During my trip to SuperOregon this month, several associates reminded me I have not followed through on any of my get-rich-quick schemes. Specifically, they yearn to shop at Big Scai’s Beer Frontier.

“If you’re going to keep doing the same work, why even bother getting fired?!” one person [my first boss, ironically] said to me.

SuperOregon is a land of innovation. When I worked there, they were destroying the nation’s largest stockpile of chemical weapons. I even had to wear a pager [I’m not an old man, but that was the most efficient technology available at the time] to alert me if there had been an issue at the chemical depot, and I had to rush to the station to warn the townsfolk. In reality, that likely would have played out as me yelling, “You gotta get outta here!” out the window as I drove out of town.

A nuclear reservation to the north processed the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That became the site of the biggest environmental cleanup in American history when radioactive material started showing up in the Columbia River.

That also may explain why they were so finicky about us being ready to warn people if something went gunnysack at the chemical depot. Although if the depot started leaking mustard gas, it would have just given the Columbia River salmon just a soupcon of tang.

Now that both the Umatilla Chemical Depot and Hanford Nuclear Reservation are cleaned up, SuperOregon needs a trailblazer to forge a new path for the area.

For example, the Hermiston melon is a celebrated crop in the Pacific Northwest. Because the area east of the Cascades in Oregon is a desert, it gets very hot during the day so the watermelons grow quickly. At night, because it’s dry, the air cools quickly, so the watermelon doesn’t have to use a lot of energy, freeing up the sugar inside to do whatever sugar does to become delicious.

“You haven’t truly enjoyed a watermelon until you’ve enjoyed a Hermiston melon,” I thought to myself. “Or, failing that, the Friendly’s Watermelon Roll.”

I decided to ship a Hermiston melon home to Fort Worth and one to the family back on Ohio.

“Oh, they’re very fragile,” the melonsmith at Bellinger Farms lamented.

“But you need a sledge hammer to break them open!” I reasoned.

He started discussing the issue with an associate who reported they had shipped watermelons before. She said packaging alone would cost about $100, and they couldn’t make any guarantees. Also, the US Postal Service told me not to.

I refuse to accept we live in a world where we can’t ship watermelons.

Just before I left, I covered the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s speech in Houston where he pledged to go to the moon and do the other things. Until then, I didn’t know what the other things encompassed, but theses grand accomplishments included [true story] Rice playing Texas.

So I shouldn’t be held back from launching into the Beer Frontier, either. The backstory includes a workaround for Oregon’s law against drive-through liquor stores. Instead of driving through, you’d pull into a parking space and the Beer Frontierstress would roller skate out with your order. My associates and I discussed the plan, complete with the schematics I forged scientifically back when I lived there.

We talked through the plan the night before the rodeo. Much like a previous discussion back in Texas about time travel, this occurred while we enjoyed some of the product we’d be selling. They suggested a tap room. People from Portland keep moving to Hermiston because SuperOregonians treat each other right, and those who hail from StandardOregon would feel more at home with a microbrew. Instead of only providing drive-thru service, we also give people the opportunity to make a day of it.

In conclusion, the editorial board here at 1 Scaianalysis Esplanade chooses to ship watermelons and open the Beer Frontier not because they are easy, but because they are hard. We won’t be doing any other things though. We’re already kind of busy.