town grapevine that the project had been self-serving, since it made such a big media splash. Before the project I had very little experience with the local media, so I learned from the rumor, and thought, “That was just a big ugly wall — if you want self serving, I’ll show you self serving…”
We tried to capitalize on the event by publishing a “Greetings from Pittsboro” postcard, which we used for correspondence with customers all over the world, but at the end of the day the mural was an object lesson in how not to garner publicity for ourselves.
Today the muralized building is one part government office, and one part hairdressing salon. Both of my sons got Mohawk haircuts there last summer. The Post Office has moved to the edge of town and its old residence is abandoned.
BLAST’s future was wiped out by the Internet, and as a property it is remembered fondly by Information Technology folks everywhere. Tami left to have babies, Mark and I were swept away by our growing distribution enterprise, and those who were left behind never figured out how to retool the company for the current day.
Something I learned along the way is that all business is difficult. One moment you are distributing computer memory in Canada, and you find that you are operating on razor thin margins and that the business is tough. Since you naturally want to be in an “easier” business, you look around at customers and suppliers to see who has it easy.
In the computer business the vendors with the highest margins are in software. It costs them a dollar to print a compact disc worth of software, and they sell it for sixteen hundred bucks. BLAST was my foray into software. What is not included in the compact disc printing cost is the million dollars worth of research and development that goes in to produce un-saleable products that do not go to market. And we did a lot of that at BLAST. We would work for years on products that would miss the market entirely. It turned out that being in the software business was hard.
And I think the same lesson applies to biodiesel. On the surface it is the process of taking waste fat, oil, and grease and converting them to fuel. Easy money. It’s a business where you can sell every drop you produce without trying.
Except it appears to be exceptionally difficult to make any money doing it.
Which has left me with the conclusion that all business is hard.
Which is the opposite message from what John would tell me. And both messages are correct. Business is hard. It takes work. And when you are in business you get everything you want or something better from your endeavors.
I should note that earnings are not the only yardstick I have used to measure whether or not something is a success. Once when Tami and I were riding horseback to the lost Jordanian city of Petra, I was not reflecting on how much money had been lost or wasted along the way.
Rather, I was vigorously celebrating the global economy that had been so kind to us.
THERE’S A METAL SCULPTOR in Rockwood, Ontario named Andreas Drenters. He worked with his brother to assemble a remarkable sculpture called Pioneer Family. It was a larger-than-life Conestoga wagon, complete with children and dogs that made its debut in Montreal at Expo 67.
I remember Expo 67. When we went as a family I was five years old. We believed in World Fairs.
And I later became friends with Andreas. He worked out of a tiny shop in Rockwood, Ontario, and filled the grounds of an abandoned nunnery with magnificent pieces of scrap metal sculpture. He was an inspiration to me.
When I bought my farm in Moncure, it was covered with trash. In a time before landfills, tradition dictated that you tote your garbage to the property line and form a pile. When your neighbor did the same thing, everything was clear. Which means the busted subsistence farms which dot these woods are demarcated by trash. While some has decomposed over the years, the metal remains.
I came along in the era of public landfills, but the instinctive recycler in me would not let me throw metal away.
I sorted glass by color. And I bagged aluminum cans by the ton. And whenever I could, I would load my pickup truck up with ferrous metals, and drive to Siler City, where I would sell it to John over at Bish Enterprises. Bish is a scrap yard and army surplus store. John would pay around a penny a pound, which meant a good day would result in five bucks. On my way home empty, I would stop at the stockyard, and give my money to the fellow who mucked out the stalls with the Bobcat.
He was supposed to load people for free on certain afternoons, but he got accustomed to my scrap-metal tip and was happy to hook me up with a scoop or two of fresh manure. My poor old truck would ride low with a load of metal to Siler City, and return riding low with soil amendment.
I would occasionally do the trip with my daughters, in which each of us would guess the weight of the outgoing load. The winner would pocket the money, which generally meant we came home with milkshakes instead of manure.
But after years of hauling from the woods to the scrap yard, I started seeing things in the metal. I would fish out certain pieces, drill holes in them with my electric drill, and bolt them together. Tami would come home from work, and I would say “Look, honey, there’s a mosquito in the front yard.”
She would look at the “sculpture,” which had tin cans for eyes, and she would look at me with a worried expression. Using a hand-held hacksaw, and nuts and bolts, I made caterpillars, and a giant Canada goose, and flowers for the yard.
Friends and family started noticing when they came to visit, and they occasionally asked to purchase a piece. “Mother’s day is coming up, and my Mom would like that,” Phifer said. At the time I was running around Research Triangle Park each day trying to sell software for a living, and I had no desire to sell my art. Which made me politely decline.
That only increased demand.
My journey into art was triggered in large part by a trip to Sweden. Tami and I awoke one morning in Hanover, Germany, at the end of a grueling technology trade show, and boarded a train for Sweden.
It was Easter, and though Sweden is not a religious country, the place was largely closed. The service was horrible, the weather was drab, and my fantasies about Sweden as the model progressive country were abruptly dashed. On top of my broken expectations, Tami and I decided that it would probably be best if we split the sheets on our return.
She wanted kids. I already had kids. And we pretty much agreed that it would be best if we went our separate ways.
We were in Uppsala, visiting a church renowned for its Viking runes, and as we walked through the cold drizzle, thoroughly disheartened, we encountered a garden-sized chess set made of wood set in a private glen in a public park.
It was a miraculous affair. We played a game. It was fun.
I thought of my scrap metal piles at home, and envisioned a life-sized set made from scrap. For some reason, it occurred to me that if we could have a giant-sized chess set at home, having more children with Tami wouldn’t be that bad.
I built my big board, and Zafer arrived, and our love of corporate life evaporated.
Tami went back to work for one week, cried her eyes out, and traded in her jet-set job for motherhood. She decided to become an art broker, which she intended to do with a kid on her hip, from her headquarters in the corner of our living room. And she
