White Bus Black Dog

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.

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.

Well, we’re filling a school bus outside our door. We’ve got ten and six days to go.
We’ve got old grease buckets stood all over the floor. We’ve got ten and five days to go…

As the days leading up to our bus trip rear up and then roll on by, my thoughts are manic, jumping from task to task, while in my head I keep singing that Shel Silverstein-penned song, “25 Minutes to go,” except with trip-related lyrics.

In my head, Bethany, Johnny Cash, Ed Vedder and I are singing the song together, on a little stage in the back corner of a dive with a linoleum floor and rows of antlers on the wall. There are a bunch of people at the bar, and each time I look up at one of them, he or she yells out something that I need to do before we can leave on our bus trip:

“Install a damn solar panel!”
“Filter some of that there grease!”
“Pack yer bags, sucker!”

But we keep singing, me and my imaginary band mates. It actually sounds pretty good, despite the stress in my voice, which manifests itself in some bum notes here and there. Cash and Vedder have been pretty understanding, conveying their collective annoyance by way of little more than a glare or two now and then.

In sixteen days, Bethany and I are planning to climb onto the bus and hit the road. Sixteen days! May 1st is our planned departure date. While workers are putting paces to asphalt in the beautifully politicized places of the world, we’ll be searching them out, pouring pails of waste vegetable oil into our grease tank as we wheel down the road. It’s exciting, and yet, in my mind May Day has shimmied itself together into one word: mayday!

There is still a hell of a lot to do. Our apartment is a messy, dog hair-infested stink hole. Take a look:

But we know what we need to do. Whether or not there will be enough time to do it all is another story entirely. Here is a brief rundown on the tasks at hand, taken from a list I’ve posted on our kitchen wall (in blood!):

- clean bus
- build bed
- build wind turbine
- buy solar panel
- change motor oil in bus
- get the bus a tune-up
- connect the turbine and solar panel to the battery bank
- finish selling all remaining non-essential possessions
- get an inverter
- clean apartment for incoming sub-letters
- build rocket stove
- finish wage labour
- finish our website/blog
- spray undercoating onto the underside of the bus
- pack
- do all of the other important things we’ve been too busy to remember to list

But all is not lost. Yesterday we scrounged together the remaining items required to make our wind turbine; today we build the rocket stove; I can see the glimmering gold aura around a May landscape at the end of the tunnel of wage labour.

Still, we’ve got ten and six days to go, and before we know it, we’ll be singing about ten and three days … ten and two days … only three days to go! So, I must leave you. It’s time to go spray undercoating onto the underside of the bus. Yee hoo! Sing me out, Mr. Cash:

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