The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories (13 page)

One day I came up with a scheme to power our house on trash. It was in the middle of summer, and I had just sawed up apple-tree branches and stuffed them into bags; now I was dragging the wood out onto the curb. My boyfriend and I live in a Victorian house in the middle of a city, with nothing but a teeny patch of land around it; nonetheless, our yard generates an enormous amount of timber. And now I was throwing it all away. When I looked down the street, I could see yard bags lined up everywhere; our neighbors were dumping potential firewood too. That was when the “aha” moment came: Why not turn my neighborhood into a tree farm?

In a fit of enthusiasm, I convinced my boyfriend that we needed a wood stove. I explained that we could grow and harvest trees on our own postage-stamp yard, and we could trash-pick the rest from the neighbors. He tried to mount arguments, but I was not to be talked out of my idea.

Much drama ensued. A craftsman named Vaclav spent days on his hands and knees in our dining room, using old-world techniques to wrap a slate shield into a corner. Zoning laws had to be consulted; a building inspector needed to be charmed. The stove itself—black, warty-looking, and insanely heavy—had to be
fetched from a faraway store. It was one of the cleanest-burning models I could find, and even contained a catalytic unit that would re-burn smoke.

By mid-winter, the stove squatted in its corner, eating like a hog. We fed it wood we'd collected from our yard and our neighbors'; it scarfed the supply in about two days time. And then we had to buy it a huge stack of firewood, delivered to us by a truck that vomited diesel fumes. Things weren't exactly going as planned. The project had ended up being far more expensive than I can admit, even to myself, and our neighborhood made a lousy tree farm. Still, that stove worked like charm. The downstairs of our 19th-century house used to be so frigid in the winter that we had to wear coats and hats while we cooked. Now we lounged in a ski chalet.

This past summer, I became obsessed with perfecting my scavenging techniques, so that we would get through the winter on free wood. Had I been a farmwoman in the 1850s, I would have tramped out into the forest and collected armloads of dead wood. This being the 21st century, I decided that I would hunt on the Internet. In the Craigslist “free” section, I typed “firewood.” Bingo. I found a woman in a nearby suburb with the remains of an entire
oak in her yard; the tree had been chainsawed into logs, the largest of which probably weighed eight hundred pounds. My boyfriend and I took two carloads of the smallest stuff and barely dented her supply—if we'd owned a truck we could have amassed enough firewood to last for years.

Then my boyfriend and I spent all summer hand-sawing that wood, along with branches from our yard, into stove-sized chunks. We developed really nice-looking biceps and shoulder muscles. It was the sawing—not the amount of wood—that ended up limiting our supply. Why didn't we buy an ax and chop the wood? Because we have more in common with Paul Krugman than Paul Bunyan, and we'd be likely to get into a political debate while we chopped and end up losing fingers or toes. Still, we managed to produce enough wood chunks to get us through the winter.

But how green is our wood heat, really? Our newfangled stove burns about 90 percent cleaner than would its forebears in the Victorian era. When you look up at our steel chimney, blazing against the sky on a cold day, you can't see much smoke, just a tiny smudge of gray. Even so, that smudge does carry a significant dose of lung-killing particles. Experts argue about how much particulate matter a wood stove generates in comparison to diesel, but it's
almost certain that our super-efficient stove is dirtier than an oil burner. The wood stove wins in other ways. It eats trash that comes from our own region. And it is a carbon-neutral energy source, since the CO
₂
produced in wood smoke is absorbed by trees, and so on, in a sustainable cycle. Petroleum fuel, on the other, has to be extracted and hauled thousands of miles; it also pumps carbon into the atmosphere that would otherwise stay locked under the ground.

I latched onto wood heat for its geopolitical appeal; I wanted to find a fuel source that had nothing to do with the war in Iraq. But in the end, the wood itself seduced me. I feel in love with it: the cutting of it and the burning of it.

When you pick up a split piece of oak, it's heavier than you expect; it feels in the hand like an encyclopedia from the library of your childhood. Maple cuts easily; you find yourself wanting to stroke its sinuous skin and surprisingly obscene crotches. Apple bleeds when you saw it; on the inside it's orange and pink as a tequila.

The split pieces flame fast and sloppy, while the logs bake slow and mellow. My boyfriend and I part with each hand-sawed, hand-gathered piece a little reluctantly. And, when the stove really gets
going, we close the pocket doors that divide the living room from the dining room, shutting ourselves in with the stove, to roast like chestnuts.

( a version of this piece was published in
Dwell
magazine)

“This is really the chunky stuff,” Jason Carven says, lifting up a plastic container of brown ooze. “Without a doubt, you've got to pump it through a filter.” We're standing in his warehouse space, surrounded by silver fuel tanks. It's freezing in here. Over many sweaters, Carven wears the kind of canvas jacket favored by guys at gas stations. With his wan, bearded face and flashing spectacles, the 25-year-old looks like a tubercular poet in drag as a mechanic. He is, in fact, the inventor of the Greasecar Vegetable Oil Conversion System, which will turn an ordinary diesel car into an ecologist's dream, available for $795 over the Internet.

He leads me into another room, where he stores the filtered vegetable oil and selects a two-gallon jug. In the parking lot, snow whips in circles like rodeo lassos, stinging my cheeks, getting into my mouth when I talk. Carven heads toward a beat-up diesel VW Rabbit with the vanity plate “VEGPWR.” Popping the hatchback,
he reveals his handiwork: in the tire well sits an aluminum fuel tank. He fills it from his jug, sending up a faint smell of Chinese restaurant.

His car is one of several hundred across the country that has been re-jiggered to run on used cooking oil. In the past two years, the greasecar subculture has sprung up fast as a weed. People are doing it as a radical form of recycling. They're doing it to promote fuels derived from vegetable oil, which produce far fewer greenhouse gases than petroleum. They're doing it as a way to protest Big Oil and wars in the Middle East. And they're doing it for kicks.

Grease is the garage band of alternative energy. It's cheap as a beat-up sound system—all you need is a used diesel car and an extra fuel tank. It's loud: most greasecar drivers plaster their bumpers with stickers that proclaim, “Powered by Veggie Oil.” And it inspires cross-country trips and lots of couch-surfing, because most greasecar drivers feel compelled to show off the awesomeness of their technology, which can turn trashed vegetable oil into 10,000 miles on the odometer.

Now, Justin and I huddle in the cracked seats of his VW, waiting for heat. He flicks a switch to change fuel tanks, and then
we pull out onto the road. We bump along the streets of Florence, Massachusetts, with its Miss Florence Diner and rickety industrial buildings. The VW Rabbit roars, as ancient Rabbits will. Justin has to yell to answer one of my questions. I'm not listening. My mind is choking, sputtering, as I try to convince myself that, yes, we really are being propelled along by the vegetable oil from that jug. We pass a gas station, where salt-smeared cars wait in line for the pump, a sign bearing the price-per-gallon numbers hangs like a prophetic message in the sky. Our gas was free—in more ways than one.

For a second, I flash back to the car that taught me to drive, a gas guzzler with a Deep Purple tape jammed into the 8-track player and three-on-the-tree gearshift. I remember the first time I pulled it onto the highway alone, my hair whipping into my mouth as I watched familiar landmarks fly away. Back then, I wanted to flee from my family. Now, in this VW Rabbit, I feel as if we're escaping from something much, much bigger.

Just past the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, you hang a left onto a narrow road and wind through meadows and apple trees.
Soon you'll find yourself among low-slung cardboard-colored buildings that command a sweeping view of sky and snow. This is Hampshire College, known for its excellent drugs. Here, in the fall of 1999, students wandered into a science classroom and found what looked like the red-painted bones of a dinosaur strewn all over the floor, a disassembled tractor. Their assignment: to rebuild the tractor so that it could rely on green energy. Carven, then a senior at Hampshire, signed up.

One day a Vermont inventor pulled into the school's parking lot, his VW Rabbit idling as it burned oil derived from the jatropha nut, which grows in the tropics. As it turned out, West Africans had been running their diesel generators on nut oil for years. Standard wisdom says that you have to prepare oil for the engine by treating it with lye and methanol. But Carl Bielenberg, who sat at the wheel of the VW that day, didn't bother with the flesh-burning chemicals. While working in Africa, he'd found a way to pump untreated oil straight into his engine.

“I could smell the vegetable oil, and the implications were incredible,” Carven said. Since then, Carven admits, he has thought of little else besides using “straight” vegetable oil—the kind you can eat—as a fuel.

If you store your olive oil in the refrigerator, then you can appreciate the problem. Untreated vegetable oil turns solid in the cold, and even at room temperature it can be pretty gooey. So how do you get that ooze to move through the fuel lines? How do you spray it through a nozzle into the combustion chamber without gumming up the works?

The trick is to install a second fuel tank in your car and a switch on the dashboard. That way, you can start the engine up on conventional diesel while you wait for the veggie oil to heat to about 160 degrees. Once you're sure the veggie oil is hot enough, you flip the switch to change fuel tanks. As long as it's liquefied by heat (and well-filtered), the grease will not damage your engine.

“I became obsessed,” Carven says. While his classmates drifted off to play Ultimate, he holed up in the lab, hacking engines late into the night. By the end of the year he and his cohorts had transformed a van so that it would burn straight vegetable oil. In the summer of 2000, Carven and a buddy took to the highway on a grease-quest, Dumpster-diving behind restaurants for used oil. “You read about Lewis and Clark, and realize it's hard to have that kind of adventure these days, living off the land as you go,” he says.
Carven was promoting not just bio-fuels but also a new way to discover America.

“We stopped in Utica to grease up,” reads an entry from his friend's Web diary. “McDonalds's warned us their grease was too nasty to use (too many bits of burgers and fries). Wendy's was out of grease, so we hit a local place, Lotta Burger. They said we could have all we wanted but as we were checking it out the cook came out and warned us that there may be lots of water in it so we said, ‘bag this,' and hopped over to see the Burger King. We scored 5 gallons.”

After a transcendent summer of Amory-Lovens-meets-Jack-Keroauc adventure, Carven decided to make grease his business. Two years ago, he set up shop, selling the fuel-tank-and-toggle kits. He estimates that he's served about a hundred customers. “People call me and say, ‘I'm leaving on a cross-country trip in one week and I need a kit.'” He goes all out to comply.

Once, two groups pulled into his parking lot, both demanding service, ASAP. Group 1 had decided that they needed to be in the High Sierra music festival by Friday in a truck they bought yesterday. Group 2: The Liberty Cabbage Theater Troupe, touring with a play about genetically modified food. “I stayed up half the night,”
Carven says, in order to convert both vehicles to grease and get them on the road.

Now, he's swiveling in a stained desk chair in his warehouse office, showing me the website that belongs to one of his competitors. They sell cheapo versions of the greasecar kit. “That will melt,” he says, pointing to the plastic tank pictured on the screen. Carven wants you to know that his kits may be more expensive, but there's no way—no possible way—he could cut costs without cutting quality. I believe him. It's 40 degrees in his office and my feet have gone numb. Carven suffers from a wracking cough, brought on by long hours of soldering aluminum in meat-locker temperatures.

“I almost forgot to show you this,” he says, handing me an issue of
People
magazine, folded to Daryl Hannah. The actress has just turned her SUV into a greasecar. “Who sold her the kit?” Carven agonizes, staring at the glossy page. “You'd think Daryl Hannah, of all people, would have been able to afford one of mine.”

(a version of this story appeared in
Details
magazine)