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?
