my driveway, “You just need to rest today.”
Dad, helped me into the house and onto the couch. He put a movie on the TV and I spent the rest of the morning tripping out to Bob Dylan’s “Masked and Anonymous.” As I pondered the movie, I thought about how I got to the point in my life where I needed my first colonoscopy at 31. What events or factors conspired to give me my first cancer scare at this young age? My first instinct was to wait until I could get back to the farm to figure it all out.
The farm had taken on an almost mystical proportion in my psyche. It represented then agrarian childhood that I never really had. It represented the flower of my untapped potential and it served as the justification for my most intense self-exploratory experiences. It was the heart of darkness and the Garden of Eden, the alpha and the omega, the center of the world, and one of its most isolated, unknown outposts. You can take the boy out of the farm, but you can’t take the farm out of the boy.
I was once asked by a reporter what question I was asked the most regarding our product, Pacific Sun Olive Oil. “Where the hell is Gerber,” I wryly replied. Indeed, the farm was located in Gerber, Ca., two and one half hours north of Sacramento, on Interstate 5. Nestled at the end of the grand, Central Valley, it was in the heart of everything in the middle of nowhere. If you are going to come to the farm, more than likely, you will come by way of San Francisco.
From San Francisco International Airport, head north on Interstate 101 to Interstate 80. Head East on I-80, crossing the Bay Bridge, and head toward Berkeley. 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 so 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. Although they may not always see eye to eye with you, if you respect them, they will respect you. When you are in your hour of need, they will be there for you because this is what people do in a community. Perhaps they might also gossip and talk about each other behind their backs but when the deal comes down your chips, having fallen, lay scattered, pell-mell these are the people who will help you back up on your feet again. Rural America is all about community and this is one of its most beautiful facets.
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 two of us had a dream of making a product that could give people hope. We wanted people to know from where their food comes. We wanted to make food for them and tell them all about it. We wanted to make specialty food that was not exclusive or efete. We wanted them to know that they should pray for the men and women who worked in the fields before they ate the food that those men and women produced. We wanted our customers to spread the word about how food is produced and we wanted them to know that there are few absolutes in this world, that black and white are simple abstractions of the truth, which comes in shades of gray. This mill building that you see standing before you is proof not only of the fruition of our dream, but also of the Farm’s commitment it.
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 to one place, watch out of the corner of your eyes, and pounce as soon as the mole starts to emerge toward the fluorescent lights and the neon glow. I always enjoyed that description and I strove to turn improvisation into a workable business methodology.
“I’ll play it and tell you what it is later.” This Miles Davis quote sums up one of my primary business philosophies aptly. I don’t want to sit down and craft an elaborate plan of action from a position of ignorance. I prefer to immerse myself totally in a project, come to grips with it from the inside, and determine my course of action looking at the world through my subject’s eyes. Likewise, I don’t want to follow someone else’s path directly. I would prefer to extract the kernels of wisdom from others, keeping them in mind when I plot my course of action. In the words of Mr. Davis again, “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”
I can think of only two farmers who would accept these philosophies as the basis of a business plan and I thank Jane and Brendon for taking the lead of faith with me. When the news was grim or when the path was no longer visible and I was standing waist high in weeds, Brendon and Jane trusted me to find another path. They were available to help if I needed them but they willingly gave me the space and time that I needed to find a new direction.
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 beliefs of 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 of olives 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. I believe that this is a result of the fact that the forces of commerce and marketing have made most people afraid to take the risk of believing in themselves. All the while, the same apparati foster the belief that our untapped brilliance is only one product away from manifestation. The machine wants us to believe that we are stuck in an infinite loop of futility but that we can break the cycle, we can “Just Do It” if we buy the right show, smoke the right smoke, wear the right scent, or marry the perfect trophy.
This manufactured frustration causes us to both revere and despise our heroes in equal measures. We believe that our heroes are human, after all, they put their pants on one leg at a time just like us don’t they? Therefore, we must all have that potential inside us. So we revere the hero for tapping into that potential. However, since they have tapped into their potential and we have not, we feel diminished by their successes. Thus, we strive to expose their weaknesses. Surely they must have cheated or used some sort of trick to find their success. The cycle is stark: exposure, fame, idolatry, overexposure, attack.
If you ever find yourself in the fortunate position of 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.”
3/27//06 Old Shasta, Ca.
[+/-] read/hide this post
posted by Brian J. Kenny @ 5:04 PM
0 comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home