PLASTICS
The natural spring water, Diamond Springs of Richmond began to out sell Mountain Valley very quickly because I could sell it for a lot less and my markup was exponential as opposed to a percentage. Mr. J didn’t like it one bit though I assured him the cheaper water that I picked up myself at the spring outside of Richmond would give me the extra cash flow needed for survival so I could continue to expand his territory on Mountain Valley. I had looked into other options of perhaps even buying a spring. I researched the differences in labeling that had evolved. I was told by a man in Maryland’s health department how many years earlier he was investigating Great Bear Water and went to a warehouse in Jessup, Maryland and was told by the warehouseman that the water came from a hose. In my travels I learned that Great Bear was being bottled at a huge bottling plant being fed by a spring south of the James River near Richmond. The spring had been purchased by Suntory a Japanese Scotch company. I learned that natural spring water was bottled at the source from a protected spring and tested regularly. Spring water was from a protected source and trucked to a bottling plant. Pure water was more than likely from a municipal source and repackaged as simply bottled water. Both Mountain Valley and Diamond Springs of Richmond were natural spring waters. Good Christian Dave was very proud of his Diamond and had it checked regularly for any impurities or aberrations. I drove weekly with a load of empties and the bottles were washed and sterilized and refilled at the spring where I stacked the filled bottles in Iris’s box before driving back home to the creek, picking up accounts on the Virginia point of the DELMARVA PENINSULA along the way. For a time I used the second bedroom for storage, backing across the patio up to the sliding glass door and carrying two bottles at a time once a week and then repacking the Mountain Valley for delivery the next day still making weekly trips to Fort Meade where I picked up Mountain Valley.
I soon had to buy my own plastic bottles and have them labeled with my phone number and name: THE WATER WAY—28WATER with IRIS on the edge. I bought plastic bottles from a man in New Jersey. He also manufactured condoms, his main business. The man told me of a project at Rutgers where they had a prototype of a machine that turned mixed recycled plastics into lumber. The Professor, my tai-chi teacher was creating a field called environmental mathematics. I told him of the plastic lumber. We created a company: Pangloss Was Right/PWR/Plastics Waste Recycling. The Professor and me went to Rutgers to visit the machine and were showed a deck constructed from the plastic lumber. The Professor believed plastic lumber was a good idea. We were both too busy to do anything about it. Pangloss was a friend of Candide. He was right but not able to do anything either.