Burbling bioTrekker

bioTrekker in Tampa!

2009-01-20T09:02:00.000-08:00

Hey everyone,

I too agree that this blog has fallen into disuse the past few months, but I'll try to fill in some of the details as time and my new job at The University of Florida permit. I just spent a week at the FRVTA (Florida Recreational Vehicle Trade Association) Super Show (the largest in the US), and so I'm once again recharged with a desire to move forward in the promotion of biodiesel as well as other alternative energy solutions. I was impressed by the desire of many of the attendees along with some of the exhibitors to continue to think green and all that entails for the RV Industry.

Back at the University of Florida, I took a 4pm to Midnight shift Manager's job at the Reitz Student Union to allow me to make some money during this economic downturn as well as give me a chance to meet with Faculty, Staff, and Students at UF who were interested in talking about alternatives to fossil fuel. Following one of the mantras of the Sixties to; Think Globally, Act Locally, I'm in the initial stages of discussion of how to make biofuel-producing Algae from waste treatment water and then use that biofuel to run local vehicles like the Gainesville School Buses and the RTS (Regional Transit System) Commuter Buses. I'll keep posting and promoting this idea, and any help you out there in cyberspace could give me would be very much appreciated.

That's all for now, take care and all the best!

Michael

Ideas for Obama

2009-01-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

So this blog has fallen into neglect, we are mostly using the blog at soltrekker.org these days, but I thought I'd update here as well for a while.

Among our latest activities is making a suggestion on the Obama administration change.gov. Please see our posting and vote for it if you think it's something that the administration should consider. Click here for the link.

And make your own suggestions as well! It seems like there aren't a lot of specific ideas being proposed, so if you have one that is even half-way thought-out, it probably has a good shot at getting noticed.

Best wishes for a wonderful 2009.

Makin' BioDiesel and then onto Vermont!

2008-06-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a busy two weeks it's been. After stopping in Atlanta to chat with The Weather Channel and then a quick stop to see an old college friend in Charlotte, I made it to a little town just southeast of Greensboro, NC, to find out first hand how biodiesel is made. The co-op is Piedmont Biodiesel (http://www.biofuels.coop), and I met some great people 'Saving the Planet, one French Fry at a Time'. There were staff, interns and local coop members eager to convert a lot of dark brown sludge into gallons of clear, yellow liquid that can power diesel engines. After two days of helping out, I received some fuel in payment and on up the road I went, to where I was raised... Vermont.

I arrived in the Green Mountain State just in time for a Memorial Day Weekend Parade, where I heard shouts of praise and cheers as the bioTrekker went smokelessly down the parade route, especially after following a group of military trucks belching black clouds of carbon monoxide as they shifted gears. I want to Thank Peter at Ehler's RV in Essex Jct., VT, for the opportunity to once again show off the bioTrekker, looking cleaner and greener than ever.

My final stop of this entry was a Reunion at my alma mater, The University of Vermont. For three days I explained how the bioTrekker was an educational platform to promote the use of biodiesel and other alternative energy solutions as well as ways to help save the environment starting right in your own home. While I was there, I met Gioia Thompson, Director, Office of Sustainability at UVM, who invited me to help her out this summer and fall to promote causes that impact positively on the environment here in Vermont, so check back for future updates!

Michael

East Coast bioTrekker

Michael's Interview with Forecast Earth

2008-05-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Hey Trekkers,

On the bioTrekker's current northern trek up the eastern seaboard, I had an opportunity to visit The Weather Channel (TWC) offices in Atlanta on May 15th. Thanks to a great contact Ty had set up with TWC, I was able to schedule this visit and give an interview when I arrived. I had a bit of a problem finding the place as my GPS could not (or would not, grrr...), find the exact location, but after an hour of driving around the neighborhood, I saw three satellite dishes and thought, "This must be the place."

I met Dedra, who did the interview and Rodney, the cameraman, at 9 a.m., and they made me feel very comfortable from the onset. We spoke about the bioTrekker and Rodney took some great 'B roll' of the motor coach for a future segment on TWC's 'Forecast Earth'.

When I find out the broadcast date, I'll let y'all know!

Michael
mike@biotrekker.com

bioTrekker gets a little bit of 'Sol'

2008-05-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

The 'Beast in the East' bioTrekker got a little more 'Eco-friendly' today as a solar panel was installed to take this Trekker 'off the grid' as it travels around the eastern U.S. this summer.

The 80 watt Sunforce Solar Charger Kit with it's ability to absorb light all day, even in cloudy or rainy weather, is another step I've taken to make the bioTrekker more fuel efficient, as I won't have to run the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit, which runs on biodiesel), to charge the batteries, as well as not having to plug in the RV either.

I'll continue to add future enviro-upgrades as funds, or hopefully sponsorships, start coming in. Although I may not be able to include all the features Ty has planned for the 'Best in the West' solTrekker, I'll follow his lead as I'm able.

He's a great mentor.

Michael

P.S. Check back later this month as I may have a few more surprises in store!

Earth Day 2008

2008-04-23T05:17:00.000-07:00

Hey Trekker Fans,

Michael Wolbach, the east coast bioTrekker here. This is my first post, so be patient with me as I try blogging on a regular basis. I'm in Orlando, Florida at the present time, but I'll be traveling north in just a few weeks, so stay tuned...

To kick off the 2008 Trekker travel season here the eastern U.S., I participated in an Earth Day presentation at Hunter's Creek Middle School in Orlando, Florida. The 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science classes rotated out during the day to listen to me talk about my 'Reeducation Upside-Down Pyramid', which is a compilation of waste management terms as well as my own research as an alternative to the buy, use, and throw away society which our world, for the most part, has become.

The young students were very attentive and a few of them asked some very poignant questions, including the debate about using food stocks like corn and soybeans to create fuels like biodiesel and ethanol verses using them to feed an ever growing and hungry population. Another concern was the overuse of water bottles and other 'one time' use products made from petroleum-based plastics verses creating 'vegetable-based' products, along with creating more reusable types.

All in all it was a wonderful day, with eager and creative minds thinking of ways to reduce not only their own personal carbon footprint, but those of their family, school, community, state, country and world, a real 'Think Globally, Act Locally', attitude that we're going to need to help foster in the coming months and years.

Raising the Roof

2008-04-10T13:14:00.000-07:00

No, the roof is not on fire, but it might as well be. We were gifted our first big surprise on the SolTrekker build last week when we found out that the entire roof is pretty much crapola. And by crapola, I mean waterlogged plywood. It turns out that if you have a Filon roof (also a synonym for crapola) you should be sealing it at least once every two years, something that the original owner wasn't aware of, either. If you don't, you get lots of pinhole leaks that slowly turn your roof to soggy mushrooms even if you never see any evidence of water damage. It's only when your unsuspecting friend steps through the roof while helping you to remove an awning that you get to experience the joy of discovery. Maybe they should just make the roofs out of fungus right from the start?

Anyway, thanks to the awesome techs at Monaco Coach, we're getting a new roof in record time, but it still sets the project back a few weeks. We're still aiming to be at the Greener Homes and Gardens Show in Portland on May 17, but it'll be tight. Stay tuned.

A Little Help From My Friends

2008-03-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Maybe you already read the post on the homepage, but I wanted to post here, too. I was really inspired to have such a good showing at the recent work parties we've had. Old friends and new friends came out to help with the tedious work of taking old materials out, with the promise of receiving nothing in return except for beverages and gratitude.

My thanks do go out to Adam, an expert in awning removal, my man Jerod, Joe "from Germany", Brad from Green Mountain Energy, Erin and Patrick who put out an awesome magazine -- Natural Awakenings, and of course, the lovely Allison.

Thanks to their help, we've almost got the rig completely stripped outside and inside. The next step is to have it painted and have solar panels installed in April. In the meantime, we'll be working on detailed design and talking to potential sponsors and partners. At this stage, it looks like mid to late July is a realistic goal for launching the SolTrekker.

Shooting Video

2008-03-08T13:05:00.000-08:00

As if we don't have enough projects with the rebuild of the latest 'trekker, I decided to add a few more. For the latest project, I've corralled my good friend and TV news photographer Michael Brandenberger to begin shooting some video of the build. The idea is to produce a 15-minute pilot for a program on the 'trekker project and travels. We'll see where it goes, but if nothing else, we'll have some good stuff for any potential television coverage or just old fashioned YouTube material. Just thought I'd share the idea and some video stills of me sitting on the pot. -- Ty

Practical Environmentalist

2008-03-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

I was invited to provide a guest post on biodiesel at the blogsite of The Practical Environmentalist last week and just wanted to take the time to highlight the website and the guy behind it. The Practical Environmentalist is a really topical site with a ton of information, and it's produced by Lars Hundley, a fellow sustaino-geek, who runs a business called Clean Air Gardening. Clean Air has some very cool stuff for gardeners, and I can testify, because I've been using their Bokashi Kitchen Composter and their Low-Flow Roadrunner shower head, which waits until the water is warm enough before producing a spray. Anyway, if you're in the market for fun gardening stuff and green housewares, check them out. If you missed it on the homepage, click here for the biodiesel post. -- Ty

Conferences and New Projects

2008-02-15T10:41:00.000-08:00

Michael and I made the long trip from Oregon to Florida in time to make presentations on the University of Florida campus for Focus the Nation, as well as the SBS and NBB biodiesel conferences in Orlando. There were just a few minor hiccups along the way, like a windshield nearly blown off in raging California windstorms, a run in with the locals of "cancer alley" in Louisiana, and a fun day getting towed because someone airlocked the fuel filter while checking it. Of course, details will follow in longer articles.

I just returned from a quick trip to Spokane, Washington and back to Portland with the newest 'trekker mothership. I love her already. She doesn't exactly sprint up hills and her "horn" is probably one of the most unusual sounds I've ever heard, but she runs smooth and steady. And she's already been christened "Sunny" because of the bright beautiful day we had for the maiden voyage, and because she's destined to make good use of solar power.

In the next few weeks we will start the process of transforming Sunny into the Eco-RV she was born to be. There's a lot of work ahead, and the changes will be dramatic, so it's an exciting time. I'll be posting build photos as we progress.

--Ty

Marathon from Oregon to Florida

2008-01-24T11:03:00.000-08:00

It's not like we'll be running, but we'll probably be pretty tired when we arrive. This Saturday Michael and I will be taking the 'trekker down from Oregon to Florida, accompanied by a few rideshare riders. We'll be hitting California on Saturday, Arizona on Sunday, Texas on Monday and aim to hit Orlando by Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. We'll be taking that route to avoid snow and mountain passes. If you see us chugging by on the freeway, give us a wave.

Our destination is the Sustainable Biodiesel Summit and National Biodiesel Conference in Orlando, Florida. For those who are interested, we'll have some reports and photos when the conference ends on February 5. I'm excited to see all of the friends made at last year's conference in San Antonio, like the crew pictured here, and it will be good fun to introduce Michael into the mix.

Peace from the road!

Best Holiday Wishes

2007-12-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

There is something different about this Christmas for me. And it's more than just a different year in a different place -- or maybe it's less. I made an effort to simplify things this year, and it seems that a lot of people in my life did the same. I remember something my mother said to me last year after participating in the traditional holiday rush to the mall. She said, "It just leaves you feeling empty."

I'm not sure if everyone has felt that way, but in the past, I have. There's something about rushing through the process of giving that somehow cheapens it. So this year, quite a few people that they didn't really "need" me to get them anything for the holidays. "Donate to charity," some said. Or, "getting to spend time with family is enough."

I sense a trend, at least in my own sphere of relationships, toward a simplified, more intimate and slower way of carrying out our traditions. I realized, as I was making an oil painting for my niece instead of buying her a plastic toy, that it takes more time to do it this way, and maybe that's why it doesn't seem to be the norm. But it was also more relaxing and left me feeling full instead of empty.

We're not abandoning our traditions, just tweaking them. We still brought a Christmas tree inside, but this year, we decided to buy a live tree. We could have headed out to a local nursery to pick one up, but I found a very cool service here in Portland called The Original Living Christmas Tree Company (www.livingchristmastrees.org/) and they deliver live Christmas trees two weeks before Christmas and then pick them up on New Year's Day, to be delivered to a local company or regional park at a discount.

We didn't have any Christmas ornaments, so we made our own out of three or four scratched CDs and DVDs that would have otherwise gone to the garbage can. (I'm especially proud of the star.) We didn't have lights for the tree, so we purchased some LEDs from a hardware store just down the block. It's great to see LEDs coming into the mainstream. It's true that they're more expensive than incandescents, but the string we purchased will last for 20 years or more, the bulbs are unbreakable and the energy savings will pay for the string over time. They are 98 percent more efficient than traditional lights. What would cost $100 in electricity at average rates with traditional incandescents, will cost $1.83 with LEDs. I'm really looking forward to the day when the residential lighting aisle's have just as many LED options.

So yes, the tree is smaller than most and there aren't as many gifts underneath it, but the simplicity feels damn good. There aren't any lights on the outside of the house to spread holiday cheer, but I've had enough time to smile at people on the street, and that seems to be working just as well.

May the season find you happy and healthy and in the best of company, surrounded by warmth and light.

The New Ship

2007-12-12T11:40:00.000-08:00

Okay, so the new ship is really an old ship, but you're not even going to recognize her when we're finished. I just purchased this 1994 Safari Trek diesel from a gentleman in Spokane, Washington, who also happens to be investing his wealth into creating a sustainable, earth-bermed home. In February, we will bring her to Portland to begin the green make-over.

Anyhow, this rig only has 7,500 miles on her (I know, that's the beauty of buying from seasonal RVers), and at 27-feet, she is seven feet shorter than the first biotrekker, about 10,000 pounds lighter and also about two feet shorter in vertical height. She gets between 12 and 17 mpg, although her top speed is only about 70mph. She's boxy, but cute.

For us, it's a more sustainable move that makes sense. It feels good to buy used and breathe new life into an RV that has tons of potential. We will be gutting most of the interior and either painting the exterior or wrapping it in graphics similar to bioTrekker1. The big changes will come when we add things like a large solar PV system, LED lighting, rainwater harvesting, solar thermal heating, better insulation, etc. Of course, the progress will be posted.

Revolution Green

2007-12-08T21:11:00.000-08:00

Just caught the Oregon screening of the latest biodiesel documentary, Revolution Green. It's definitely worth a viewing and would be especially good for those who are new to the scene. The website is: http://www.revolutiongreen.com/.

There is a movement within the biodiesel industry to focus on sustainable production (or at the very least to move in that direction) and the documentary focuses on that movement and the people who were very important in its creation. Defining 'sustainable' can get a bit tricky, but it primarily has to do with localized production and distribution of a fuel, rather than one giant, centralized production area, which is pretty much the model we have now.

How to get 100 mpg ... now

2007-11-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

This article blew my mind. I usually don't include other content than my own here, but this a must read. Here's the link: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/motorhead-messiah.html

The article is below.

--TA

Motorhead Messiah

Johnathan Goodwin can get 100 mpg out of a Lincoln Continental, cut emissions by 80%, and double the horsepower. Does the car business have the guts to follow him?

From: Issue 120 | November 2007 | Page 74 | By: Clive Thompson

“Check it out. It's actually a jet engine," says Johnathan Goodwin, with a low whistle. "This thing is gonna be even cooler than I thought." We're hunched on the floor of Goodwin's gleaming workshop in Wichita, Kansas, surrounded by the shards of a wooden packing crate. Inside the wreckage sits his latest toy--a 1985-issue turbine engine originally designed for the military. It can spin at a blistering 60,000 rpm and burn almost any fuel. And Goodwin has some startling plans for this esoteric piece of hardware: He's going to use it to create the most fuel-efficient Hummer in history.

Goodwin, a 37-year-old who looks like Kevin Costner with better hair, is a professional car hacker. The spic-and-span shop is filled with eight monstrous trucks and cars--Hummers, Yukon XLs, Jeeps--in various states of undress. His four tattooed, twentysomething grease monkeys crawl all over them with wrenches and welding torches.

Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

He laughs. "Think about it: a 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and does zero to 60 in five seconds!"

This is the sort of work that's making Goodwin famous in the world of underground car modders. He is a virtuoso of fuel economy. He takes the hugest American cars on the road and rejiggers them to get up to quadruple their normal mileage and burn low-emission renewable fuels grown on U.S. soil--all while doubling their horsepower. The result thrills eco-evangelists and red-meat Americans alike: a vehicle that's simultaneously green and mean. And word's getting out. In the corner of his office sits Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 Jeep Wagoneer, which Goodwin is converting to biodiesel; soon, Neil Young will be shipping him a 1960 Lincoln Continental to transform into a biodiesel--electric hybrid.

His target for Young's car? One hundred miles per gallon.

This is more than a mere American Chopper--style makeover. Goodwin's experiments point to a radically cleaner and cheaper future for the American car. The numbers are simple: With a $5,000 bolt-on kit he co-engineered--the poor man's version of a Goodwin conversion--he can immediately transform any diesel vehicle to burn 50% less fuel and produce 80% fewer emissions. On a full-size gas-guzzler, he figures the kit earns its money back in about a year--or, on a regular car, two--while hitting an emissions target from the outset that's more stringent than any regulation we're likely to see in our lifetime. "Johnathan's in a league of his own," says Martin Tobias, CEO of Imperium Renewables, the nation's largest producer of biodiesel. "Nobody out there is doing experiments like he is."

Nobody--particularly not Detroit. Indeed, Goodwin is doing precisely what the big American automakers have always insisted is impossible. They have long argued that fuel-efficient and alternative-fuel cars are a hard sell because they're too cramped and meek for our market. They've lobbied aggressively against raising fuel-efficiency and emissions standards, insisting that either would doom the domestic industry. Yet the truth is that Detroit is now getting squeezed from all sides. This fall, labor unrest is brewing, and after decades of inertia on fuel-economy standards, Congress is jockeying to boost the target for cars to 35 mpg, a 10 mpg jump (which is either ridiculously large or ridiculously small, depending on whom you ask). More than a dozen states are enacting laws requiring steep reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, gas prices have hovered around $3 per gallon for more than a year. And European and Japanese carmakers are flooding the market with diesel and hybrid machines that get up to 40% better mileage than the best American cars; some, such as Mercedes's new BlueTec diesel sedans, deliver that kind of efficiency and more horsepower.

General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, in short, have a choice: Cede still more ground--or mount a technological counterattack.

Goodwin's work proves that a counterattack is possible, and maybe easier than many of us imagined. If the dream is a big, badass ride that's also clean, well, he's there already. As he points out, his conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts and snapping them together in clever new ways. "They could do all this stuff if they wanted to," he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. "The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use." He doesn't have an engineering degree; he didn't even go to high school: "I've just been messing around and seeing what I can do."

All of which raises an interesting possibility. Has this guy in a far-off Kansas garage figured out the way to save Detroit?

America's most revolutionary innovations, it has long been said, sprang from the ramshackle dens of amateurs. Thomas Edison was a home-schooled dropout who got his start tinkering with battery parts; Chester Carlson invented the photocopier in his cramped Long Island kitchen. NASA, desperate for breakthroughs to help it return to the moon, has set up million-dollar prizes to encourage private citizens to come forward with any idea, no matter how crazy. As the theory goes, only those outside big industries can truly reinvent them.

Goodwin is certainly an outsider. He grew up in a dirt-poor Kansas family with six siblings and by age 13 began taking on piecework in local auto shops to help his mother pay the bills. He particularly enjoyed jamming oversized engines into places no one believed they'd fit. He put truck engines inside Camaros, Grand Nationals, and Super Bees; he even put a methanol-fueled turbocharger on a tiny Yamaha Banshee four-wheeler. "We took that thing from 35 horsepower to 208," he recalls. "It was crazy. We couldn't put enough fins on the back to keep it on the ground." After dropping out of school in the seventh grade, he made a living by buying up totaled cars and making them as good as new. "That," he says, "was my school."

Along the way, Goodwin also adopted two views common among Americans, but typically thought to be in conflict: a love of big cars and a concern about the environment. He is an avid, if somewhat nonideological, environmentalist. He believes global warming is a serious problem, that reliance on foreign oil is a mistake, and that butt-kicking fuel economy is just good for business. But Goodwin is also guiltlessly addicted to enormous, brawling rides, precisely the sort known to suck down Saudi gasoline. (I spied one lonely small sports car in the corner of his garage, but he confessed he has no plans to work on it right now.) When he picked me up from my hotel, he drove a four-door 2008 Cadillac Escalade XL that should have had its own tugboat. He parallel parked it in one try.

If Goodwin is an artist, though, his canvas has been the Hummer. His first impression of the thing was inauspicious. In 1990, he bought an H1 in Denver and began driving it back to Kansas. Within 50 miles, the bolts in the transmission shook loose, forcing him to stop to fix it. "By the time I made it home, after three roadside repairs, I pretty much knew that the Hummer was not all it should be," he told me. He didn't think much of the 200 horsepower engine, either, which did "zero to 60 in two days. It was a piece of junk."

So Goodwin decided to prove that environmentalism and power could go together--by making his new lemon into exhibit A. First, he pulled the gas engine so he could drop in a Duramax V8, GM's core diesel for large trucks. Diesel technology is crucial to all of Goodwin's innovations because it offers several advantages over traditional gasoline engines. Pound for pound, diesel offers more power and torque; it's also inherently more efficient, offering up to 40% better mileage and 20% lower emissions in engines of comparable size. What's more, many diesel engines can easily accept a wide range of biodiesel--from the high-quality stuff produced at refineries to the melted chicken grease siphoned off from the local KFC.

"Think about it," Goodwin laughs. "A 5,000-pound vehicle that gets 60 miles to the gallon and will do zero to 60 in five seconds!"

Putting a diesel engine in the Hummer, however, required Goodwin to crack GM's antitheft system, which makes it a pain to swap out the engine. In that system, the engine communicates electronically with the body, fuel supply, and ignition; if you don't have all the original components, the car won't start. Goodwin jerry-rigged a set of cables to trick the engine into believing the starter system had broken, sending it into "fail-safe mode"--a backdoor mechanism installed at the factory. (At one point in his story, Goodwin wanders over to a battered cardboard box in the corner of the garage and hauls out an octopuslike tangle of wires--"the MacGyver," his hacking device. "I could have sold this for a lot of money on eBay," he chuckles.)

Once he'd picked the car's lock, Goodwin installed the Duramax and a five-speed Allison--the required transmission for a Duramax, which also helps give it race-car-like control and a rapid take off. After five days' worth of work, the Hummer was getting about 18 mpg--double the factory 9 mpg--and twice the original horsepower. He drove it over to a local restaurant and mooched some discarded oil from its deep fryer, strained the oil through a pair of jeans, and poured it into the engine. It ran perfectly.

But Goodwin wanted more. While researching alternative fuels, he learned about the work of Uli Kruger, a German who has spent decades in Australia exploring techniques for blending fuels that normally don't mix. One of Kruger's systems induces hydrogen into the air intake of a diesel engine, producing a cascade of emissions-reducing and mileage-boosting effects. The hydrogen, ignited by the diesel combustion, burns extremely clean, producing only water as a by-product. It also displaces up to 50% of the diesel needed to fuel the car, effectively doubling the diesel's mileage and cutting emissions by at least half. Better yet, the water produced from the hydrogen combustion cools down the engine, so the diesel combustion generates fewer particulates--and thus fewer nitrogen-oxide emissions.

"You can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."

"It's really a fantastic chain reaction, all these good things happening at once," Kruger tells me. He has also successfully introduced natural gas--a ubiquitous and generally cheap fuel--into a diesel-burning engine, which likewise doubles the mileage while slashing emissions. In another system, he uses heat from the diesel engine to vaporize ethanol to the point where it can be injected into the diesel combustion chambers as a booster, with similar emissions-cutting effects.

Goodwin began building on Kruger's model. In 2005, he set to work adapting his own H1 Hummer to burn a combination of hydrogen and biodiesel. He installed a Duramax in the Hummer and plopped a carbon-fiber tank of supercompressed hydrogen into the bed. The results were impressive: A single tank of hydrogen lasted for 700 miles and cut the diesel consumption in half. It also doubled the horsepower. "It reduces your carbon footprint by a huge, huge amount, but you still get all the power of the Duramax," he says, slapping the H1 on the quarter panel. "And you can feed it hydrogen, diesel, biodiesel, corn oil--pretty much anything but water."

Two years ago, Goodwin got a rare chance to show off his tricks to some of the car industry's most prominent engineers. He tells me the story: He was driving a converted H2 to the SEMA show, the nation's biggest annual specialty automotive confab, and stopped en route at a Denver hotel. When he woke up in the morning, there were 20 people standing around his Hummer. Did I run over somebody? he wondered. As it turned out, they were engineers for GM, the Hummer's manufacturer. They noticed that Goodwin's H2 looked modified. "Does it have a diesel engine in it?"

"Yeah," he said.

"No way," they replied.

He opened the hood, "and they're just all in and out and around the valves and checking it out," he says. They asked to hear it run, sending a stab of fear through Goodwin. He'd filled it up with grease from a Chinese restaurant the day before and was worried that the cold morning might have solidified the fuel. But it started up on the first try and ran so quietly that at first they didn't believe it was really on. "When you start a diesel engine up on vegetable oil," Goodwin says, "you turn the key, and you hear nothing. Because of the lubricating power of the oil, it's just so smooth. Whisper quiet. And they're like, 'Is it running? Yeah, you can hear the fan going.'"

One engineer turned and said, "GM said this wouldn't work."

"Well," Goodwin replied, "here it is."

Goodwin's feats of engineering have become gradually more visible over the past year. Last summer, Imperium Renewables contacted MTV's show Pimp My Ride about creating an Earth Day special in which Goodwin would convert a muscle car to run on biodiesel. The show chose a '65 Chevy Impala, and when the conversion was done, he'd doubled its mileage to 25 mpg and increased its pull from 250 to 800 horsepower. As a stunt, MTV drag-raced the Impala against a Lamborghini on California's Pomona Raceway. "The Impala blew the Lamborghini away," says Kevin Kluemper, the lead calibration engineer for GM's Allison transmission unit, who'd flown down to help with the conversion. Schwarzenegger, who was on the set that day, asked Goodwin on the spot to convert his Wagoneer to biodiesel.

Observers of Goodwin's work say his skill lies in an uncanny ability to visualize a mechanical system in precise detail, long before he picks up a wrench. (Goodwin says he does much of his mental work during long drives.) "He has talent unknown to any mortal," says Mad Mike, Pimp My Ride's host. "He has this ability to see things so exactly, and I still don't know how he does it."

For his part, Goodwin argues he's merely "a problem solver. Most people try to make things more complicated than they are." He speaks of the major carmakers with a sort of mild disdain: If he can piece together cleaner vehicles out of existing GM parts and a bit of hot-rod elbow grease, why can't they bake that kind of ingenuity into their production lines? Prod him enough on the subject and his mellowness peels away, revealing a guy fired by an almost manic frustration. "Everybody should be driving a plug-in vehicle right now," he complains, in one of his laconic engineering lectures, as we wander through the blistering Kansas heat to a nearby Mexican restaurant. "I can go next door to Ace Hardware and buy a DC electric motor, go out to my four-wheel-drive truck, remove the transmission and engine, bolt the electric motor onto the back of the transfer case, put a series of lead-acid batteries up to 240 volts in the back of the bed, and we're good to go. I guarantee you I could drive all around town and do whatever I need, go home at night, and hook up a couple of battery chargers, plug one into an outlet, and be good to go the next day.

"Detroit could do all this stuff overnight if it wanted to," he adds.

In reality, Goodwin's work has begun to influence some of Detroit's top auto designers, but through curious and circuitous routes. In 2005, Tom Holm, the founder of EcoTrek, a nonprofit that promotes the use of alternative fuels, heard about Goodwin through the Hummer-junkie grapevine and hired him. When Holm showed GM the vehicles Goodwin converted, the company was duly impressed. Internally, Hummer executives had long been looking for a way to blunt criticism of the H2's gas-guzzling tendencies and saw Goodwin's vehicles as an object lesson in what was possible. So GM decided to flip the switch: It announced the same year that, beginning in 2008, it would convert its gasoline Hummers to run on ethanol; by 2010, it said, Hummers would be biodiesel-compatible.

"It was an influence," concedes Hummer general manager Martin Walsh, of the EcoTrek vehicles. "We wanted to be environmentally responsible by having engines in Hummers that run on renewable fuels." But until I contacted Hummer for this story, GM didn't know that the man behind those machines was none other than Goodwin.

GM's commitment is a start, however halting. Overall, though, Detroit still seems to be all but paralyzed by the challenges of fuel economy, emissions, and alternative fuels. And it's not just about greed or laziness: Talk to car-industry experts, and they'll point out a number of serious barriers to introducing radically new alternative-fuel vehicles on a scale that will make a difference. One of the highest is that low-emission fuels--biodiesel, ethanol, electricity, hydrogen, all of which account for less than 3% of the nation's fuel supply--just aren't widely available on American highways. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem. People won't buy alternative-fuel cars until it's easy to fill them up, but alternative fuel makers won't ramp up production until there's a viable market.

Goodwin admits all these things are true but believes the country could be weaned off gasoline in a three-step process. The first would be for Detroit to aggressively roll out diesel engines, much as Europe has already begun to do (some 50% of all European cars run diesel). In a single stroke, that would improve the nation's mileage by as much as 40%, and, because diesel fuel is already widely available, drivers could take that step with a minimum of disruption. What's more, given that many diesel engines can also run homegrown biodiesel, a mass conversion to diesel would help kick-start that market. (This could have geopolitical implications as well as environmental and economic ones: The Department of Transportation estimated in 2004 that if we converted merely one-third of America's passenger cars and light trucks to diesel, we'd reduce our oil consumption by up to 1.4 million barrels of oil per day--precisely the amount we import from Saudi Arabia.)

The second step in Goodwin's scheme would be to produce diesel-electric hybrid cars. This would double the mileage on even the biggest diesel vehicles. The third phase would be to produce electric hybrids that run in "dual fuel" mode, burning biodiesel along with hydrogen, ethanol, natural gas, or propane. This is the concept Goodwin is proving out in his turbine-enhanced H3 Hummer and in Neil Young's Lincoln: "At that point, your mileage just goes really, really high, and your emissions are incredibly low," he says. Since those vehicles can run on regular diesel or biodiesel--and without any alternative fuel at all, if need be--drivers wouldn't have to worry about getting stranded on the interstate. At the same time, as more and more dual-fuel cars hit the road, they would goose demand for genuinely national ethanol, hydrogen, and biodiesel grids.

For Goodwin, navigating this process is all about imagination and adaptability. "The point is to design cars that are flexible," he says. "You'll see a change in how vehicles are fueled in the future. Which fuel source will be the exclusive one or the one that'll take over the petroleum base is, you know, anybody's guess, so it's like the wild, wild West of fuel technology right now. I think it'll be a combination between a few different fuels. I know hydrogen will definitely come around."

Imagination and vision, of course, are often rewarded. As global pressure increases on the United States to reduce our carbon emissions, those rewards are likely to get juicier. Under some versions of legislation being considered in Congress, for example, companies voluntarily deploying superefficient vehicles in large fleets could be awarded substantial offsets. Take DHL, the FedEx rival: Goodwin says his company, SAE Energy, is negotiating with the shipper to convert 800 of its vehicles to dual fuel. "We could get them an offset of something like 70 cents a gallon," Goodwin says, "and reduce their cost of fuel by 50%."

Industry insiders and observers agree with many of Goodwin's prescriptions, particularly his concept of fuel flexibility. "We have to have alternatives," says Beau Boeckmann, vice president of California's Galpin Motors, the largest Ford dealership in the country, who recently partnered with Goodwin to convert a 2008 F450 truck to hydrogen and biodiesel. "Only with a combination of things can we get alternative fuels off the ground." Boeckmann believes hydrogen is the true "silver bullet" for ending greenhouse gases but thinks it'll take more than a decade to figure out how to create and distribute it cheaply. Mary Beth Stanek, GM's director of environment, energy, and safety policy, also agrees with the multifuel approach--and points out that this is precisely how Brazil weaned itself from regular gasoline. "They pull up to the pump, and they've got a whole bunch of different choices," she notes. She, too, predicts diesel will make a comeback because of its inherent fuel efficiency: "You will see more vehicles going back to diesel over a lot of different lines."

Yet in reality, American carmakers seem conspicuously slow on the uptake. Stanek is about as ardent a fan of alternative fuels as you're likely to find inside GM, but even she admits no one there is seriously thinking of abandoning the gasoline engine anytime soon. The 300-million-gallon U.S. biodiesel business is a fraction of the 12-billion-gallon ethanol one. And Detroit is extremely cautious about what the market can bear.

A Detroit carmaker does, of course, have to worry about selling millions of cars at reasonable prices. But we've been hearing this refrain for a long, long time. And with European and Japanese carmakers driving ever harder into our market--and with Chrysler having become just another meal for Cerberus Capital--this hardly seems like the time to be overly cautious. (Those ultralow-emission Mercedes BlueTec diesels, for example, include a four-wheel-drive sedan that gets 37 mpg and goes from zero to 60 in 6.6 seconds.) Moreover, after decades of consumer apathy, improving fuel economy and reducing carbon output are becoming urgent national priorities. The green groundswell has arrived, and, given the stakes, anyone who ignores it does so at his peril. If Detroit can't sell diesel now--especially a clean, high-performance, money-saving diesel--it never will.

With U.S. carmakers being stripped for parts, now is hardly the time for them to play it safe.

Goodwin, perhaps, can afford to be a visionary. He has the luxury of converting cars for fancy clients who'll pay handsomely to drive on higher moral ground. (He charges $28,000 for a "basic H2 conversion to diesel--custom concept cars cost far more.") The future of the American car will likely be won by an automaker that can split the difference--one that may innovate more slowly than Goodwin would like, but a hell of a lot faster than the Big Three.

Goodwin himself seems more oracle than implementer, slightly unsure of how his ideas could be brought to the masses. He's working on patenting aspects of his and Kruger's dual-fuel work and would love to license it to the big carmakers. But the truth is, he's a mechanic's mechanic--happiest when he's solving some technical puzzle. He loves getting his hands dirty, "throwing wrenches around" in his shop, pioneering some weird new way to fuel a car. Today, he's thinking about taking his wife's Infiniti, outfitting it with a tank of ether, and powering the engine via blasts of compressed air in the cylinders. "Zero emissions!" he crows. It's the visionary inventor's curse: constantly distracted by shiny objects.

Goodwin eyes the turbine, which he has dragged out to the center of the floor. Just for kicks, he says, he's thinking of mounting it on a wheelie board and firing it up. "I'd love to see how fast that goes," he says. "I'm just not sure how I'm going to steer it."

Feedback: thompson@fastcompany.com

The Scolded Blogger

2007-10-09T08:03:00.000-07:00

I've been informed by a couple readers that I am not a very prolific blogger on this site. I have to agree. Because most of my blogging has been reserved for the "Recent Articles" at the homepage of bioTrekker.com, I only use this site for content that might not be quite suitable for kids or content that isn't as professionally written. I do a lot of talking to younger audiences, and didn't want to feature anything off color on the main page, so I opened this blogger account just in case I felt like saying something off color. Also, as someone who gets paid to write and tends to be extremely anal as far as editing goes, sometimes it's nice to completely forget about that internal editor and let the free thought rambling go on without worries. The truth is, though, it's really difficult to write something without taking the time to go back through and edit it, so the free thought blog idea has become a casualty of that fact.

Excuse number two: As sad as this is, because I don't get paid for any of the writing or design work on this website, and in fact, because I'm spending money to do it, it sometimes becomes a lower priority than the things that do pay the bills. For those who would like to change that, you can email me to arrange an address to send checks. : ) Or ... send in your own articles about biodiesel and renewable energy, even if they're articles you haven't written. I'll post them here if they're good!

I admit that I'm getting a bit defensive here, but it tends to happen when you throw all of yourself into a project with a big scope while already working a full-time job, and then catch a little heat because you aren't providing daily updates. (Maybe I'm stretching it here, it has been four months.)

I am honored that people are reading the site and would like more content, and I'll be doing my best to continually improve on what I've got. The experiences have been coming at me faster than I can write them down, so there is definitely a delay, but this fall and winter I'd like to take the time to slow down and catch up.

In the meantime, my immediate future plans are to set the wheels down in my homebase of Portland, Oregon while I work to get more partners involved with the Eco-RV project, especially an RV manufacturer. I'd like to organize a team of local Northwest folks to work with me on this project to amplify the volume, and I'll be posting the specific needs I have in the near future.

Once a manufacturer is on board, I will probably sell the existing bioTrekker motorhome, because ideally, I'd like to see an Eco-RV built from the chassis up. If we need to do a retrofit, that's definitely possible, but I would rather start with a slightly smaller, more fuel efficient model. My current mileage in a 34-foot diesel is 10 to 13 mpg, but I'd prefer to have something between 20 and 25 feet that gets better than 15 mpg.

After a year on the road in the bioTrekker, I have a much better idea for my own RVing preferences, as well as my limits. Turning this Eco-RV project into a team project is something that is a necessity in order to see it finished correctly, so that's what I'll be setting out to do. With Nash Evans from Rocky Mountain Institute on board, I have a great start, but the more help we get, the more impressive the Eco-RV prototype will be once it's finished.

So, to those who wrote and asked, "what's up with the blog?" thank you for lighting a fire under my ass. To be honest, in the age of YouTube, I wasn't sure if people still read these things. Now that I know you are, I'll make sure to bring on the updates.

There's No Place Like The Road

2007-06-08T10:58:00.001-07:00

We are in Kansas, Toto. It's the Wakarusa music and camping festival set in beautiful Lawrence, Kansas. We've got a crack team of biodiesel advocates: Allison, Nash, and three new friends, Theresa, Suzy and Kenny. The weather is fine and the festival folk are friendly, although we've had a couple stumblers walk up. One girl looked at the biodiesel samples and thought we were selling apple juice. Another late-nighter walked up to Allison and said, "Will it make me go 'vroom?'” Wobble, wobble, wobble. “Will you go 'vroom' with me?"

Tomorrow, we'll do some hands-on demonstrations and make some biodiesel batches with the leftover grease from the vendor tents selling curly fries and coney dogs and funnel cakes. Mmmmm. There will definitely be photos to follow.

Lovin' Lovins

2007-06-08T10:31:00.000-07:00

One of my newest heroes plays with Orangutans. In addition to being an advocate for 'higher primates,' Amory Lovins is one of the foremost energy experts and renewable energy advocates in the country -- he's written several visionary books and founded the Rocky Mountain Institute, which I recommend everyone have a look at online. There are some amazing things happening at this place.

Lovins house near Carbondale, Colorado is also an amazing example of the possible. I just parked the 'trekker there for a few days to visit my latest business partner and 'brother in bio' Nash Evans, who is the in-house contractor at RMI. The house is 4,000 square feet and has an average utility bill of $5 a month. It's an earth bermed building with an indoor greenhouse that acts as a passive solar heater. It also has several enormous solar PV arrays, and solar thermal hot water heating. There's an indoor stream and koi pond (with turtle!) a hot tub, an enormous energy efficient fridge, etc. Basically, it's the kind of house I've been building in my mind for several years now. It's also got a 500-year life span. I did get some photos, which I'll be posting soon, but the house is being remodeled, so it doesn't look quite as beautiful as it will in a year.

Lovins' residence also serves as an office for RMI employees, and will soon re-open to the public for tours. It's a huge inspiration, and I'd recommend it (and all of Lovins' work) to anyone who is looking for an example of uplifiting human progress.

If We Have to Hear About Hilton

2007-05-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

I don’t seek celebrity news and gossip, and I avoid most traditional news outlets, but I can’t avoid knowing about the latest saga of Paris Hilton. It could be infuriating if it weren’t so amazing. Maybe she’s really got the heart of Mother Theresa, or maybe she’s the antichrist in Gucci. I don’t know, and — until the day that Paris Hilton rescues my grandmother from drowning or is elected head-of-state, forms an army and organizes mass genocide — I don’t care.

Still, this celebrity stuff has a way of finding us all. Even if you politely ask the clowns to leave, the mainstream circus sets up the big top right outside your door and parades the screaming chimps along your porch rails until you pay attention. Somewhere, on an island off the coast of Indonesia, there’s a man in a loincloth eating roasted insects who knows that Britney Spears shaved her head.

Like Arnold the Governator, I also feel that I have “more important things to do,” than to closely follow the misdemeanors of the rich and famous. Some people think they deserve it, but I feel like it’s bad karma to revel in the low points of someone else’s life. I definitely wouldn’t have wanted press coverage during my early twenties.

But if we have to know about it, here is a very serious suggestion for the entourage of Paris Hilton or those in charge of her legal fate. If the point of her jail sentence is to make her feel like someone who doesn’t have millions of dollars in a bank account, it won’t be effective. Until the day that Paris Hilton is magically transformed into a poverty-stricken racial minority or someone born to a homeless mother or someone sexually abused by foster parents, she’ll never know how it feels to live like “the other half.”

Instead of trying to erase her fame and fortune with a 45-day jail sentence, why not put it to good use for a cause that serves her community and the world? Here is a recommendation for alternative sentencing that would do just that: Require Ms. Hilton to become a spokesperson for environmental building practices, greenhouse gas reduction and clean, renewable energy for one year. Just imagine the world stage you could create for spreading awareness of these serious issues.

First, Ms. Hilton could do this by spending her money to build a zero-energy hotel and conference center, featuring green building materials and the latest solar technology for heating and cooling. You could require that she organize renewable energy rallies to help pay for the project and mandate that a percentage of the profits return to the community. Second, she could be required to use only biofueled transportation. In fact, once she does return to driving, I know someone who can set her up a Porsche to run on 100 percent ethanol. But then she’d probably have to fund an ethanol station in Hollywood to fuel it.

There are some celebrities out there, like Darryl Hannah, who have chosen to focus their limelight in a way that also serves others. Rather than spanking those who don’t by trying to make them feel poor, doesn’t it make more sense to help them direct their considerable resources and popularity in positive ways? Rather than wishing the mainstream media outlets would give more attention to critical world issues and less to celebrity hairstyles, why not commandeer one of their favorite targets and do it for them?

April Absence

2007-05-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

I know. I missed April entirely on the blog. No quotes from street walkers. No men in panties and cowboy boots. No close calls with semis. I'll do better in the future, I promise. In fact, soon I'll regale you with the dumbest maneuver a man has ever pulled in a motorhome. If you like narrowly averted disasters, you'll love this.

For the next month, I'll be catching up in my home base of Portland, Oregon. Doing some writing, waterfall hiking and overall maintenance before leaving on a summer concert tour in June. Anyone going from Portland to the Sasquatch Festival, the Wakarusa Festival near Kansas City or the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee, let me know. Rides are available.

Check out the updated Links section on the website, or if you're in the mood to advertise, check out the latest ebay auction by clicking here. Biodiesel doesn't pay for itself you know.

Midwest Madness

2007-03-21T06:59:00.000-07:00

Wisconsin has been great for the last week -- full of cold, sunny weather and a lot of new friends. It's a beautiful, bucholic country up this way. Red barns, big silos and rolling pastures around every bend. It makes me want to eat cheese. The kids at Webster Elementary were amazing and we had fun singing the new "Biodiesel, It's My Fuel" song I've been working on. Look for it on MTV very soon.

Allison toured me around the area and I got to meet some of the family, including Mugga, who is not a fan of French Onion Dip. I also witnessed the untimely end of an opossum at the paws of Major, talked about the A-team with Dell, leafed through old photos with Dave and Diane, talked fishun' with Flip the Jazz Man and walked the lake with an Original Princess (it sounds much better than the Big Princess). My thanks to everyone for the hospitality.

On Monday, March 26 I'm stoked to attend the groundbreaking of Wisconsin's largest biodiesel plant in Evansville. It's a cooperative project coordinated by the crew of North Prarie Productions LLC. Talk about empowered and enterprising individuals.

The next day, I'll begin heading west, moving at a little faster pace. I'm looking forward to seeing my Montana clan and then moving on to do some solar thermal advocacy in California before setting the wheels down in Portland for a while. Early summer in Oregon is not to be missed.

Brain Still One Month Behind Body

2007-03-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

It's true, the adventures are happening faster than I can write them down. I'm okay with that now. I've made my peace. Hopefully, you will too. Real-time is overrated anyway. I mean, how can you possibly fault me when I'm in the company of folks like Leslie, the Mayor of Mardi Gras? Have a look at other fun and well-shot photographs by my new friend and fellow freelancer Benjamin Arseguel, at www.flickr.com/photos/propelfilms

I had to forego Florida because it felt like too much of a rush. So I'm still in Austin for another week. That's when I'll head north where spring will have fully arrived, melted all snow and banished cold temperatures. I'll have your weekend forecasts later on tonight.

Asking For Adventure

2007-02-20T11:28:00.000-08:00

After the month I’ve had, I’m seriously considering a name change. I asked for adventures and I’m getting adventures, but maybe I should have been more specific. Maybe I should have gone with, “Tranquil Adventures in Biodiesel,” or “Occasionally Eventful Adventures in Biodiesel,” or “Zen Adventures in Biodiesel.”

And while I’m at it, it might be a good idea to cut out that part on the homepage about sprinkling in a “little insanity.” It think I left the lid loose on the jar, and the sprinkle turned into a full-on pour, because after leaving Northern California and the calm of the redwoods, the stew of my life has been heavily spiced with my own insanity.

The sky was clear when I left Crescent City and headed for Highway 199 on Tuesday morning, January 16. I’d spent the night in a vacant gravel parking lot next to a ranger station near Tolowa Dunes State Park. I didn’t realize I was doing anything I could be busted for, but it’s hard to be familiar with all the bustable offenses in every new area, so you just do your thing, secure in the knowledge that if you are doing something bustable, a buster will show up and inform you that you’ve been busted. That’s what happened in the morning, when a ranger knocked on my door and told me that he’d caught me spending the night in the lot. It was keen detective work, and I wanted to ask him how he knew that this big orange and yellow bus with green liquid flames was the same one he’d seen the night before, but busters can be sensitive. So I smiled, knowing he was just doing his job, and told him the truth: I wasn’t aware of the law he was now telling me about, that RVs are required to park in private lots.

“If we let people park wherever they wanted, there would be motorhomes filling up every spot in the summer,” the buster said.

I looked out over the huge vacant lot and he followed my gaze. “Well, even in the winter there can be a lot of visitors,” he said. “I’ll let you go with a warning this morning, but your plates are in the system. Just make sure that you park in a campground from now on.”

Now a registered offender, I made my way to Jedediah State Redwoods Park. It began to rain, a drizzle first, which became fat, high-speed drops. Shaking the moisture off after a bike ride, I climbed in the RV and set out for the Oregon border. For about ten miles, it was a peaceful drive, set in the stunning scenery of the Smith River Canyon, with impossibly-colored turquoise water gliding flat in the channels and churning white in the rocky spots.

White turned out to be the theme for the day. It started with the water. But then white began coming from the sky, made its way to my knuckles and eventually reached my face. The snow hit hard after just a few miles, and by the time I was climbing the steepest grades in a 34-foot bus, the trees, the road and the shoulder were all covered in about five inches of fresh stuff. The snowplows weren’t out yet, so the best thing to do was stay in the tracks. Turning around wasn’t an option in a big rig; none of the side roads or turnouts even had tracks. And pulling off to the side to wait it out was sketchy. What if the freak blizzard lasted for a week?

Drawing on experience from years of driving in Montana winters, I cut the speed to about 10 mph and loped up the hills and around the sharp turns. The way up was tense, but solid. It wasn’t until the descent into Oregon that the rear wheels started slipping. I’d never experienced fishtails in a 30,000-pound vehicle and I hope I never have a repeat. It felt like trying to steer a taboggan. Finally, after an inch-at-a-time downward zig-zag next to sheer canyon walls and riverside cliffs, we reached the valley floor and the snow started to thin out. It was slushy and asphalt was showing, and I decided it was okay to pry my fingernails out of the steering wheel. Things were bound to be much easier at this lower elevation.

Things were easier for about thirty miles. And then, just outside of Cave Junction, Oregon, the patches of asphalt disappeared and the slush turned to ice. A line of cars formed behind me and stretched out in front and our entire procession slowed to walking speed. We slowly passed several vehicles sitting in the ditch at various angles on both sides of the road. My fingernails found their way back to the dents still in the steering wheel, and my heart resumed it’s double-time polka pace.

I was lucky enough to find myself directly behind a loaded semi with balding tires. I was doing my best to keep off the brakes, using the engine to slow down, but that became impossible when the semi driver lost control of his trailer. The box began to slide sideways, and the front of the rig slid toward the ditch. My heart slid into my stomach, and I put on the brakes. Now the back of my coach began to slide toward the ditch. It was a slow glide to the shoulder, and I thought something like, “Well, it’s been a fun few months, but it’s all about to come to an end when I roll into this ditch.”

But the snow on the shoulder was thick and sticky enough to hold, and I came to a stop behind the semi. I never imagined it would be so nice to have a change of pants on hand. The dry britches helped, though, and I stepped out on the ice to see if I could help the truck driver with his chains. About an hour later, we were ready to start the slow roll again. Eventually, the snow thinned again, and I reached Grants Pass and I-5 just in time to line up behind hundreds of cars waiting for the truck drivers to take off their chains now that the snow was slush again.

The going was slow for most of the trip, but I reached Eugene at around seven that night, with the entire state of Oregon still in deep freeze. It’s funny how a leisurely four-hour drive can turn into an icy, eight-hour tango with near catastrophe. It’s also funny how you sometimes get exactly what you ask for. I was hoping that this bioTrekker journey would bring adventures, but I’d also been feeling the desire to slow down a bit. The trip back from California was definitely adventurous, and I was forced to slow down. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was a pattern that would be playing out for a few more weeks.

Lots of Living, Little Writing

2007-02-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

I obviously have some catching up to do. When you’re doing lots of living that doesn’t leave too much room for doing lots of writing, so the next few blog entries will cover all the adventures of the last month. I’m in Austin now, and I’ll be in the area for the next week, but the craziness of California and the trip down was too rich to skip over. So bear with me as I play catch up.

Redwood Reverie

2007-01-25T10:16:00.000-08:00

If you’re ever feeling uninspired or busy-brained, go sit in solitude in an old growth redwood grove. That's kinda tough to do if you’re anywhere but Northern California/Southern Oregon, but it would probably be worth the money to make the trip out, even if you’re from Miami and it’s just for a day.

I set out for the Newton B Drury scenic drive on the ol’ Mongoose this morning, and after some serious quad burn along the patchy paved/graveled coastal road where I was passed by one car and passed one person, I found that the six-mile scenic drive was closed to cars. I couldn’t have scripted it any better to enter my first experience with these enormous trees by flying down an empty two-laner. It’s a good thing there weren’t any cars on the road because I kept wobbling over the center line, preoccupied with tilting my head back as far as it would go, my eyes chasing the enormous trunks into the blue sky. I’ve ridden better with a stomach full of moonshine, but I didn’t care. At the bottom of the grade, I pulled over and read a plaque with a Steinbeck quote. It was about how the redwoods make the most irreverent men humble with awe. I had to laugh, because I think these trees might also have the opposite effect on humble folk, turning the most reverent person into a child. Just minutes earlier, I was pedaling with my arms raised, flying past 10, 12, 14-foot trunks, cheering for these beautiful ancients like they were some of the last ones on Earth. Oh … yeah …

I made it to the extravagantly-named Big Tree. You have to give it to the pioneers, they didn’t mess around with any fancy stuff. Putting dimensions on this tree doesn’t do the experience justice, but at 21-feet wide, the trunk takes longer to walk around than some apartments I've called home. And it’s as tall as a football field turned on end. I tried to take Big Tree's photograph from base to tip, but didn’t have a lens with a wide enough angle. And it’s around 1,500 years old, born when King Arthur was fighting the Saxons, the Chinese were constructing the Great Wall, and the tribes of this area were living in the shade of the giants, catching salmon, hunting game and generally doing a better job of managing their environment over thousands of years than the civilizations that replaced them would do in 200.

I heard laughing as a couple came down the trail, and I realized the Ever Living Trees were having the same effect on them. They were both smiles when they stepped into the clearing. “Is this the bi— . Holy … I guess this is the big tree!” That was from the guy, who must have been in his thirties. Big Tree subtracted twenty years from him too. “THAT is a big tree. No, that’s a biiig tree.”

Nope, he didn’t say “fantastically lofty tower of bark and branch” or “woody fortress of insane proportions.” I guess the simple name fits. After hiking the rhododendron trail and the Cathedral Trees trail, I noticed the second major effect this trees had on me: Calm.

Inner peace.

Outer peace, too. I felt no need to rush or head back to camp. They’d taken their time getting that big, maybe there’s a lesson in that.

So tomorrow, at my own leisurely pace, it’s on to Jedediah State Park to witness more of the glory.

If You’re Parking In San Francisco…

2007-01-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

I really hope that San Francisco doesn’t float off into the Pacific, because it’s an amazing city that was kind to the bioTrekker. Well, other than finding parking. The streets were actually wider than most of Portland’s, but a free parking space is a mythical creature there, like trolls or Republicans. There was no way I was going to chance too much city driving in the hills or triangle-shaped intersections, so after a brief stay at a campground across from Candlestick Park (I’m calling it that forever, I don’t care how many companies plaster their logos on it), I headed back to the East Bay to enjoy a wide asphalt swath in front of a local “mom and pop” general goods store by the name of Target. The Targets weren’t around (it’s pronounced Tarshay, I think they’re French), but the store manager informed me that, yes, as long as it was only for a night or two, I was welcome to bask in the sunshine on their paved paradise. So after a few nights there, I scooted over to a space next to a vacant corner lot in Berkeley. Sure, the lot was fenced and topped with enough razor wire to ward off a legion of Trojan footsoldiers, but maybe the property owner had buried some gold ingots in there. My only concern was that the resident street artists who had done such a lovely job on the buildings would whip up a free “Biodizzle My Nizzle” mural on the outside of the coach. I like to be able to pay for that sort of thing.

There is a place to park oversized vehicles on the Embarcadero, but it’s $30 a day … for pavement. No hookups. No sewer station. No affable Chinese manager who tells you that the best restaurant nearby is called the Clam Shack. But for the last night, I splurged and parked my tourist attraction on Pier 30, right in the shadow of the Bay Bridge. It was almost worth it, just for the view. I never imagined I’d find parking in downtown San Francisco on a pier, three feet from the bay, although at one point, a tugboat was heading straight for me. I thought maybe I’d be torpedoed or asked to move, but instead, the tugboat docked next to a van. A guy got off the tugboat, gave a package to the guy in the van, got back on the tugboat and tugboated off. I would’ve taken a picture, but I was afraid that I might have just witnessed a Russian Mafia weapons exchange.

Algae Scientists Cage Match

2007-01-12T12:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was my last day in San Francisco, and I spent it well. Hiked to the top of Buena Vista Park with some friends and got a little random mandolin serenade from a guy on a park bench. Then, for evening entertainment, I went to learn about algae at a very cool community media center on Valencia Street. Like a lot of biodiesel enthusiasts, I’ve heard about algae’s potential as a feedstock. If it lives up to its promise, algae could possibly do for biodiesel what seed crops can’t: lift it to a place where it could replace consumption of petroleum diesel. But that day is not today, and I’ve been jonesing to hear more about this from someone who has actually worked with the stuff. In other words, a real, live scienteest. Like manna from heaven, that scienteest was delivered in the form of Jonathan Meuser, a graduate student at the University of Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado.

I’ll write a lot more about everything we learned from John in a more formal capacity on the biotrekker site, but for now, I’d just like to give some fun general impressions. When I first learned about the whole algae thing, I had to chuckle. I imagined thin, pale men and women with glasses, all dressed in white. I pictured them slaving away in the poorly lit basements of universities and colleges, sallow-eyed and scorned by their parents and peers for their choice of career paths.

“What’s it going to be, son? Doctor … lawyer … engineer?”

“No dad, I’m going to be a scientist.”

“Why, that’s great, Eugene! Chemical weapons and pharmaceuticals are biiiig business these days.”

“No dad, actually, I’m going to study algae.”

There would probably be a lot of silence at that point. It must be a little like telling people that you’re majoring in Byzantine Poetry.

And there would probably be a lot of taunting.

“How’s the snot-studying going, Eugene?”
“It’s algae. It’s not snot.”
“Ooooh, snot snot? Huh Huh Huh. Did you hear that Dirk? Snot snot?”

That’s not to mention the nicknames: Algae Boy, Spirogyra Freak … you know how teenagers can be.

But then…

One day, you figure out that it’s possible to turn algae into one of the fastest growing alternative fuels, and if you can crack the code and get the Dirks of the world to pass legislation funding your projects, you will not only make more money than your lawyer father, you will literally save humanity from itself. Who’s the snot studier now?

At least, that was my fantasy, so you’ll forgive me if I was a little disappointed that Jon turned out to be a casually cool California native with a healthy complexion who could play the charming resident role on one of the many prime time hospital shows. He is skinny, though.

Still, there were two points that evening where my dreams came true. The first happened when Jon put up an energy efficiency graph, comparing the efficiency of petroleum fuel and ethanol. The point of the chart was to show that a lot of energy goes into the extraction, production and transport of petroleum, and regardless of how inefficient it is, the companies doing it will simply charge the consumer as much as they need in order to cover those costs. I think that was the point anyway. To be honest, I never figured the chart out. I’ve tried to be a chart guy, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m pretty sure I was the only person there who still counts on fingers. But one of the gents near the front was a chart guy.

He said, “That’s a bullshit argument.”

Jon thought he was talking about the argument for petroleum.

The guy near the front said, “No, I mean your argument, that’s not true.”

In the science world, that’s like getting pimp-slapped by a raving methadone freak. The room was tense, but after a thirty-minute discussion of the chart, with talks of MIT studies and Bayezian analyses, they came to some form of agreement. It was the equivalent of a bare-knuckle cage match. Jon said that he encouraged people to have a critical look at all the information being discussed. That was the pile driver that allowed us to move on.

In the second round of mind-blowing discussion, Jon put up a slide of several multi-colored blobs, photos of algae under a microscope. He asked if anyone knew what types of algae were being displayed. I again felt like a two-bit hack when several folks in the audience rattled off names that ended in coccum or something similar. During the algae discussion, something like a Jeopardy lightning round happened. Jon and another fellow had a back and forth about lateral gene transfer that Alek Trebek couldn’t have explained to me with an entire deck of cue cards. Just before I began pondering whether Flash Gordon could beat Superman in a foot race, I heard, “The way they think chloroplasts evolved is that it was a bacteria that was able to photosynthesize and some type of eukaryote engulfed it and kept it.”

For future articles, I will do my best to have John explain details like this to me on my own level of science comprehension, which is somewhere around fourth grade. Then, I’ll translate for any fourth graders who might be reading. But to sum things up, and prepare you for future articles, I’d just like to say this: I joke about it, but by the end of the night, there was the prevailing sense that everyone there was on the same team. I came away feeling that it was a room full of people who are changing the world in a positive way. And if we can get the Dirks in government to help them out, we’ll all be a lot better off.

Blinding Generosity on the BART

2007-01-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

A few nights ago, I was hitting the midnight Bay Area Rapid Transit train back to Berkeley. I had my bike and my backpack, fully loaded with my laptop and my camera. All told, about $2,500 worth of equipment, not to mention about two months worth of writing and photos that I haven’t backed up. I’d told myself repeatedly to be very careful with that bag.

The train I was on didn’t go to my station at North Berkeley, so I prepared myself to transfer as we pulled into the first station. I rolled out of the car and used my bike to scoot across the platform to the other train, and then down a few cars to one that wasn’t so crowded. I got into position, when a Latino guy with a Fedora style hat (who is now my new personal Lord and Savior) came into the train, out of breath, to tell me I’d forgotten my bag on the other train. After losing control of my bladder, I scooted out of the car I was in and back across the platform. Instead of leaving my bike in the middle, I hauled it with me through every car, pulling open the ridiculously difficult doors between each one and barely noticing the curious onlookers. The hat-wearing gentleman was behind me, guiding me to the next car and encouraging me that I could make it. I made it. My bag was miraculously still there. I grabbed it and rolled off the train. I wish I could have kissed the feet of that generous man, but all I could do was catch his eye for a moment and mumble, “You saved me.”

I don’t know how he followed me on foot so quickly. I even made it back across to the other train in time. It seemed like the trains stayed there, perched at their respective platforms for much longer than they usually do. So one of three things happened: either time stood still, I moved at the speed of light, or that short, well-dressed fellow was actually the One Omnipotent Being (or OOB) in human form, able to manipulate both BART drivers at the same time. Whoever he was, I love him.

So after severely scolding myself with a, “don’t you ever do that to me again, do you understand?” I quickly made a promise to The OOB that I would go buy the fattest Christmas Turkey I could find and give it to the next Tiny Tim I saw.

So, I’d like to testify: There are good people still left in the world. Thank Jehova for that. Halelujah and Amen.

Street Talk, Installment One

2007-01-12T11:56:00.000-08:00

Street Talk will be a regular feature on the blog. It’s basically just a feature where I’m going to report, word-for-word, a random sampling of the things I overhear on the street in each place. I think it gives a good idea of the local flavor.

PARENTAL ADVISORY: Things are going to get a little gritty and foul-mouthed in the Street Talk section, so if you’re sensitive to gritty and foul-mouthed people, don’t read it (but how can you resist the temptation?) If you’re a kid, don’t repeat anything you read here around your parents until they start cursing around you. If you’re a teacher whose class is following along, I’m sorry. I don’t make the street talk, I just report it. Maybe you can do the cyber version of earmuffs with this entry?

San Francisco Street Talk
Scruffy looking man, maybe sixty, wobbling around a bit, approaches a group standing outside a movie theater on Haight Street. Makes fart sounds with his mouth. Guy in the group makes fart sounds back to him.

Scruffy guy: Hey, don’t steal my lines.
Guy in group: (laughs)
Scruffy guy: I’m like George Carlin on coffee. (Wobbles and makes more fart sounds) Wanna hear a joke?
Guy in group: Okay.
Scruffy guy: Why don’t you wear a skirt in San Francisco?
Guy in group: I don’t know.
Scruffy guy: Because your balls will show.

Two girls in tight jeans and huge sunglasses walking through the panhandle of Golden Gate Park, past the crowd of drummers and park sitters. Someone in the crowd yells: Wow! Haaaappy New Year! Young kid, late teens or early twenties, passes them at the same time. Spins around and starts talking as he walks backward, and says: No, Happy New Year to ME. Where are you ladies rolling in from? The girls laugh and keep on walking.

Olive skinned bald guy holding a book, screaming at the top of his lungs in Chinatown to the crowds passing by, most of them crossing the street and ignoring him: Ain’t no Buddha! Ain’t no Mohammed! It’s the Holy Bible! The Holy Bible!

Fashionable tennis players in Golden Gate Park. Mid to late thirties. Late morning. New Year’s day. Tennis player one: Do you hear them playing drums over there on Hippy Hill?
Tennis player two: Yeah, are they there a lot?
Tennis player one: Yeah. All the time. I’ll have to take Judy over there some time, she’d get a kick out of it.
Tennis player two: It’s pretty cool.
Tennis player one: I feel like I’ve stepped into a time warp. It’s like the summer of love all over again.

Guy, maybe forty, laying on a dirty blanket on the sidewalk on Filmore street, yelling: Don’t you people know how much fucking pain I’m in?

Kid in a group of three, maybe early twenties, wearing a baseball hat and “cool” clothes. Says while talking to his friend: If I don’t get laid, I get angry.

A blond lady with a scarf and retro clothes, maybe late twenties, walking down the street with a to go box, one guy on either side of her. One guy carries a roll of wrapping paper.
Lady: I got it heeeere man, and it’s mine, and it’s beeeeautiful.
First guy: But where exactly did you get it?
Lady: I got it heeeere.
Second guy: Yeah, but where’d you get it, off the back of a truck?

A guy on the bus, wearing a long sleeved t-shirt under a short sleeved t-shirt, a wallet chain and a five o clock shadow. Talking on his cell phone: Do you know how to spell marijuana, okay? It’s T-Y-L-E-R, okay. That’s me.

First Steps

2007-01-12T11:45:00.000-08:00

It’s been a month and a half, and this wee campaign is still in its infancy, but we managed to toddle our way to sunny California after some tentative crawling around the moss-padded safety of northern Oregon. So the first real step of this journey was one of 620 miles, from Portland to Vacaville, California, just north of San Francisco. That’s a pretty good stride for a newborn. Of course, there were some initial incidents involving trees and awnings and ladders, but it takes some scrapes to get a feel for your dimensions, and it’s only going to take a few stitches to patch up.

The rideshare experience was a good one, and it’s something I’d advocate to all RVers who are open to other people and aren’t in a huge rush. There were five of us, plus bags, and we had room for more, but it was good to stretch out. We were supposed to have eight, but a no-show and two last-minute bail outs turned out to be a blessing because we ended up crashing in a parking lot and there was just enough room for everyone to sleep without anyone on the floor.

So Colleen, Mike and Kris started out as strangers when we picked them up on Friday afternoon, but by the time we all piled out into the morning sunshine on Saturday, we had made some friends. You do a little bonding when it’s two in the morning and three cups of coffee and 500 miles have pulled down your emotional walls. Plus, splitting the fuel cost turned a $200 expense into a $50 expense. That’s $30 cheaper than a greyhound bus ticket, even though you miss out on the experience of sleeping in an upright fetal position while having your seat repeatedly kicked by a hyperactive ten-year-old. Mike said the bioTrekker ride reminded him of the Green Tortoise bus rides of the sixties, only without the Grateful Dead music, pillows on the floor and smoke billowing from the windows. Colleen said it took the “creepy” out of Craigslist. Kris was nice enough to stay up and help the driver stay awake and look for a truck stop or rest area during the last few miles.

We made the trip from Eugene to Vacaville on one tank of biodiesel, and even passed up the opportunity to fill up at biofuels stations in Medford. There are no biodiesel fueling stations right now on the I-5 corridor between Ashland and Sacramento, which isn’t an issue if you have a large enough fuel tank to cover the 330 miles.

Still, the biodiesel scene in Northern California is impressive at first glance, especially in the communities surrounding San Francisco and along the coastal corridor north to Eureka. It’s exciting to have the opportunity to really explore it in depth, and synchronicity brought a great host. Christopher Murphy, who is the president of the SOCOBIO biodiesel co-operative in Santa Clara, happened to see the bus on the freeway and gave us a call on New Year’s day to help out with some biodiesel-related information. I’ll be talking with Chris a lot more to get a better feel for all the latest NorCal happenings with biofuels and sustainability.

Slimy Hippies On Parade?

2006-12-20T16:54:00.000-08:00

Local BioClown Runs Over Child, Ruins Christmas

That was the headline going through my mind as we steered the motorhome through the crowd of people lining Mohawk Street for the Springfield Holiday Parade. No, let’s make a correction there, the crowd wasn’t so much lining the street as standing in it, and I felt like a “Wide Load” truck driver being asked to drive through a meadow without hitting any grass.

Without having a good feel for the dimensions of the RV yet, it seemed like the candy-minded children were just inches away from the tires, and sitting in the cockpit, there was no way to see anyone within ten feet of the front of the bus unless they were eight feet tall. Unfortunately, Eugene and Springfield have yet to produce any eight-foot children, so it was just a matter of using The Force to detect any scampering kids or pets.

I guess it was with us, because we managed to make it through the sea of people and safely onto the rest of the parade route without even maiming a poodle. Not to bad for a first-time float-driver. I’d cajoled the significant other and associates — Allison, Jamie, Marc and Caroline (and Jak) — into coming along as a waving and candy-hucking support team. But, it turns out that old-fashioned candy-hucking is prohibited for fear of eyeballs lost to a Roger Clemens’ Jolly Rancher fastball. You’re supposed to hand it out. Kids under eight feet tall dancing in the streets? Fine, just no flying Tootsie Rolls. So I turned the wheel over to Marc, and exited the coach Marine-style to pass out sweets. The rest of the team leaned out the windows and became discrete candy droppers, and we went through six bags roughly half way through the parade. That explains the huge crowds at the beginning: parade veterans.

In addition to the candy rule, I wasn’t aware that we were driving in a place of honor, directly before Santa Claus and directly after the Horsey Clean-Up Crew, or as they were affectionately called by several parade-watching screamers, “The Pooper Scoopers!” Armed with Santa hats, wheelbarrows, shovels and Christmas Cheer, they made navigation much easier and more pleasant, and we were grateful for it.

While everyone loves you when you’re packin’ chocolate, it was still amazing to see the reaction to the bioTrekker campaign. We got thumbs up from manicured older folks in sweater vests and peace signs from shaggier folk in tie-dye. A lot of people said, “Thank you for doing this,” which still hits me in the spot usually reserved for Old Yeller.

The kids’ comments were the best though. One of our favorites was, “It IS the hippies!” (Hard to escape that one.) Or, “Look, there’s slime on the side of it!” (No, those are “biodiesel flames,” kid, they just look a lot like the goo out of Ghostbusters.) This last one must have been a teenager, because he turned from watching the scoopers ahead of us, looked at the RV and said, “Biodiesel’s made from horse shit.” Don’t tell that to the Soy Farmer’s Lobby, my man, or the whole industry might lose its momentum.

When we finally turned off Main Street at the end of the route, everyone inside the motorhome could now stop smiling, but we didn’t. I thought it might feel sort of corny to drive in the parade, but it filled me with a holiday spirit that I honestly haven’t felt in a while. People smiling and waving to each other, it seems like a small thing, but it doesn’t happen as often as it could these days. The small things make a big impact. At least, they do for me. If a giant oak tree is uprooted in a storm and crashes into the motorhome tomorrow in Portland, I’ll be happy just knowing that, yesterday, I took the opportunity to smile and wave at the town of Springfield.

Still Not Famous, Still Won't Play The Doors

2006-12-20T16:46:00.000-08:00

If everyone gets their 15 minutes of celebrity, I’ve still got 12 and a half left. I think a two and a half minute news story in Eugene, Oregon qualifies as celebrity, doesn’t it? It’s certainly the closest thing to it that I’ve experienced, other than my stint in a high school rock band called “Prophacy” (the misspelling was intentional, for copyright reasons), when playing in a biker bar at 16 was the pinnacle of celebrity — even if we did suck. “No sir, we don’t know any Doors songs, and please stop throwing bottles at the drum set.”

But the news story experience didn’t suck. It was actually a lot of fun. I’m sure that I was cheating since I didn’t actually send out any press releases for the story, and the reporter was a friend of mine, but I’m still counting it as official bioTrekker tour coverage. Al Peterson is the morning show anchor at KEZI 9 News and he owed me a favor after coercing me to flail down Class III rapids on the McKenzie River in nothing but a wetsuit and a snorkel this summer. Nothing like being one frog kick or mis-timed breath away from a watery grave to rekindle your zest for life. But that’s a different story.

The story that Al couldn’t have been as riveting as a near death experience, but it was very solid. As a former newspaper reporter, it was interesting to be on the other side of the interview. I can see that there are quite a few angles you could take with this story. You could focus mostly on the travel angle or the biofuels angle, or you could get specific and focus on something like the rideshare angle — using me as an example of how RVing could really go hand-in-hand with the rideshare websites popping up, seeing as how “Ma and Pa” are driving mostly empty rigs all around the country.

Or, if you’re a leathery, skeptical enviro-reporter looking at it from a sustainability point of view, you could pull a Helen Thomas on me and hammer me with questions about whether the RV industry is even sustainable at all, or whether it’s hypocrisy to advocate conservation while getting 10 to 15 miles per gallon. Perhaps the biofuels industry is enabling people to have an excuse not to conserve by giving them biofuels to hold on to.

These would all be interesting angles to take, but by his questions, I could see Al was probably going with the “hitting the road” angle. I wondered if the biodiesel angle would get underplayed. I mean, this motorcoach I’m traveling around in is an impressive thing and all the technology is amazing, and I know it’s unusual for someone in their 20s to give up the office job and hit the road full-time, but the real reason I’m going for the news coverage is to spread awareness of renewable resources and sustainability and to advocate more biodiesel use among RVers while stirring up support for greater investment in biofuels research. This was the message I was hoping to convey through the story, and I could see that it wasn’t going to come out that way.

When the story aired, though, it changed my mind. I realized that Al knows his audience and his format better than I do. “Have you ever thought about chucking it all, kissing the boss goodbye and hitting the road? Well, a local Eugene man is doing just that, and it’s a way of life that he might maintain for 50 years or more.” That was the tease (more or less) that the anchor read leading up to Al’s story. It was catchy, I had to admit. Who hasn’t thought about chucking it all and hitting the road? I guess I’ve done some chucking, but I’m not sure if I’ve chucked it all. And I guess I did say that I hoped I’d never have to go back to an office that didn’t move, but to be honest, I’ll be a little surprised if the bioTrekker campaign lasts more than five years, not to mention 50! I can just see it, a 78-year old man rattling around the country in a faded bioTrekker bus with a million miles on it, all duct taped together. Now that’s a story.

But Al did get to the biodiesel angle after he hooked them with the “chuck it all” pitch, and I have to say, it made for a better TV news piece. Trying to explain all the intricacies of biofuels and sustainability in under three minutes would be damn near impossible. So let people have a fun story about a 28 year-old boss chucker and maybe they’ll be interested enough to check out the website and think about biodiesel for a few minutes out of a busy day.

So, as I think back on my scrappy newspaper days, for all those folks who called to tell me that I reported MY story instead of the story YOU wanted me to report, I know exactly how you feel. But just like I learned from Al, my version of the story was probably better than yours.

I think that, for the most part, the only agenda of a good journalist is to put together the most interesting story. A bad journalist probably just wants to get by with the least amount of work. The rest is all up to personality, and whether or not they feel like pulling a Helen Thomas on you that day. As for my remaining 12.5 minutes, we’ll just have to see if everyone is as kind as Al.

—Ty Adams

For the shortened, web version of Al’s story, go to www.kezi.com/content/contentID/15488

¿Cómo Se Díce Biodiesel?

2006-12-20T16:31:00.000-08:00

“My name is Ty,” I said, standing in front of about 15 students at Hamlin Middle School in Springfield, Oregon for my first classroom talk.

“Cómo?”

That was the whispered response of a girl to my left, asking her classmate how to spell my name. I was planning to have an informal chat with them about what energy is (the ability to do work by creating movement, heat, power, etc.) the source of all energy here on earth (the sun), and the difference between renewable (biofuels) and non-renewable (petroleum) containers of that energy. Then I was going to talk about the importance of doing what you love, even though that bit of wisdom is sometimes viewed as cliché or naïve. You know, the old, “follow your dreams speech.”

I was going to do all of this without using the blackboard, because — man — I didn’t want to be one of those dry speakers who use the blackboard. I was going to be a “cooooool” speaker. But in my plans to be cool, I didn’t give much thought to the fact that this was an ESL class. You know, English as a second language, as in, I should probably come prepared to use some of the Spanish that I was so proud to speak fluently six years ago, and I should probably prepare to simplify some of the vocabulary.

Did I prepare to do those things?

Nope.

So instead of being cool, I grabbed for that dry erase marker like a drowning man going for a log. And while I knew how to say, “el sol es la fuente de toda la energía en la tierra,” among other Spanish phrases, I mostly just butchered that beautiful language while trying to say things like “exhaust” or “engine” or “used cooking oil.”

“It’s the same that your mother uses in the kitchen,” I said in Spanish, with a very gringo-like accent.

Hector laughed, elbowed his classmate and said, “Tu madre.” Should have known that yo’ mama jokes cross all language barriers. At least I was funny, even if by accident. When I tried to be funny on purpose, “I’m a freelance writer … which means I’m poor,” only the teachers laughed.

The motorcoach and the biodiesel samples saved me, along with a young gentleman named Jesus, who took pity on me and asked a lot of questions in either English or very slow Spanish. Thank God for Jesus.

They were really digging on the idea of going outside to see the decorated bus, much more so than watching me scrawl out mundane information on the board, so we went out in the misting rain to have a look.

Lesson one: If you’d like to hold the attention of a 12-year old, it helps to have 34 feet of bright yellow house on wheels. I think they had a good time watching me dance around like a clown in the back-up camera, and opening the slideout without telling anyone was a good trick. Of course, they went right for the television, too. One of those daytime court shows popped on. Several of the kids laughed, “My mom is watching this right now, I bet.”

Back inside, I broke out the biodiesel samples, letting them have a look and a sniff, getting a sensory experience of the difference between biodiesel made from pure Oregon-grown canola, and biodiesel made from used cooking oil. One of them had a very descriptive phrase for the smell of used cooking oil. “Huele de caca de paloma” … smells like pigeon poop. That brought more laughs. Lesson two: If you ever go speak to a middle school class, make sure you can pass around vials of liquid that they can smell and compare to the poop of various animals.

Kidding aside, I think the kids understood two of my biggest reasons for doing this, maybe more than some adults. I wrote down reason one on the board. “Because it’s fun.” Mrs. Torres asked one group of boys huddled around the vials if they knew why I chose to use biodiesel and one of them nailed reason two.

“Because it’s good,” he replied.

When you break it down to the basics, he’s exactly right.

The Wet Launch

2006-12-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

You’ve heard of a dry fire? Well, this was a wet launch. Very different from a hot lunch, the wet launch. It felt like being fired from a water cannon. So the wheels of “BioCoach One” hit the ground with a satisfying ‘shhhhplat!”

It’s only fitting that the Oregon portion of the bioTrekker campaign should start off in the rain, and some true Oregonians came out and stood in it for a few hours on Sunday to take a peek at the veggie-powered love macheen — a 34-foot yellow and orange submarine that will be home for the next year (or two or three or five, just depending on just how much fun this is.)

After a B20 fill up at the SeQuential station off I-5 just south of Eugene, it was off to Armitage Park. The gold, yellow and orange leaves carpeting the parking lot even matched the “paint job,” although, at first, I was the only idiot in the park at 11 am on a rainy Sunday to admire the beauty.

Setting this bus down is like landing a spaceship. Slides pop out … leveling jacks down … awning out … generator on … all systems go. “This is Major Ty to Ground Control, I’m stepping through the door.”

Out came the keg and the portable fire pit, the propane grill, the steaming stew, the warm cider, and a table full of other goodness. Thanks to all my amazing friends who helped with set up. That’s a true friend right there, somebody who gets out of bed early on a blustery Sunday to brave the rain and help you out. There is no way I could have done it without them.

For the rest of the afternoon, I was honored to give tours of the house on wheels and hang around in the company of some extremely cool individuals. We shared interesting discussion about biofuels and sustainability, ate good food from biodegradable plates and bowls made from sugar cane and were entertained by “the gingerbread boy.”

The kids in attendance enjoyed some puddle stomping, plus, every thirty or forty minutes the awning provided a Disney-like feature: whenever it filled with enough water and reached critical mass, it poured down on the pavement or whoever happened to be standing in the wrong spot. Okay, that’s only Disney-like if you’re two years old, but I enjoyed it.

Ian Hill and Alan Twigg (and their loved ones) came out to “co-chill” (literally) and represent SQ Biofuels. I can’t say enough good things about this home-grown Oregon-based organization. They ARE biofuels in Oregon, and I’m fortunate to have a connection to them. If the biofuels distributors I find in other regions are like these folks, then the future of fuel in this country is in good hands. The fueling station they just built here in Eugene is exceptional. It’s seriously the coolest fueling station I’ve ever seen, and I’d say that even if they weren’t a co-sponsor. I'll be starting off with a B20 blend, tracking fuel mileage and performance, and down the road, I'll research blends of 30 percent, 50 percent, 70 percent, and 100 percent (which is really 99.9 percent).

So the campaign is now officially underway, and after I wring myself out over the holiday, I’ll be taking part in a bit of local press coverage. Plus — and I’m really excited about this — I’ll be giving tours and talking biodiesel basics with some classes at Hamlin Middle School. The website is a work in progress, and soon we’ll be adding photo galleries, a map with destinations, a daily blog, a discussion forum and other mind-blowing content. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

bioTrekker Beginnings

2006-12-20T15:32:00.000-08:00

The mid-life crisis cliché is pretty well defined. A man approaching his retirement years suddenly finds himself fighting the clock. Maybe he starts dating women young enough to be his daughters. Maybe he dyes his hair and starts wearing clothes that look like they belong on the mannequins at Abercrombie and Fitch. Almost always, as the cliché goes, he buys himself a hot sports car—a Corvette or a Mustang, a Porsche or a convertible of some sort.

Well, I guess I’ve got it all backwards. I’m 28 years old and I’m buying an RV. Break out the white shorts, black socks and Hawaiian t-shirts.

Some people might call it a quarter-life crisis (yes, I plan to live to 112). Some people might call it a strange financial decision or a half-baked scheme or a desperate attempt to get out of having a “real job.” I call it a dream.

For the last five years I’ve worked as a writer and editor in the marketing department at Monaco Coach Corporation, the leading manufacturer of diesel motorhomes. Not just any diesel motorhomes — luxury diesel motorhomes. The Taj Mahals. The glossy painted, leather upholstered, ceramic tiled, plush carpeted, rope lighted, technologically tricked out coaches that made my modest suburban house look like a tar paper shack.

The truth is, before my job at Monaco, I never imagined myself as the RV type. I always considered myself a backpack sort of guy—an aficionado of camping old-school style with tent and sleeping bag. You know, nothing but the soft howl of a kerosene lantern, the crackle of a campfire and the sinus clearing odor of a small nylon compartment packed full of un-showered companions who have been eating nothing but granola for the last three days? Who doesn’t love waking up to the rhythmic pitter-patter of cool water on the forehead from an overnight thunderstorm and a leaking rain fly? Isn’t that how Kerouac would have us do it?

I also had a little trouble with the idea of using so much fuel just to bring along the TV and the kitchen sink. It seemed a little excessive to me. Isn’t the point of camping to leave it all behind? I’m not going to make the Greenpeace Hall of Fame any time soon, but I always wished there was some way to make RVing more environmentally friendly. In the final analysis, it might not be any less friendly than traveling by plane and staying in big hotel chains, but I think it’s a good idea to do what you can to take care of your Big Blue Mother. Or at least have good intentions for her. So I recycle. I compost. I even do my best to reuse plastic bags, unless it’s the one at the very bottom of the crisper that’s filled with a jellified cucumber or a fuzzy tomato.

I was 98 percent in love with my job at Monaco. One percent had to do with the environmental wish, and one percent had to do with the fact that it was a desk job. I like desks, they’re very useful, but let’s face it, they’d be much better if they came with changing scenery.

I was working at my very useful desk on a spring day when it hit me: I am an RV guy. After five years in the industry, I know all about them, I love the people who own them and I can see myself in one. I’ve discovered that these things are endlessly flexible. You might not take the fridge and the kitchen sink up on a pack trip, but wouldn’t it be nice to have them nearby when you get back? If used in the right way, can’t they actually help conserve energy when traveling? You can live out of an RV full-time or part time. You can save good money on hotels and restaurants. You can outfit them with solar power for more energy efficient living. You can even eliminate your commute by turning an RV into a mobile office and using it for work.

Wait a minute.

You CAN use them for work. That’s what I was sitting there at my desk thinking. It’s a dangerous thing when you start believing your own marketing. But it’s true. Couldn’t I take my job on the road? Wouldn’t that bump me up to 99 percent?

At that same time, I was researching a story on biodiesel. It had me excited. There is tremendous promise in biodiesel and biofuels in general. Here we have a way to take the crops of American farmers, or used fryer grease from American restaurants, and turn those things into fuel for our vehicles and houses. Not only that, but the fuel is less toxic and it requires no change in fuel distribution infrastructure. In fact, biodiesel or a biodiesel blend will run in almost any diesel engine without modifications.

Wait a minute.

Monaco is a DIESEL motorcoach manufacturer. You probably see where I’m going with this. That’s right, I’m headed to 100 percent. As a kid, I thought my dream job was to play professional football or maybe to become a professional tree fort builder, but now I know what it really is: write from a mobile RV office fueled with a renewable resource—travel the country in search of adventure and great stories, all the while advocating the things I believe in, like the joy of travel and the benefits of biofuels research.

So that’s the personal reason behind all this—it’s a dream, plain and simple—but there is also one underlying message I intend to make with this campaign: Anyone can do this. And by that, I mean a few things.

• If your dream is to travel the country now, you can do it. An RV is a worthy craft to accomplish this goal, especially for families. It’s true, the RVs built for the American market could be designed in a more fuel-efficient way, and hopefully I can convince a few people that there’s a market for that. I’ll also track all my expenses and share the results to prove that it can be done by spending less than other forms of travel. I’m certainly not rich, and this is a huge investment for me, but the experience is worth much more. Yes, gas prices aren’t what they used to be, but there are solutions.

• If you dream of working at a desk that comes with changing scenery, you can do it.
I hope to show that RVing is not only useful in recreation, but for many businesses as well. This is perfect for any sales profession that requires travel with a lot of equipment (think golf, skiing, etc.).

• If you are 10 percent or 40 percent or 80 percent or 90 percent satisfied with your life, and you dream of 100 percent, it’s possible.

• If we all dream of powering our vehicles (and much of our society) with a more stable, renewable fuel that will empower farmers and free us from dependence on foreign oil, we can do it.

Whatever the dream is, we can do it. All it takes is a little belief.

When it first occurred to me, quite a few people seemed to think that my little dream didn’t have much of a chance. What about losing the safety net that comes with a desk job? What about the money? What about all the things that could go wrong? All I can say is this: I believed, and it’s happening. If you dream about anything at all, I hope I’m taking some of the excuses out of not following it.

So, yes, I’m peddling biodiesel here, especially biodiesel research. I’m peddling energy awareness and I’m peddling the traveling lifestyle, but more than that, I’m peddling the power of dreams believed. Thank you for joining me in the ride.