Opportunity Overseas

Bret Cali had to close his store and café in Bend because he was getting too many customers. Sound strange? Well, we are living in a strange time. It happened right after spring break when Bret was busy taking care of a big influx of tourists who had come for a few days’ rest at his place and at the Colorado Bend State Park just down the road. His neighbors in San Saba County asked him to shut down because they feared some of those visitors might be carrying the virus and bringing it in his store and café. Bret is still on the premises doing some updating, but his business is temporarily closed.

Bret can roll with the tide. He has done it many times before. He is a man of many experiences in many places including Alaska where he worked for a company that fished for salmon. He has had a variety of jobs, from a hospital

DJ playing tunes for patients to being a show producer and entertainer. He can also marry people. “I charge extra if I have to put on a button shirt,” says Bret, who has managed to avoid marriage for himself.

He lived in London a couple of years. One day he saw an old beat-up truck with a sign on it advertising a landscape company. That gave him an idea. He and his roommate started doing some research. “We were in the wealthier part of London and we found this book on the English landscape and a poem by Alexander Pope so we made a flyer containing words from Pope’s poem: ‘Where you walk cool gills shall fan the glade and where you sit, trees shall crowd into a shade and everything shall flourish before your eyes.’ We listed all these vast landscaping projects that we could do, then got on our bikes and put these flyers in mailboxes. We didn’t have any postage money.

“One night we were sitting in a pub and this American lady called and said her husband was making a movie in London and they were renting a mansion from the owner who was in Greece. The owner said they could do whatever landscaping they wanted as long as he approved it. We went by the next day and talked to her. She wanted different levels and all sorts of stuff. I had mowed yards in junior high school and thought that qualified me to do involved landscape jobs. She asked us for a bid and said she would submit it to the owner. She told us that she was so honored to have both owners of the company take the time to stop by. We told her we had another project in the neighborhood. Our bicycles were parked around the corner. So we went to the library and looked at architecture books and then called all sorts of landscape companies, found one that seemed reputable, took the price they offered, added much more to it and gave her the bid. The owner in Greece said that was fine. So while this company did all the work, I just rode my bike by there occasionally to see that everything was going ok. We called our company Arcadia Urban Woodlands.” Bret got a good job offer in the states and gave up his landscape business.