newjerseynewsroom.com

BY GREGORY J. RUMMO

LIFE IN THE BOONIES

My real job as a drug dealer allows me the luxury of escaping from the Boonies of New Jersey every so often. I'd like to be able to impress you with tales of exotic destinations to where I often escape, and I do on occasion travel to Europe and South America — but not to Colombia — and the drugs I sell are perfectly legal.

But ironically, after spending several hours in an aircraft I often find myself back in the middle of the Boonies, just in another part of America — like this week, where I am writing from the Midwest — Kansas, Missouri and Illinois to be precise.

I spent most of my Monday in a rental car, screaming along a nearly empty I-29 where the posted speed limit is 70 mph, listening to someone on the radio playing guitar and droning on and on about a girl and a dog as cornfields and silos and barns and herds of beef cattle and milk cows whizzed by.

My first stop was St. Joe, Missouri, a place not far from "somewhere over the rainbow," sitting a mere stone's throw across the Missouri River from Kansas.

Some of my customers are farmers and the drugs they buy from me are therapeutic antibiotics which they in turn use to manufacture finished dosage forms administered to livestock; predominately chickens, hogs and cattle in order to keep them healthy until they are slaughtered, ultimately ending up on your dinner table or in-between the slices of sandwich bread or on a hamburger bun.

No, I don't get to don a pair of boots and wade through fields of grain, dodging piles of manure to shake their hands and hawk my wares so erase that image from your mind. It's all very civilized actually. The buyers sit behind desks in modern offices of corporations ranging in size from medium, privately held companies to Fortune 500 multi-national conglomerates whose names would be immediately recognizable.

Sometimes we get to go to lunch with a customer and that almost always means barbecue or steak or something red and meaty that was recently walking around making snorting noises. (You have to be willing to make a good-will contribution to the industry in the form of consumption and there's no better place for beef and pork than right here.)

The Midwest is no stranger to me.

My first business trip, a journey filled with many "firsts" including my first time to board an aircraft occurred two jobs and a century ago.

I wasn't a drug dealer back then but I was catering to another great American addiction. It was during the oil boom of the 1980s when just about everyone in the Oil Patch had a working well in his backyard and I was in the thick of it, selling oil field chemicals.

I remember flying out of Newark on an Eastern Airlines 727 through Atlanta to catch a flight to Tulsa, Oklahoma where we rented a car and drove for what seemed like several hours until finally arriving at the Holiday Inn in Bartlesville. It was close to midnight by the time I laid my head on the pillow and closed my eyes.

When I awoke the next morning and pulled open the curtains in the room I realized we were in the middle of cornfields. After breakfast as we drove to our first visit, I remember my fascination as I watched Scissor-tailed Flycatchers and Meadowlarks frolicking along the borders of meadows where wild sunflowers toed up to the road. It was as if I had been transported in my sleep to the Land of Oz.

It was the first time I met Americans from the Heartland. And it was the first time I ever ate barbecue, at a roadside place that was simply called, "Let's Eat."

We drove back to Tulsa that afternoon and flew to Oklahoma City (Eastern lost my luggage) and a day later to Houston where my bags finally caught up with me. (I have since learned how to pack light such that everything I need for a week fits into a carry-on.)

The memories of that trip are as fresh as if it had happened a year and not decades ago. It was a baptism of sorts serving as the introduction to what has become a regular part of my life.

From my room here at the Marriott I can see the runways at Kansas City airport where soon I'll be sitting on another aircraft — this one headed to Chicago — for more meetings with more pharmaceutical manufacturers in the outskirts of the big city — the Boonies if you will. And although they might find my characterization somewhat deprecating, it's meant affectionately, offered in the spirit of the awe and wonder of waking up that first morning in Bartlesville Oklahoma knowing that "I wasn't in New Jersey anymore."

Gregory J. Rummo, is a businessman and the author of "The View from the Grass Roots." Contact him at GregRummo.com.

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