JIM BELUSHI, NAKED
ONE TUESDAY AFTERNOON, I was standing on the bank of the Rogue River in southern Oregon, naked, and in the water below me, also naked, was Jim Belushi. He smacked the water’s surface maybe six feet from the riverbank, showing me where it was deep enough to jump and saying, “Right here.”
I wasn’t dreaming. And although this is a story about drugs—marijuana, specifically, which Belushi grows commercially here in Eagle Point, about 20 minutes outside Medford—neither of us was high.
We’d known each other for about seven minutes. We’d walked across the field that separates the business part of Belushi’s farm from his house and the river that flows behind it—me, Belushi, and Taro, the massive German shepherd who follows Belushi nearly everywhere he goes on the farm.
He walked slowly, unhurriedly, like a frontiersman in a western, an Albanian John Wayne. He’d been working outside all morning as the heat climbed into the low hundreds. As we approached the water’s edge, he said, “I think I’m gonna jump in the river” and invited me to do the same.
I said something about running back to my car to grab some shorts, and Belushi told me, Sure, go ahead. But when I looked over at him, he’d discarded his shirt, his khaki shorts, and his sweat-printed cowboy hat on a picnic table by the water and was in the process of shucking his bright-white Hanes.
I understood that I could do this or not do it, but I couldn’t do it halfway. Belushi leaped from the bank. Taro followed him, entering the water like a thrown knife. Belushi looked at me and said, “One, two, three.”
slightly famous, there are much easier ways to get into the weed business than growing it yourself. Invest a little money, partner up with a grower, sign off on a few package designs, and —you’ve got your own line of cannabis products, just like Snoop Dogg, Seth Rogen, Willie Nelson, and
