Well, Paul’s last word left too many people in suspense. Although I’m sure his next installment will relieve it with enough information to satisfy everyone’s story hunger, I’ll just say that we did make to Ontario eventually, and have been here visiting some of his family. Today we move on to visit some of mine, and after that we head south.
In a personal victory, I finally convinced someone to stop at the Big Apple, and it was just as good as I had always hoped, although not in a conventional sense. The story goes that, during the first 6 years of my life, we would have to drive quite frequently between Kingston and the Toronto area to visit our grandparents. On this road, the massive structure of an apple is a prominent landmark. I can see why a child would be attracted to such a bold, primary-colour, unusual sight. I, and probably my siblings eventually, would always beg my parents to stop at this massive apple. I wanted to see what was there, because I was sure that such a structure was there for a reason. Every time we passed it, I would beg. And sometimes, my mom or dad would give indications that we might stop. But it was a ruse. We never did. I don’t know if they used reason (”It is just a shop, it is just for show”) to explain this, but my young mind was never satisfied, and the enforced suspense felt like torture. Why wasn’t I allowed to stop at the monstrous apple, if it was such a non-thing? Eventually, my expectations for the grandeur of the place were shattered, but my desire to stop there was not: I didn’t care if it was just a place to buy dessert, I would not be content until I saw that! But we were still never allowed to stop there.
Well, yesterday, with Paul at the wheel, we did. I admit, he wasn’t much more willing than my parents were when I was 6, but at least Paul is more vulnerable to my requests. As co-travelers, we have a lot of say over the route we take together. We have a rule of no refusal: if an adventure (such as a stop at the Big Apple) is suggested, you can’t just say no: you either have to suggest an alternative, or go along and be accepting of the adventure.
The Big Apple is an over-priced gift shop, and it has some caged animals that reminded me of the poor souls locked in the perpetuity of a tourist’s camera flash at Magnetic Hill. But we got some good pie at the gift shop to bring to Paul’s mom and step dad, and I got a picture to prove I finally fulfilled this dream.
But the adventure was not over. The Rule of No refusal paid off, because in the parking lot, we discovered a pristine (or as pristine as used grease can be) grease dumpster. We filled three 16 liter tubs from it, and it was the best grease we have collected so far. Used vegetable oil of prime quality has never been used to fry animals of any kind, and this stuff definitely hadn’t. In the past, the nicest stuff we had was from french fry wagons and fish and chip joints, but vegetable oil used to fry apple fritters and dumplings is, apparently, the best vegetable oil of all. Thank you Big Apple! We are in Oshawa now, visiting and getting ready for our May 19th or 20th departure into the States.
We have some new shots up on the Flickr stream, and breakdowns of Day 3 and Day 4 on their way!
We had been leaking fuel all along, leaving little puddles under the engine wherever we went. A deviant spark might have sent us sky high. Fortunately, it didn’t. But we’ll get to that later. For now, it’ll suffice to say that our bus was leaking fuel all throughout our first, second, and third days on the road, though we didn’t know about the problem until the leak was so bad that a pool of fuel began to gather at my feet as we crawled through a scramble of downtown Montreal rush hour traffic.
That happened on day three, though; there’s a lot of other business to talk about first.
We started our second day beside a small orchard along the bank of a river. We were just north of Fredericton, New Brunswick, a little way back up the road from the train yard that we had found our way into the night before. It was cold, and the windows had steamed up a little overnight. Still, through the moist translucence we could see the sun rising on the opposite bank of the river, making spangles on the water.
A little further along the shore, at the other end of the orchard was a white farmhouse with twin gables and a tin roof. As we got out of the bus and stretched, I noticed a black silhouette come from the house and stride slowly across the yard to the orchard, its movements as slow as the sound of the river. The farmer had seen us when we pulled up on the edge of his or her property the night before, I was sure of that, but we had been left alone to enjoy a little shared piece of the river and orchard.
Later that morning we drank coffee and ate breakfast in a little diner up the road. Then we got back on the highway and continued on toward Edmundston, the city that marks the border between New Brunswick and Quebec. If we’d looked back behind us at the river and orchard, likely we would have seen a puddle of fuel in the place where the bus had sat for the night. But we didn’t look back. It was going to be our first full day on the road, and backward was the one place we did not want to spend time looking.
On the way to Edmundston, we searched for vegetable oil to fuel the bus. We scoured the town of Woodstock, but most of the restaurants there were boarded up, closed either for the season or forever. Several areas of that town had a ghostly feel to them: bits of rubbish swirled in the windier corners; long grass grew up from the cracks in the sidewalks; pale faces stared out at us from laundromat windows.
Somewhere between Woodstock and Edmundston we picked up a woman named Zahra and man named Greg, two hitchhikers on their way home to Montreal. They had just finished a three week hitch through the Maritimes. Both laughed a lot and shared stories about getting garbage thrown at them in Halifax and about thumbing their way through a late-April snow in Cape Breton. They sat on our bed and we talked over the growl of the engine as the bus sped up the number two, passing lonely service stations and gaudy Irving clear cuts, the latter poorly concealed behind a façade of highway side trees.
Sometime in the early evening we rolled into Edmundston, and it was there that we first became aware of our fuel leak. We had just checked out a grease dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant and were about to hop back in the bus when we noticed a puddle of liquid forming under the engine. Both Bethany and I slid underneath to take a look, and we were concerned to see what looked to be vegetable oil dripping from the fuel lines. We were hoping to make it to Quebec City that night, so we still had a long way to travel. We tightened the hose clamps on the fuel lines and decided to keep going. Things could be worse, we thought. And we were right: by day three, things were going to get much worse.
But first we cooked dinner by a dam in downtown Edmundston. We had forgotten to eat lunch, consumed as we were by the hunt for fuel. So, while Zahra and Greg went to scrounge some food, Bethany and I christened our rocket stove. An eye on the pool of fuel spreading beneath the bus, we crouched over our little metal cooking container run through by a stove pipe. The rocket stove worked famously, and our excitement that our homemade cooking contraption worked so well overpowered the fact that the meal itself was pretty bland; we ate some bean, rice and lentil medley, which we won’t be eating again, if we can help it.
After supper, while the sun set over the loud, rushing water of the dam, I gathered some twigs in preparation for the next day’s meal, then filtered some vegetable oil and cleaned up the stove while Bethany washed our bowls down by the dam. She nearly fell in twice, but eventually she made her way back up the bank to the bus with sopping wet pant legs. Both she and the bus dripped onto the gravel.
As you read this entry, you may be wondering why we weren’t more concerned about our fuel leak. In hindsight, I guess we assumed that vegetable oil wasn’t overly flammable. And the leak wasn’t yet very big. So, we drove on.
We left Edmundston around 9:00 pm and continued north, the sun having already set above us, leaving behind it a sky of dark purple. Quickly the highway narrowed from four lanes to two. Our headlights again did a poor job, so I was forced to drive for two hours with the high beams on, speeding along and throwing light on treed ravines while the sky turned from post-sunset purple to black.
It was a busy night on the highway. Transports tore toward us, washing the car in blinding white light and leaving me blinking. Soon everyone else in the bus was asleep: Zahra and Greg up on the bed, Bethany in the passenger seat, and the two dogs beside me on the floor. As we rode along, all of us in the belly of the leaking bus, I began to grow tired. To keep myself awake, I listened to Highway 61 Revisited, eventually putting Tombstone Blues on repeat, though not realizing at the time just how ominous my song selection was, given I was using the music to ward off the spectre of death by highway wreck.
Maybe the fuel leak had gotten worse by this point, or maybe my tiredness made me careless. Whatever the reason, about two hours outside of Edmundston the bus gave a mad lurch and lost power. We were out of vegetable oil. While a convoy of transports bore down on us, I put the bus in neutral and turned quickly onto the shoulder. The lurch had woken everyone up, and as I switched the bus over to diesel, Zahra and the dogs went outside to pee on the side of the highway.
We didn’t have much diesel fuel left in our alternate tank, and we were smack in the middle of a black nowhere. We rode on cautiously, until at about 11:30 when we pulled into a gas station parking lot for the night. We parked at the edge of the lot where the gravel met a farmer’s field. Our two hitchhiking friends went into the restaurant to drink coffee before setting up their tent in the field.
We were glad to be stopped for the night, but now we were leaking diesel fuel, not vegetable oil, so it was with a worried mind that I fell asleep at the end of our second day on the road. There were no garages for miles. I wondered how far we could we make it in a bus that leaked diesel? Was it safe to drive at all?
On Saturday night we slept in the bus in the parking lot of our townhouse complex. We’d packed and cleaned for much of the day, and it had rained intermittently, so the sheets on our bus bed felt damp. We’d been planning to leave that day and the day before, but then Friday slouched into Saturday, and as Saturday crawled toward Sunday we found ourselves surrounded by metal tubing and bolts, staring up from the kitchen floor as the clock prepared to mark midnight. We were trying to assemble our new bike rack. In vain we hammered and prodded and barked at the last safety bolt until eventually we had to admit that the manufacturer had made one of the holes too small. Begrudgingly we took the dogs out to the bus and spent a last cold, damp night in Nova Scotia under the parking lot light.
First thing in the morning we returned the bike rack and bought another. Then, bikes mounted, every millimetre of the bus’s interior crammed, by noon we were ready to go. We crossed the bridge over the harbour and headed up Highway 102, the thread of asphalt that would wind us up toward Truro. Having forgotten to eat breakfast, in Elmsdale we chewed our way through cheese sandwiches on kaiser rolls, while on the horizon, in the direction of the Cobequid Pass, dark clouds formed themselves into a storm. We ploughed head-on into it, the engine growling as it sped us over the diamond crust of rain droplets on the road.
Bethany drove and then I drove. My turn brought us to the Cobequid Pass. There the rain fell harder, the wind charged colder and more menacing, pummelling the windshield, rattling the doors and windows of the bus. Whimpering inside, the dogs paced back and forth in what little room we’d made for them.
Out back, through the double door, the blue tarp that covered the bikes crackled and shook, straining its bungee ties. Twice it loosened itself and nearly blew away. We took it off and decided that the bikes would get wet.
We realized early on how much weight we were asking the engine to deliver through the Cobequid Pass; the bus struggled up the hills, higher and higher, groaning under the strain. I’d give it a run, ramping the old engine up to 110 as we flew down and through the long dips, barrelling through the rain, our windshield wipers whipping like two wagging fingers saying, “No, no.” You’ll never make it, they seemed to be saying. Back and forth the wipers went – no, no. The speedometer would begin to slow as we’d start to climb each incline. Then it would stop completely for a moment and waver, poised to fall around 110, teetering there like a tree just that moment sawed through. Then: 104, 102, 98, 91. Down it would go. The bus would bellow, gasping for power as its speed continued to fall. 88, 85, 82. Other cars pulled out to pass us, ripping through the rain. 80, 75, 73, 70. Down, down, down. No, no, the windshield wipers said. And then, as we neared each subsequent crest, as if by will alone the revs would ease up and the speedometer’s seemingly terminal freefall would level off. We’d make it. Rain and wind would try to beat us back as we’d came over the top of each rise, but we’d push through, breathing sweet relief, only to drop down the other side toward the next climb.
It rained off and on for most the day. We rolled through Amherst and Sackville, then through Moncton and past the small towns that dot the stretch of Highway 2 between Moncton and Fredericton.
It was around nine o’clock at night when we finally decided we’d gone as far as we could for the day. We pulled off of the highway just on the other side of Fredericton. We found a gas station and a restaurant. We’d burned through a lot of waste vegetable oil, so I was excited by the prospect of oil from the restaurant’s kitchen. I hopped off of the bus, walked around back, and was immediately excited by what I saw: there, glistening with the last of the day’s rain, were five fifty-gallon grease containers. Five! Usually restaurants will have two, three at most, but this one had five. I lifted the first lid, but what little oil there was inside was chunky and green. Same with the second and third. By the fourth, my hopes had dwindled, and by the fifth I found that the Acorn Restaurant had no oil that we could use. The prospects for the next day’s travel were looking grim, but we’d cross that bridge the next morning. It was late and dark, and we knew that we needed to find a place to park for the night. As we sat in the lot behind the restaurant, we decided that the “No Corporate Food, No Corporate Coffee” rule we’d made for our trip extended on this particular evening to parking as well. No Petro Canada overnight parking, we said. So we found a small, narrow road not far from the gas station. We turned down it and quickly left the highway glow behind us.
We’d seen a river from the highway, so we drove in search of it. The unnamed road we’d chosen wound along, steering us past small houses and modest farms before narrowing and petering off into a dirt road. We went on. Tree branches scraped the windows and sides of the bus as we passed a few numbered driveways, each of which led off into darkness. We drove further, our headlights doing little to make the way clear. We crept forward, our attempt at slinkiness betrayed by the growl of our diesel engine. Suddenly railway crossing signs rose up on either side of us. Two large white crosses towered above, like the windshield wipers earlier in the day, urging us to turn around; no, no, the signs seemed to say. I wondered if somehow we’d wandered onto railroad tracks. Then, in front of us, out of nowhere there reared up a large house among the trees. Bright lights burned in the windows, and between the house and the separate garage, we saw the moonlit river.
“Is this a driveway?” I asked. “Where are we?”
More train signs were hung on the walls of the house: CN, Grand Trunk, SVI. We edged past the building, the house lights burning so close we could almost touch their warmth.
The road dipped down suddenly then as we rolled past the last corner of the house. I pushed on the brakes and we edged down a curving slope. Then there was the river, stars sparkling on its surface, and on its manicured bank was a train engine on blocks - long, shining in the moonlight and leering out over the water. It was dark, we’d reached the end of the road, and we’d wandered into what seemed like the model train playground of a giant.
Headline photo by Bluebell Railway
Travelling on vegetable grease is a lot slower than traveling with diesel. You have to gather it, filter it, and fill up your tank by hand. You have clean up after yourself after each of these steps. Dogs, also, add time to a trip. They need to go outside to pee, prance, poop and chew grass once in a while. They get antsy. Sometimes, we combine the dog and grease chores. Somewhere near Moncton, NB., we parked on the side of the road to do just this.
While pouring vegetable grease from a bucket into our red secondary tank, we noticed cars driving slowly by, stopping at a certain point in the road, and rolling backwards towards us again. We looked quizzically at them as they passed, first going one way, then the other (I’m sure they wondered about us, too).
Turned out, we had accidentally parked at the top of New Brunswick’s Magnetic Hill, one of the top three natural destinations in Canada. We gathered our pups, drove to the end of the road, stopped at the white post as directed, put ourselves in neutral and ROLLED UPHILL (apparently). Pretty neat, said Paul, who was driving at the time. But the Magnetic Hill attractions do not end there. It isn’t just a muddy road with a definite lack of signage. Past the entrance to the “natural phenomena”, there are gift shops, artificial ponds and a covered bridge. And the words “tourist trap” are taken literally: the maze of one-way streets only leads deeper into the manufactured landscape. Roads lined with magnet monuments weave you through an endless variety of quaint wooden houses selling trinkets, caged animals waiting for a sunny day, and signs that point you back to the beginning of it all. We were lost. But we got out! Don’t go there, it is awful.
We hope to make it to Quebec City by tonight.
As per request, haircut photos:
We are posting these blogs from the Acorn Restaurant, in New Brunswick. Come for the large parking lot, stay for the shower stalls, $1.89 bottomless coffees and wireless internet. 
Passenger seat. It is raining. The engine is too loud to shout over. We can’t find CBC Radio. So, I think.
Politics ruminations, if carried out with concentration over a long enough period of time, often lead to questions of the spiritual. I don’t know if this is typical for other people. If I think long enough about how the Planet Earth could be successfully organized in such a way as to provide enough food, land, water and self-satisfaction to every member of every tribe, nation, family and history, I will soon begin to make plans for how such a vision could be implemented in the shortest amount of time, so as to save as many of those currently dying of poverty, stunted imagination, racism, boredom and wealth from their fast approaching fate. And then I think along the lines of: How do I get us there? And then: Why?
The system I often come up with after the first step of wonderings involves the abolition of capitalism. Capitalism, I believe, is a system that runs smoothly for some, but forces an invisible majority into lifelong misery in order to continue to operate. If there isn’t a pool of people willing to enslave themselves to jobs they hate for the sake of money, there is no way to have a factory: because very few 12 year olds would say, when asked “what do you want to be when you grow up, that they want to spend 8 hours (or 12) a day loading and unloading widgets from a forklift. But many do end up there. And its because in Capitalism there is always the inherent threat of poverty: capitalism only exists because misery exists. If we lived in a country where measures existed that completely protected the unemployed from destitution and social exclusion, we wouldn’t have a working capitalistic system, because nobody would want to work a job they hated if they didn’t have to. This is how capitalism chokes down the broken.
But it also screws up the “winners.” It makes people believe that the only way they can get what they want (security, a family, love, happiness) is by accumulating money, and securing it with purchases that are dependable. With money, one can acquire elements that will allow them to have all the rest. It’s not about building a family that can withstand life’s troubles, it is about paying down a mortgage and securing a home so that the family (that falls apart in the meantime) can have a secure place to live. Decisions are made based on how much something costs and how it fits into the budget: can we afford this vacation right now? Is this house close enough to our jobs, to market conveniences, to be a smart purchase? And so, capitalism takes away humans capacity to think in any terms other than money. The way we use language expresses this: “afford” (the emotional stress), “spend” (the time), “pay” (for hurting me). We use money language to talk about stuff that is purely human. Capitalism shackles the imagination, and the spirit!
So, apart from being built upon a foundation of the creation of poverty, it also inhibits the lives of those who are supposedly “doing well” within the system. If you have enough money, you don’t even need to know how to cook your own food, let alone mend clothes, change the oil in your car, cut your hair, or knit yourself some socks. I don’t know which end of capitalism is worse, the one that breaks your health and your dreams, or the one that lobotomizes your creativity, but both are evidence to me that the whole thing has to go.
But then, of course, as Paul continues to drive on, I wonder: how to get rid of capitalism? You would need to re-educate the children, instill different values, different judgment standards. And quickly, as soon as the ramifications of eliminating something so ingrained in the culture that you drop a coin in a slot to go pee in some places branch off into unimaginable direction, I am thinking: how to do it quickly? This is when the spiritual starts to play in, because revolution is always about life, the loss of it and what it is really supposed to be about.
These are spiritual questions:
What is a human life worth? Do they have a purpose, and if not, why do you care to find a system that is gentler on them than Capitalism is?
Is a human life worth as much as its mind, because you will find many adult minds contaminated by decades of subjugation to paths and patterns that have trained it out of imagining any way free of money, free of pain. Are these minds lost causes? Should their masters then be disposable? Of course, eventually there is the question of killing. Killing is the easiest way to get rid of an idea that doesn’t fit with your own, but is it ever justified? What is the end of a life? What does it mean? And if those questions are unanswerable, what gives one person the right to make the decision for anyone else, about when their chance at life is over?
I can’t imagine a way of overthrowing capitalism that is bloodless. So, the spiritual questions sometimes act as a blockade for my political map-making. But maybe they shouldn’t. Maybe if you can figure out: What is a human life worth? You could have all the answers, anyway.
We are moved out. I killed Facebook. Cut a foot and a half of hair off my head. Bus packed. We are headed to a town near you.
Sorry for the scanty updates these last few days. Our internet was disconnected on May 1, so we’ve been ‘borrowing’ some, but only when the fickle wireless gods deem the day good for thievery.
I’ve been singing “Hit the road, Jerk,” for the past several days, trying to avoid the impulse to just pack my things and go. We’re still in Halifax, struggling with our wind turbine. Who’d have thought that mounting a wind turbine to the top of a bus could be such a difficult task? What’s that you say? Everyone except us knew how tough the task was that we’d set for ourselves? Oh.
Still, we persevere. Our hopes for wind power have risen and fallen like the barometer and the provincial government (Vote Gary Burrill in Colchester-Musquodoboit Valley!) and yet we’re optimistic about the next few days. We leave tomorrow, whether the wind turbine is mounted and wired or not. We’ll bring it with us and mount it when we get a sunny day and friendly mind willing to share with us its knowledge of electricity. We’ve got grease stockpiled, tetra-packed tofu and beans ready to be cooked over our new rocket stove, and we’ll be traveling in the company of a freshly repaired cigarette adapter in the bus, which will allow us to post blog entries during the absence of wind-harnessing devices.
We’ve also got a new website in the works. I’ve been staying up late trying to wrap my head around a new Joomla template, scraping my way through lines of HTML code. It’s a real treat (insert sarcasm here). But it’ll be worth it in the end, when we’ve got a more user-friendly site up and running.
Remember that To Do list we posted back when we first launched this website? Well, believe it or not, the only things left unchecked on it are “Build wind turbine” and “Clean house,” and a lot has already been done toward the completion of both. So, today we’ll try our best to complete these last few tasks before hitting the road tomorrow. Look for us at a truck stop or cheap campground near you. We’ll be the ones with greasy clothes and waste vegetable oil seeping from our pores.
This summer, we are going to attempt to cook entirely on a rocket stove, a device that consumes fuel so efficiently and distributes heat so precisely that you can boil a pot of water using little more that twigs and cardboard. If we get adventurous, we might try to build a solar oven at some point, but we are steering clear of the propane stoves and open pits cooking.
If you already have the tools, you can build your own rocket stove for less than $10.
You will need:
- A large metal container with a tight lid (for the outer body. square or cylindrical, doesn’t matter. Ours is an antique coffee container, a bit bigger than you would need)
- A stove pipe and and pipe elbow, 4″ diameter (this is the standard size. They are cheap at a hardware store, but also perhaps available at junk stores, lots or condo developments after dark)
- an empty tin can that measures at least 7″ around (an apple juice can would be ideal )
- ashes, for insulation (quantity will depend on the size of your outer container)
- an old over rack, or barbecue rack
Tools:
- tin snips
- measuring tape
- metal file
- thick gloves
- marker or pencil
- a hammer and chisel, or a hammer and nail
- can opener/serrated knife/creativity
1. Take the metal container and pick a side. If you have a cylindrical container, just start anywhere. Measure two inches up from the bottom and mark the spot. This measurement doesn’t have to be precise: decide what distance from the floor looks better on the metal container you are building on.
2. Lay container on its side with the marked side up. Place the elbow on the side of your container, lining it up with the mark. You are going to draw the 4″ perimeter of the stovepipe on the side of your box, centred in between the two sides of the box and a couple of inches above the floor of the stove.
3. Put the chisel, or the nail, on the circle that you drew on the side of the box. Start the hole by hammering the chisel through the side. Pry the tip of your tin snips in there and cut the circle out. You might want the gloves for this step.
4. Measure A and calculate B (A/2=B). This will be the first piece to cut off the stovepipe. Make sure the pipe is open, like in the picture below this step. Starting at the crimped end, measure B + 2″ up the length of stovepipe, and mark it. Make a line across the pipe at this mark. Use the tin snips to cut on this line (for us, it was a length of about 7″).
5. Fit the pipe together so it makes a cylinder. File down thee sharp tin. Push the crimped end into the elbow. This will be the bottom of your stove pipe.
6. Insert this “elongated” elbow into your tin container, and fit the long end through the hole you cut in Step 3. You need to do this in order to measure how tall to make the chimney of your stove. You might also have to file or snip down the hole in the big container, if the pipe doesn’t fit through. It should be snug, though.
Top view:
7. With the elbow resting in its hole in the stove, fit the other piece of stove pipe together (the length that was left over) to make a cylinder. lower it onto the upturned piece of elbow, and fit it on securely, but not too tight. Now, measure up this pipe and mark it 1″ BELOW the rim of the container. The chimney has to end while still inside the big container, so that when the pot sits on it it doesn’t block the airflow.
8. Take the chimney piece out, collapse it so that is it flat again, mark a line at the height of the mark you made, and cut with the tin snips. This is your chimney piece. Put it back into the elbow, and this time push it in good.
9. Set the body of the stove aside, for now. Open both ends of the tin can with the can opener. Use your tin snips to cut down the side, and use the hammer or your bare hands to flatten it into a rectangle. You need to make a t-shirt shape like the one in the pictures, with 1″ tabs poking out on either end of a 4.2″ wide rectangular piece. This piece will fit inside the bottom part of the stove pipe, to make a platform onto which you will be putting your kindling. It allows airs to flow up under the flame more easily. Like this:
I say to make it 4.2″ wide, even though the pipe is only 4″, because you will need to make sure it fits in tightly, and it is better to start with it too big than too small. Try it in, and trim some off the sides until it fits into the stovepipe perfectly.
10. Now, the lid. If your lid fits OVER the lip of your container, you are in luck: just cut of the edges so that the lid is the same size as the mouth of the container, cut a stovepipe hole in the centre of it, and its done. It will eventually sit inside the container, an inch or so below the top of the chimney.
IF, however, you lid was like ours, and is smaller than the body of the container, then you’ll have to make some modifications. We cut the top of the box to, then cut the end off of that, filed down all the sharp edges, and improvised an extra attachment from spare stovepipe material that would sit underneath the main lid and fit more snugly around the chimney. Hopefully, you don’t have to do this.
11. Fill your container with ashes, packing them snugly around the chimney pipe. We got 6 grocery bags full of ashes from a woman in Waverley. She has a wood stove and saves the ashes to use in composting, but she had extra. You will need ALOT of ashes if you have a big beast of a container like ours. Keep the inside chamber free of ashes.
12. Put your lid on, over the stovepipe (you did cut that hole, right?), and packing down the ashes, until the lid rests just below the top of the chimney. As you can see, we don’t quite have enough ashes to fill it yet, so our lid is resting a little low.
13. Set the oven rack resting on the lid, or on the sides of the stove.
14. Light a fire at the ends of some long, slender sticks. Push them into the stovepipe entry, on the top side of the tin can divider. Push the flame in to the end. They will burn slow, and the heat will be concentrated by the insulated chimney and the small space. Put a pot of water on the oven rack and see how long it takes to boil. Hopefully, not too long! As the sticks burn, you keep pushing them in so that the flame is always burning at the elbow bend.
And… bam! You have a rocket stove. Now you can celebrate your achievement.
