When I say I ran the bar—which is the Electric Lettuce place up there on Foster now—I meant that I was the regular that helped the owner out with his deal. We, my friends and I, the boxers and wrestlers mostly, we had a regular table. We ran a tab. If there was any trouble, we waited to see if the owner could handle it. If not, we handled it, like the time I got maced!

I was in stumbling distance of the house I was buying at the time, this house. If there was something the owner wanted. I brought it to him. He liked coke, but his deal was weed. He was the only person I ever brought stuff to. It was cool. If we wanted to stay and fuck the bar maid—who was crazy—on the pool table, it was all good, so long as we didn’t make a mess.

[laughter]

I was dating his daughter, who was crazy. She was great, but was living in one of the grow houses! Her mother is buying corvettes and shit, and I could see the trouble on the wall, and said, “I just can’t be around you any more—this deal is gonna go bad.” And it did, in a big way and I was thankfully far away.

Yesterday, [his wife, who he always calls by name and never title] and I were driving across Hood River and there was this fruit stand, first big fresh fruit stand of the year, and she wants to stop and get some apples.

[His wife can be heard in the background groaning, “Here we go, Kelly talking about produce again, apple gas levels!”]

Apples! [he grins] are out of season. They’re not gonna be any good, especially with how this idiot is like to have handled them after he got them out of storage. When these things get picked, they get stored in negative pressure, and sealed with a coating that is going to keep any ripening process at bay for a year. Now, when you are a roadside guy, you’re not selling to people who know, so there you go, she gets her apples—I told her only to buy two—and they were terrible. She takes a bite and complains that they’re not fresh and I’m like, don’t worry, if they would have kept them another five months under negative pressure and released them at least at a time when they were designed to ripen, they’d be fine!

[laughter]

So, apples, put off ethylene, a gas, that causes other fruits they are stored with to ripen, so you have your apple room, or since the things are wax sealed, you do what you guys on the night crews did, park them on the dock away from the more sensitive fruit, which, of course, goes in the cooler. You want to ripen an avocado, put it in a bag with an apple.

Bananas are an even bigger deal, because they come from out of the country, your #1 green and inedible, [basically the way the big wholesaler gets them], your #2 starting to ripen, your #3 green and yellow, your #4 yellow, and your #5 spotted and you better fuckin’ sell it today. This process factors into the day chance rush, and the deal with the sorting system and secondary and discount outlet billing, credit, what have you.

The banana room is something I was offered to run when driving was just getting too tough. But, one mistake, and you just lost the boss a bunch of money. The company spent a ton of money for a banana room where the fruit could be hit with gas, or hit with cool air, where the gas could be vented off. That guy, whoever ran that, could do well, but if something went wrong it was his ass—too much for me. I’d rather be over the road. I used the credit book, which was as good as a check book in produce, to smooth things out with the clients and get more deliveries done in less time with less shock to the produce. Some guys just want to make it rough on you at the door because its their store and you’re the driver. So I made it easy on them. You have to, because you have some stores where easy does not fly, where there is no home for a smooth delivery, sound ordinances, what have you. Hauling an entire trailer down a ramp with a dolly is something that bites into your time and your body.

[Kelly pulls over above a body of water to survey hundreds of canoes, kayaks, boats, pontoons and white water rafts, country music playing, American flags waving, good looking young ladies in bikinis smiling. Over half the trees on the mountainsides above are standing charred and dead from a forest fire. The mountains are sheathed in green, even moss clinging to shear rock faces.]

You see, its beautiful even now. Some asshole burned it with tanarite five years ago. Now, a woman or some dude from the butt hurt city, will look at this and cry, want to make someone pay. But the mountain don’t give a shit. Those trees are toothpicks compared to what’s forty miles up the river, trees so big around we couldn’t hug them together. Even here, some trees were missed and look at all the green! Look at the berries, the feed, the young trees sprouting from this gnarly ass mountain! You can see, after the burn, how rugged it is, doesn’t look so picture perfect as the trees make it seem in maturity.

Point is, I walked these hills, hunted these hills, fished the creeks and rivers. By the time some kid is my age, it will look like it did when I was his age and the ash will have fed that forest like mother’s milk. When you walk the land, rather than fly or drive, you get less ruffled. Like my friends who made it back from Vietnam—and some of them didn’t; in these parts we lost a lot of men, on the ground, to that raw deal war. But, what is the sense in being angry about something that was done fifty years ago—I mean done? The men I knew who walked the ground, they’re not all butt hurt about it. But the fliers [aviators], the big wigs [officers], the Monday Morning quarterbacks, they are the ones who are butt hurt over it, like the woman who never hunted a bear looking at this and crying about the burnt tree, a tree where the bear can still sharpen its claws in what is to a bear a Garden of Eden—prime habitat.

It’s nice to be up here with your, Brother. Glad you get to see the mountains of my youth.