by Doug Fine
On my test drive I noticed tiny Hummers and Suburbans bowing deferentially out of my lane, their drivers smiling submissively and waving me on. I started reading clearance signs because of close calls at my initial overpasses, and when I pulled over I figured out quickly that whatever else it meant to be a full-size truck owner, I was now a parking lot refugee. I’ve since had scientist friends do the calculations, and it is physically impossible, in the Earth’s atmosphere, to steer a 2001 Ford F-250 into a standard parking space on the first try. I suddenly felt deep empathy with every excluded minority. Before the morning was out, I discovered that all of us Monster Truck drivers congregate grumpily on the outskirts of supermarket and hardware store parking lots, taking up one and a third spots and suiting up for the long trek inside. Usually we leave our engines running, since starting a diesel V-8 engine (on any fuel) is such an event that three or more simultaneous starts can affect oil prices worldwide. Sometimes we hold barbecues out there.
* * *
A hybrid vehicle (like a Toyota Prius) uses about half the energy, and produces about half the greenhouse emissions of a full-size truck or large SUV (like a Hummer).
* * *
In short, it was an impressive piece of machinery. Before I had even declined the alarm system and undercarriage waxing from the Rich Ford Postsale Scam Department, I had named my new ride the ROAT: the Ridiculously Oversized American Truck. I mean, this was a V-8, which was twice as many Vs as I was used to. Suddenly I could accelerate up hills. Even when carrying four bales of alfalfa hay, eight solar panels, and a peripatetic puppy. I almost felt obligated to put a pinch of chewing tobacco between my cheek and gum, just when the rest of the world was abandoning its SUVs exactly like a bad habit.
And I realized at the first traffic light during the elevated drive to the Albuquerque Alternative Energies warehouse that the type of masculinity I project had now and forever changed. I went to sleep as a sensitive progressive and woke up in the NASCAR demographic. Women with names like Darla were eyeing my rig like it was a human body part. They winked. Introduced themselves with tattooed waves. Once or twice tongues emerged. I tried to put this in Darwinian perspective: was there something about excessive heaps of steel and insanely powerful engines that implied good breeding prospects? The LOVEsubee, compared to this vehicle, had roughly the power and environmental footprint of a go-cart. I couldn’t believe they allowed such toys on the road.
Back at Albuquerque Alternative Energies headquarters, the vegetable oil conversion took three days, most of which I spent misunderstanding jargon.
“You can double your postpurge run time if you’re getting hard starts,” Kevin said late on day one, and I lost focus immediately. I didn’t realize what an important point he was making. He meant that I had to clear my fuel lines of vegetable oil whenever I stopped for more than twenty minutes, or they’d look like John Candy’s aorta. And the next time I tried to start the ROAT, coronary arrest would be the prognosis. I was so lucky to have such a feature in my truck. (If only we could purge the fat globules from our arteries after each Chinese meal.)
I wasn’t concerned about fading out during Kevin’s technical talk, because my truck was among the first equipped with a nifty digital control panel Velcroed to the dash. It was called the VO Controller and was invented by a guy named Ray in his Michigan garage. Thanks to this device, Kevin said, my engine would know when it hit a hundred forty degrees, and would switch to vegetable oil power on its own. It would even “purge” the fuel lines automatically when I shut off the engine. I didn’t have to think about these nuances. I could just drive and feel like a green global citizen. Believing that was my mistake. It would take a couple of cataclysmic mechanical failures before I figured out that I did have to think about purging, and which fuel I was on. Often.
Even though we worked closely together for days, it was hard to know what Kevin Forrest thought of me. He confessed to having mixed feelings about all the “hippies” who kept wandering in wanting to barter four crystals for a full conversion of their Volkswagen.
“You gotta embrace your market,” I told him, hoping my cowboy hat at least partly disguised my politics. In the background, the radio was announcing that Brazil had just become energy independent, thanks to massive sugar-based ethanol harvests.
Kevin knew his market, all right. In fact, he was thinking three stages ahead. Just as he punched out my dashboard and made my fresh-off-the-lot truck look like a critically injured neurosurgery patient, he told me that he saw veggie oil power as a transitional phase until someone figures out how to separate hydrogen from a water molecule in a sustainable manner.
“There just isn’t enough vegetable oil in the world to power, say, the first million conversions,” his head said, poking out from somewhere in the hood.
* * *
VegOil driving is technically not legal in forty-eight U.S. states because it’s not an EPA-certified fuel. In Germany, people have been legally driving on VegOil for twenty years. In the Netherlands, trains are powered by VegOil. In France, it’s illegal.
* * *
I wanted a closer look at what he was doing to my ROAT. Sliding around on one of those square skateboards that mechanics use to get under vehicles, I looked up at all the colorful wires that were hanging out from my truck and wondered, Will there be enough vegetable oil for me? For the first time in my life, I was rooting for less healthy American dietary trends, to keep the fryer oil supply plentiful. I envisioned personally cooking a lot of french fries if necessary.
I think Kevin noticed my concern, because when he sent me on something like my tenth auto-parts run on the final day of the conversion, he asked me to bring back “something greasy” for lunch. “Gotta support the industry.”
Kevin Forrest practically was the industry. In New Mexico, at least. He had recently partnered with a local waste oil collection company and opened the first government-sanctioned vegetable oil filling station in the United States. They got approval by offering both the State of New Mexico Revenue Department and the U.S. Treasury the same fuel taxes charged at gas stations: 21 cents per gallon to Santa Fe, and 18.4 cents to Washington, D.C.
“The government likes when you offer it money,” he taught me. In March 2007, Kevin was charging $2.00 per gallon for veggie oil—while diesel was hovering at around $3.08 in New Mexico. They already had customers seeking them out from all over North America.
As I drove the loyal LOVEsubee to pick up lunch, I appreciated the savings, since I’d be filling up my freshly installed eighty-gallon veggie oil tank at Kevin’s station. After that, I hoped, my fuel would be free: I’d collect the waste oil myself, from unhealthy restaurants. So, in the spirit of contradiction that seemed to pervade all aspects of my green life these days, I brought back Panda Express takeout. In Styrofoam containers.
After sevety-two hours and a dozen trips to NAPA auto supply, Kevin declared my truck “converted.” As he was waving a monkey wrench the size of a golf club over the vehicle, his proclamation actually had a somewhat spiritual ring to it, though I’ve seen formal religious conversions that took less time. In fact, since I’d just gotten splattered head to toe in vegetable oil from assisting in a minor hose-tightening mishap that Kevin called my “annointing,” I felt as though I had just been through what any theological scholar would call a religious conversion: immersion, sequestering, sleep deprivation, confession (of opposition to Bush), a visionary moment (the oil anointing), and, finally, tithing.
Now it was time for the first carbon-neutral fill-up. We test drove the ROAT to the Albuquerque Alternative Energies Vegetable Oil Filling Station and Restroom Rental Business in what can only be called a sketchy warehouse district in west Albuquerque. The guy Kevin partnered with on the veggie station also ran a lucrative porta-potty business. He was obviously a fellow who’d figured out a way to make a living carting off everything people wanted to get rid of before and after they ate their meals.
On the drive over, we talked about the del
icate issue of world crop acreage being used to power Western ROATs, instead of poor people’s food. Tortilla prices in Mexico had recently doubled, the radio was telling us.
“Everything is about market demand and everything is global,” Kevin said almost angrily. “If these technologies are not cost-effective, they won’t take hold. If some people need to find other sources of food, because crop space is devoted to corn, switchgrass, or grapeseed for biofuels, well, they’ve got to listen to the free market.”
* * *
Half of U.S. agricultural land is devoted to livestock feed, mostly cattle, and 70 percent of U.S. grain goes to feed livestock. Worldwide, 7 percent of the planet’s biomass is being utilized now, meaning, to some energy theorists, that the human food supply is not in danger from biofuels.
* * *
I was pleased to discover that the kind of mechanic who once spat tobacco juice and whistled at passing women now discussed renewable energy for fun. Despite his “free market at all costs” mind-set, Kevin recognized that unless something compels the less ethical corporations worldwide to stop killing the Earth, the future is in jeopardy because we have to live on said Earth. And yet he somehow believed that Fox News was telling him the truth.
I almost couldn’t believe my eyes at the sea of plastic restrooms poking out of the desert landscape when Kevin unlocked the VegOil Station gate and shooed away the local vagrants. I couldn’t believe my nose either. The smell of the facility was virtually anesthetic in its strength. Even the cactus seemed to be wilting.
Kevin looked over at me as we pulled in. I had my forearm pressed to my nose.
“It’s the filtered grease,” he said after I parked alongside enough sanitation facilities for two Woodstocks. “We render the whole raw mess, separating the good oil from the lard and the water, and the reject pile starts to smell ripe in the warm weather. If you weren’t driving it, this stuff would go to feed the chickens we ate from Panda Express.”
The actual vegetable oil pump, tucked between seven hundred porta johns, looked like gas station pumps used to look when my dad was little: quaintly oval, with an old-school gauge and actual physical numbers that turned as you fueled. I asked Kevin if this would be like a normal fill-up.
“Yeah, except if you hold the fueling handle long enough—ow!—it might burn your hand. Feel.”
I clasped the handle. “Yeah, ow! Hot,” I agreed. I guessed correctly that the pump was kept at scalding temperatures to prevent artery clogging in its lines.
With my palm still sizzling, I reached for the nozzle again with my shirttail as a potholder. I wanted to put the first vegetable oil into my truck even if it cost me a hand. I mean, filling up with a clean fuel from a totally old-school pump. How cool was that? I felt like ordering a grape Nehi.
I unscrewed my gas cap and aimed the nozzle at my normal fuel tank.
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Kevin shouted, breaking me out of my reverie.
“What?”
“If you put the vegetable oil in your old diesel tank, this truck’ll never drive again.”
“Right.”
Just what I needed: two fuels to think about. But a few minutes later, with eighty gallons of vegetable oil in the correct tank and a second-degree-burned hand, I did a little mileage calculation. If I got the same eighteen miles per gallon on VegOil that I got on diesel, I wouldn’t have to fill up for the next fifteen hundred miles. That would get me halfway across North America. I was good to go for months, and I wouldn’t have to fill up with actual diesel, well, almost never. With diesel prices up twenty cents per gallon in the three days since I arrived in Albuquerque due to some kind of pipeline sabotage in Nigeria, I was already rubbing my palms together.
It’d be so simple: when I ran out of veggie oil, I’d simply get more at the Mimbres Café. That was one of two small eateries in my valley, known for its mastery of both traditional New Mexican dietary staples: fried corn products and fried flour products. I could still tool around in a car, that ultimate American symbol of freedom. My gas would be free and clean. Sure, I would have to calculate and pay my own fuel taxes on the honor system next April. But that was a lot better than that last $67 diesel fill-up I had just endured on the nearby tax-free Indian reservation. I was carbon neutral, and it felt right.
EIGHT
THE KUNG PAO SMOKESCREEN
Halfway home from Albuquerque, I decided to call someone. I thought it’d be fun to say, “Guess what I’m driving on right now?” But as I flipped open the phone at eighty-one miles an hour, I realized, with a smart in my belly, that there was no one in my life I felt close enough with to wake up with a pop quiz in the middle of the night. I paged through my auto dialer. Nada.
In the weeks since Lupy and I had realized we were better off as running friends, I’d spent time with a woman who had a tendency to talk about past lovers practically while still in flagrante with her current one, and a woman who disclosed “I don’t really have a lot to say.” This wasn’t the most satisfying period of my romantic life.
Still, it was truly thrilling to be driving on a carbon-neutral fuel. Just like that. It was the first time that I concretely felt like I was making progress in my experiment. I mean, I was driving. A Monster Truck. On vegetable oil. Above me, the stars south of Socorro were, as always, the most piercingly clear in this sector of the galaxy, and I wasn’t doing anything to smog them up. It’s just one of those amazing phenomena that while theoretically possible, seems almost magical when it occurs, like a supernova, or Stephen Colbert speaking at the White House.
The only downside I noticed was a powerful craving for Kung Pao chicken. Even though I’d just eaten, I found myself mysteriously drawn to Chinese takeout places at every exit. Kevin had warned me about this. Now and forever more, my truck was basically a munchies machine. The exhaust smelled like heaven.
It was a small price to pay: the ROAT handled beautifully on veggie oil. The ride was quieter than on diesel. And the fuel gauge didn’t even budge for the whole two-hundred-forty-mile drive to the Funky Butte Ranch. I could get used to this.
The problems began a couple of days later when I tried starting the beast for a town run. True, it was a cold morning at 5,400 feet elevation—even Sadie in the passenger seat was shivering. But I have never experienced a motorized vehicle so fervently dedicated to not starting. After ten minutes of deafening engine coughing that activated the part of my brain responsible for thinking That can’t be good, I started seeing red.
“Can you believe we actually unloaded that rig on that rawhide liberal?” I imagined the used-car boss was saying to his salesman over beers. “He’s probably stranded in the desert somewhere.”
But then I got a grip, took a deep breath, and tried to remember Kevin’s instructions. Starting a diesel engine does involve more prestart rituals than a space shuttle launch. I ran through the checklist. Plenty of fuel. Clutch engaged. I even remembered to turn on the glow plugs prior to starting. So I did what any intelligent primate with a well-developed cerebral cortex would do in such a situation: I went back to cranking the starter for another fifteen minutes.
Surprisingly, this technique sort of worked. On the one hand, the ROAT’s mighty engine did in fact turn over, but on the other, my truck was engulfed in a thick, white, Batmobile-like smokescreen redolent of a certain Chinese dish. It was probably caused by incomplete veggie oil removal from my fuel lines.
I heard Sadie yelping as she bolted from the truck and took off for the Funky Butte. I leaped down the two and a half stories from my seat and ran for cover, too. I was certain that something was gonna blow as I emerged into a world so saturated with smoke I thought I was in my high school’s teachers’ lounge. Maybe I should have been listening more closely when Kevin was going on and on about “purging.”
I thought my digital VO Controller would handle all that. It had a feature specifically called “autopurge.” I was learning that driving on green fuel was going to be much more of a participatory experience than I had
planned. In fact, my mechanical expertise at this point had been limited to tire changing. I was now a full-time engine diagnostician. That is, if I wanted to drive anywhere, say, to the Silver City co-op for broccoli. Suddenly I missed the LOVEsubee and its quaint Japanese reliability. I still hadn’t sold it—it was jammed into the Forrests’ garage in Albuquerque, surrounded by piles of two-stroke power equipment. Maybe I wasn’t meant to drive on alternative fuels.
But eventually the smoke cleared. I could see a tornadolike pillar drifting off toward Mexico at a height of perhaps five hundred feet. Somewhere in Chihuahua, a village was about to get very, very hungry.
* * *
VALISA’S KUNG PAO CHICKEN WITH COLD SESAME NOODLES
CHICKEN
3 chicken breasts, cut into strips
1 tablespoon Chinese rice wine
Pinch salt
Pinch white pepper
3 teaspoons corn flour
3 teaspoons Chinese black vinegar
3 teaspoons sugar
1 teaspoon honey
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Sunflower oil
1/4 cup cashew nuts
3 dried Szechwan chilies, snipped with scissors or, if you only want them for subtle flavor, leave them whole and discard once the chili oil is made
