The Grease, The Egg and The Man in Black

We knew we were moving, but we didn’t know how. Then Nicole handed me the article. A guy in the South of the city was running his diesel engine on recycled vegetable oil. Nicole and I are not the types to leave a big footprint on this earth, we often buy recycled and used products; we share or use public transit and always have, we don’t see the point of the big box store spell that seems to hold most of the world in its thrall. Moving across country, possibly to another country was going to be a challenge to our ideals, whether we liked it or not, on at least some level. Crating up our worldly possessions and transporting them was bound to be costly, involve the burning of fuel, the organization of pick up and delivery at both ends, and to top it all off, we didn’t even know exactly where we wanted our trip to end. Recycled veggie oil pushing the whole adventure seemed like a perfect compromise, and I immediately became a convert.

Within a few weeks of reading that article I was throwing myself completely into the new project, reading books and researching ‘SVO’ (Straight Vegetable Oil) conversions on the internet, I was also lucky to meet a fellow traveler who had successfully taken his converted Volkswagen rabbit across much of north America, making the pipe dream seem like less of a pipe dream, and more of a pipe line (couldn’t resist it...). Now, this was several years ago and there are a couple of details to note here. One was that a key to our strategy was using recycled veggie oil; I am no longer convinced that biofuels can save the planet, but seriously, recycling cannot be all bad. And another was that I would be doing the conversion myself. Now, I am not an auto mechanic, I am a chef, but by necessity, and coming from a family of do-it-yourself Texas jimmy-riggers, I have managed to pull off a few interesting mechanical feats. Not enough, mind you, to seriously consider it a vocation, but enough that I have managed to develop what is probably a massively disproportionate sense of overconfidence in matters relating to such things. Success, even modest success, can be a dangerous drug.

The first task was finding the truck. We scoured the want ads for weeks with no luck and then one night, browsing eBay, I found the truck. It was described as being in decent shape, a former commercial fleet vehicle (regular maintenance, right?) which the current owner had purchased in an auction. It was a diesel, which was key, but (...there’s always a ‘but’...) it was also in need of a new transmission (‘otherwise, in good condition!’). There were two weeks left on the auction, and the reserve was 600 dollars. After weeks of looking at diesel trucks in the multiple thousands of dollars range, it seemed, for that split second, like a deal. Click. Two weeks later we had the truck for 600 dollars, no one else had even placed a bid, which really should have told me something. For some reason, the seller had an amazing look of relief on his face as the truck was towed away. The new tranny was about a thousand bucks, but afterward, it fired right up! I drove it home feeling lucky, what a deal! Then, of course, in the first week, the starter blew (300 bucks...). Then the glow plug array shut down (150 bucks...). Then we needed new tires (900 bucks!). Then, then, the valves were diagnosed as shot, which of course, meant a full engine rebuild. Soon, my “bargain” truck had turned out to be, well, you know...a diesel truck in the multiple thousands of dollars range. Click.

But after all that, we did have the truck. And it was a working, living breathing monster, ready to cart our worldly goods hither and yon.

Our next step was the fuel conversion. I won’t bore you with the details. Which is to say; I won’t entertain you with the humbling process by which I finally came to understand my limitations as a mechanic. In the end, we were only a month late in leaving and it only took us two more weeks after that before I had the guts to flip the switch and finally, for the first time, admit to some small degree of success. The conversion was a kit purchased online through a company called Greasel (now called Golden Fuel Systems) and the long hours of advice and guidance they provided on the phone (usually held in one hand with a wrench in the other) was invaluable and a key to my success. Along the way we also acquired a camper trailer, one of those cute old 50’s style things we called ‘the Egg’, which was our hotel room, camp kitchen and storage room for the trip, as well as the domain of our companion, Opus, a long haired grey male cat. Opus, by day, rode calmly in the cab of the truck in his carrier, and in the evenings, when he wasn’t guarding our tiny mobile home, looked forward to his leashed walks around the various campgrounds of what were eventually 21 states and 3 provinces.

We had fun; I’ve got loads of memories from that trip. We traveled as far to the Northwest as Vancouver Island to eat at the Sooke Harbour House, a world class destination and a highlight of my lifetime restaurant experiences. We paused or stopped in various places I’d always hoped to see throughout the Northwest and the Rockies, including the Redwood forests in Northern California, the cities of Eugene, Oregon, Olympia and Seattle, Washington, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the Grand Teton National Park. We also saw lots of Colorado and a bit of New Mexico, before we paused in Texas to visit my family, offload some of our possessions, filter some more oil and regroup. The second half of our trip took us up through the Midwest with a stop in Chicago to visit a cousin before we crossed into Canada to stay for a while. The border patrol in Detroit took one look at our ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ alternative fuel arrangement with its various heated fuel lines, duct tape, boating accessories, water heater insulation and various barrels of veggie crude (not to mention our hand-painted pickup and our oil-slicked vintage 1950s camping egg) before sending us back to US soil. We were shocked and dismayed but after a little soul searching and with some advice from a seasoned border crosser or two decided to try again on the other side of the lake. The slightly more redneck friendly border patrol agents at the upstate New York border had a different take on our alternate fuel system and laughed at the response we had gotten to it in Detroit and gave us a pass, saying, ‘whatever gets you down the road!’

The veggie oil experiment was not a complete bust, but I don’t like to take too much credit for its impact on the planet. In the end, we only had a few long stretches of recycled planet saving vegetable based fuel burns, interspersed with a lot of stretches of good old fashioned dinosaur juice pushing a lot of weight a lot of miles without a whole lot of breaks. Some unanticipated challenges arose, such as the importance of heavy filtration, and the time it took to accomplish that. Also, the awkwardness and sheer dumb luck needed to procure good quality veggie oil while we were in transit, and the messy, messy, smelly oiliness that inevitably coated every surface of our lives and possessions throughout the whole process. But we didn’t do it because it was easy, to paraphrase JFK, we did it because it was hard. Our ideals had made us want to at least try something. But more often than not the challenges proved for us to be too great to overcome within our timeline and limited budget, and while the veggie oil, when we found it was technically free, it was not easy to find; whereas, petroleum diesel was everywhere, taunting us with its ease of access and for the effort, comparatively low cost. Now, to be fair, we did know about some of the challenges we would be facing on our trip in advance and had always planned to supplement our veggie oil supply with biodiesel, its processed cousin, which is available commercially and works just like regular diesel (no conversion necessary). We had a map of biodiesel pumps across the breadth of our journey and sought them out, even detoured out of our way to use them. But they are few (though growing in number) and far between, and even though it is heavily subsidized, the cost was much higher, usually as much as 20 cents to the gallon. Frankly, by the end of our trip, petroleum or ‘dinosaur’ diesel was what kept our show on the road. Our veggie oil adventure was not an unqualified success, it was an exercise, an experiment, and, we hoped, another hand in the hard work of clearing a path that leads away from the fossil fuel economy that seems, in my mind, to be at root of a series of messes (ever heard the Middle East? Global warming?) But in the end, I think what it turned out be was a fact-finding mission on our part, and facts are not as pleasant as we’d like to think.

Much of the rhetoric that comes out in support of biofuels, especially ethanol, seems to imply that our lifestyles can continue, uninterrupted from one fuel source, petroleum; to another, in this case, ‘bio’ or plant based fuels. Some enlightening statistics have shot holes though this argument. From the numbers I’ve seen, even as productive as the grain belt of the US is, its entire production, if converted to fuel crops, could not even come close to keeping up with our current, much less our future fuel needs. And that’s not even taking into account that some of that grain belt production should be, you know, feeding us. Not to mention the tough reality that this new biofuel focused agriculture would push the chemically intensive, pesticide, herbicide, and genetically modified monoculture beast that ‘Big Ag’ has become to even more extremes doing untold damage along the way. Sadly, by my reckoning, biofuels are a false prophet. They are a feel good solution, but not the truth. Without some sort of sea change in our world view, this process leads down a scary road. I mean, we haven’t used all the oil yet, but we will, doing untold damage in the process no doubt, but it won’t stop there; if we don’t face the truth and change, then what is next? Will we use up all the other available carbon in our hunger for more power? The fact is that the truth is a bitter pill. In the real world, we will have to stop using as much fuel. We will have to drive less, fly less and accept that everything is going to cost more. We will have to get off the grids that control our lives or convert them to clean renewables like wind and solar power. At least until some Prometheus brings us a new gift of fire from the gods to power our lives. And I do believe it will happen, is happening. Kinetic energy, wind and solar, even some aspects of hydrogen offer glimmers of hope, and honestly, in the end, I think it will be something even better, even simpler than all these things. Modern science has made it clear that energy and power are all around us, and I believe that all we need is the right creative mind to figure out how to unlock it. But until then, we’ve got to face the facts, and the fact is that our answers are not going to be found at the gas pump.

The truck broke down the day that Johnny Cash died. We were stuck in New Hampshire for the night. The transmission again, I guess all that trailer hauling was a bit too much for it. After that we nicknamed it Johnny Cash in honor of ‘the Man in Black’. Even without the significance and coincidence of the great man’s untimely demise, the nickname was appropriate; before our trip, Nicole had hand-painted the truck with black Rust-o-leum and, perhaps even more obviously, because we’d dumped so much Cash into it over time. But for all of our problems, (and I haven’t mentioned all of them, trust me) the truck had become a bit of a friend and just as much a companion and a part of our story on our trip as Opus. But that was its last stop for a while. We stored it in New Hampshire until the following summer when I flew out to pick it up and drive it to Texas where Nicole and I had moved for the year before we settled in Canada for good. The truck drove me back to Texas solo, and then drove all of us back to Canada for one last anxious border crossing, this time from Maine into New Brunswick, and also completing our just over a year long circuit from coast to coast. After our arrival, we eventually settled into Kemptville. The truck had developed an oil leak and started running rough, it also needed snow tires (more cash) and there was also a fee to consider involved in properly importing it. Reality set in, and we bought a smaller more efficient car. When the last of the boxes were moved, we parked old Johnny until I had enough time or enough cash to get him up and running again.

Tim Aubin was a rose farmer in Africa. He always says that he used to run the farm with one finger, pointing it at this guy or that with instructions. Now, as a small farmer in rural Ontario, he says that more often than not, he finds that finger pointing back at himself. Years ago, he and his wife Roshan decided to take their future into their own hands. Together, they operate Aubin Farms, one of my favorite local farms, one look at their farmer’s market table and you’ll know why. After years of life in the “Big Ag” game, Tim likes to keep things real. They don’t use pesticides or herbicides; they strive to keep a closed cycle, or a waste-free farm. Everything on the farm that is not eaten or sold is used somewhere; from the sheep’s wool for blankets to the vegetable trimmings Roshan uses in her variety of delicious pickles and chutneys and what little is left or can’t be used anywhere else that finds its home in the compost heap and becomes the nutrition for the next round of crops. As a chef, the incredible quality of their product is reason enough for me to admire them, but as a human, and someone with more than a few environmentalist leanings, the choices they have made that have brought them to where they are fill me with such deep respect and admiration that I have trouble voicing it. Nicole and I left San Francisco to find a place to raise our family. To find a place where we could walk to work, shop locally, and live a lower impact life. Aubin Farms has quickly become an important part of that life. Their table was an anchor at last years Kemptville Farmer’s market and their food has fed dozens of our guests and as importantly, it has fed us. It’s the kind of food that looks better, tastes better and smells better than you can find anywhere else. It is local food, and it is what we are all about. Low food miles? We’ve got ‘em. Tim also picks up the compost at the restaurant; something that seems so natural, that our trimmings would go to nourish his next crop which we’ll soon be happily buying. One day earlier this year he asked me about the old truck out back, beside the compost bins. ‘It runs,’ I said, ‘It leaks oil and needs snow tires, but it’s carried me over many a mile.’ Two weeks later he made me an offer. A good old fashioned real farm offer and I swear I wouldn’t have taken ten thousand dollars for that truck from anyone. But from Tim, an offer of trade was more than enough.

Sunday June 8th marks the first day of our local farmer’s market in conjunction with the Dandelion Festival and our very own street party VegStock, an all afternoon musical event on a big stage right out in front of the restaurant. Come say hi to all our farmer’s market vendors at their new location between the Court House and the water; stick around for some tunes, some barbecue and some Beau’s Lug Tread beer. And be sure to say hi to Tim and Roshan, and wish them luck with their new truck.