White Bus Black Dog

Our system:
Boat gas tank, $85.
25’ of copper tubing, $20.
Hose clamps, $1.50.
Three-way ball valves, $110.
Labour; crash course in Veggie oil conversion; use of tools and tour of the town; $200 donation.

We drove the two hours to the north shore of Nova Scotia with Muddy and our treasure trove of goodies. We also had about 50 litres of filtered and clean vegetable oil in pails in the back of the truck, hopeful that we would be using it for the drive back.

Perry’s workshop is two aluminum hangars surrounded by a graveyard of machinery: Volkswagens in varying states of disassembly, trailers, lawnmowers, and a shiny Airstream hooked up to a propane tank.

Perry examined our offerings and saw that they were good. The plan became thus:

1. Take turns climbing under the bus in an effort to understand where the fuel lines went and what they did.

2. Hack into the lines that take diesel back and forth between the engine and the gas tank (apparently, there is a line that returns unused diesel from the motor to the tank), and re-jig things so that we can switch to vegetable oil once the engine is warmed up.

3. Make a hole in the floor of the bus to bring the modified fuel lines inside, where the two three-way valves would allow us to make the switch with two swift moves of a free hand.

4. Install the vegetable oil tank behind the drivers seat.

5. Connect everything up and head off into the greasy sunset.

We put the plan into action. While Perry began to reconstruct our fuel lines, he sent us off to make a dinky plywood box that would serve the dual purpose of housing the three way valves and covering the hole in our bus floor. We were barely talented enough to perform this most basic task of carpentry, but at least it gave us something to worry about while a stranger was carving up our future home.

Perry wasn’t a stranger for long. Various male members of his family dropped by to look at the boat he is half-way through building, and stayed to chat about our bus project. Muddy went a little wild on his tether. Perry’s son Jacob stayed after his cousins and uncle left, and he was around for the rest of the afternoon. He was a really lovely guy.

While we were cutting away at some plywood with a jigsaw, Perry came into the shop, and below is an approximation of the conversation that took place:

Perry: “Good news, guys. No need to cut a hole in the floor after all.”

Bethany: “That’s a relief.”

Paul: “Nice.”

Perry: “Yeah. There was already a hole rusted right through the body of your bus, and it happens to be in the exact right place. Come take a look.”

The three of us went out of the shop and into the dusty late-March afternoon. We laid beneath the bus and looked at the hole. It was a big hole. Fortunately, it was the only hole.

While Perry fed the lines up into the hole, we finished our wooden box.

The sun shone, the dust blew, the dog moaned on his tether.

When the tank was all rigged up, 11-year-old Jacob got into the drivers seat and turned the key. After letting it run a couple of minutes, he flipped the switch that would allow the engine to draw veggie oil into its fuel pump. Paul and I rushed around the bus to the exhaust pipe and waited until the chugging engine was pumping the smell of french fries, instead of fossil fuels, into our faces. Success!

As I said, it was a sunny day and Muddy had been tied up to a trailer for five hours (with water and many a friendly pat on the head), so we decided to take him for a walk along the Annapolis Royal waterfront. Perry and Jacob invited us for a tour of their town.

The historical claims in this story shouldn’t be taken as corroborated facts. We didn’t read them in a peer-reviewed academic journal. They are, instead, completely accurate as details of the day we spent in Annapolis Royal, as they were told to us by a long-time resident while we were walking through the town. While we were there, they were true, anyway.

Fundy tides, artist colonies and Canadian History combine to make Annapolis Royal one of the most fascinating towns in Nova Scotia. We drove past “North America’s only tidal power generating station” on the way into town. It was closed for the season, but this photo should give you an idea of what it can do.

We saw scallop boats fishing off the coast, and Perry told us he had worked on two of them. Unfortunately, we didn’t take any pictures that day, but apparently scallop boats are not an unfamiliar sight in that town:

Photo by Tim Van Horn

Photo by Tim Van Horn

The walk along the water was beauty. Fortunately, the tide was out and we didn’t get our feet wet, but Jacob was jumping around the soggy land in his rubber boots quite contentedly.
Perry pointed out across the ocean to a point on the opposite shore where he said was the site of the Habitation, the first continuous European settlement on the continent, started by Samuel de Champlain in 1605.

We kept walking around to Fort Anne, and Perry talked about the dozens of times the fort changed hands between the British and the French. The Fort still flies the flag of both Navies, but apparently at night they have to take the French one down first, in concordance with the rules of the victor.

Perry said that about 500 people live in Annapolis Royal, and that he knows them all, as well as many folks from Granville Ferry, across the water. When we were standing at the Southern-most point, at Fort Anne (which looks like it is northernmost on the aerial photos posted here, because they are flipped around), he said that some of the men killed in the hundred-year-old battles for the fort might still be buried underneath our feet, and that only a few years ago a body had been found dislodged by the tides and found rotting on the shore.

We let Muddy off his leash briefly, and he met a linebacker English bulldog that wanted to play a whole new game of force with him that he wasn’t quite ready for. We finished the walk back at the bus, and Perry and Jacob left us to eat dinner at the pub in town. We drove back to Halifax, tired, but virtually diesel-free.

Tank and hoses