Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

In an earlier Dispatch I promised to tell the story of my unintentionally-ceiling-fountain-sprouting, mattress-destoying (and eventually successful, even in winter) attempt to install a homemade solar hot water system at the Funky Butte Ranch. Well, it turns out that anecdote made it into the book (Farewell, My Subaru, which comes out March 25). So I’ll keep that one fresh for book-readers, and instead herein recount my equally shocking (in this case literally) effort to bring solar power into my home (and, unfortunately, into my body).

It was first time I had tried to use the sun to harness electricity, I did it on my own, and I wound up with a Sid Vicious haircut and a house so unsafe I still feel some of the shocks. All so I could charge one measly laptop. This was two years ago, back in 2005, when I was living in the off-grid straw bale shack I rented before moving to the Funky Butte Ranch. If there’s one thing the experience taught me, it was that tiny electrons are as immensely perilous when shot all over my body by the sun as they are by grid electricity.

The event started, as so many near-electrocutions do, with a stolen cigarette lighter from a 1970 Cadillac. A car that was manufactured thee year I was born, but with a driving lifespan just longer than a fruit fly. The shell of the three-block long vehicle lived in my neighbor DL’s yard.

You won’t read that in any biography of Edison or Tesla, but this is one way to produce electric current in your home.

It was DL himself who gave me the idea. I was lamenting to him over beers one November evening how I couldn’t really get into the flow of writing at the straw bale house because of a lack of power.

“Every time I want to charge my laptop battery, I have to start the LOVEsubee (the 1995 Subaru Legacy that pre-dated my current Vegetable Oil-powered ROAT [Ridiculously Oversized American Truck]). I’m churning gasoline just so I can write about living off the grid.” I shook my head at the contradiction and bowed my head into my microbrew.

“At least there are no witnesses,” DL said.

“You should see it. I use an extension cord the length of the Great Wall. I run the cord into the house through the gap in the windowsill under that second wasp nest.”

DL’s face lit up. “Why don’t you just move the cigarette lighter into the house, and power it by that old solar panel you’ve got up on your roof there?”

It was a brilliant idea. Or, on quick reflection, maybe not so much.

“Where would I get a car cigarette lighter?” I envisioned he was proposing auto theft. Or driving the LOVEsubee in through the admittedly fragile south wall.

“No problem,” DL chirped. “I got tons of ‘em. We can get one off the old Caddy.”

Indeed, DL’s lawn art, much to his wife’s chagrin, consisted of the rusted frame of pretty much every vehicle he’d owned in his 39 years. It’s a style of garden decor common in the rural West, and I’ve always been a big fan, for just this reason. Believe me, if the oil runs out and factories stop making stuff, the home junkyard owners of the world are going to enjoy the social status that doctors and professors have today.

The next day I found myself jamming a screwdriver into one side of the right front door panel of a monster, forest-green, parallel parking-incapable Cadillac sedan while DL pried on the other side. Even with the owner assisting me, it felt slightly criminal. Who pries apart cars? But I needed the device so I could move the electrons necessary to start Farewell, My Subaru.

Luckily, one of the few amenities I had inherited in the one-room straw bale house was this tiny, rusted solar panel of perhaps Civil War vintage. At least Congolese Civil War. It was roughly from the same model year as the ones Ronald Reagan ordered ripped down from the White House roof when he moved in. If it wore clothes, this panel would dress in bellbottoms.

But I wasn’t worried. The panel seemed to be in one piece. These things actually come with 30-year warrantees. Ask that of even your Japanese car manufacturer. Working or not, the aged cluster of glued silicon sat on my woven-stick roof in a backwoods (or back-desert) part of the American Southwest. That house overall was one you would not be surprised to see in pre-colonial Equatorial Africa. More of a hut. My hot water came from a Coleman camp shower. Solar powered, technically, I guess. But so Twentieth Century.

Five miles away in DL’s brambly yard, between Federico Lopez’s wooden rodeo stands and a place of worship called “Rock Church,” I spent two hours tugging on DL’s rusted Cadillac. My feet were braced against a tire and my back against an outdoor adobe horno bread oven — I felt like I was like pulling a tooth in a Three Stooges short. It occurred to me that I was spending a lot of time working with automobiles, considering that my plan was to use dramatically less fossil fuel. But, I reasoned, you gotta start somewhere. I thought trying to activate one solar panel of undetermined wattage would be a good learning experience in advance of my much bigger plans.

It was already dark that night when, armed with the dented car lighter and cheap inverter, I spread my wiring materials, mini-light bulbs and (Chinese made, Wal-Mart-purchased) tools across the floor of the straw bale house. In my headlamp light I felt like a Watergate burglar. The wasps were asleep and the mountain lion crouched somewhere outside hadn’t shown itself during my recent expedition to the outhouse — though its tracks were clear and I saw some suspiciously feline dung not far from where I deposited mine. I thought it was considerate of the predator to at least recognize the general restroom area.

75 yards away at the “house,” I needed to shed some light on the subject before I got going with the cigarette lighter and the inverter. My headlamp and a monastery worth of candles just weren’t cutting it. So I pulled out the mini light bulbs.

It took perhaps two hours to See the Light. Up and down I had to climb from the roof under stars with a pulse. Up and down went my chest and arm hair with each mis-wired burst of electro-shock therapy.

I discovered that there were three kinds of wire to deal with: positive, negative and ground. To me, “positive” was an attitude, not a kind of charge. Negativity of any kind was to be avoided. And I clearly hadn’t yet mastered the concept of grounding, in either my electricity theory or, when I thought about it, in my then relationship with a Life Coach in Albuquerque.

Sticking with the electrical side of things, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to attach the ground wire to. So I chose random things: a gap in my desk. An apple. For months after this seminal evening, just walking in a certain part of the left-center of the straw bale house would for some reason cause my entire epidural system to pulse warmly. Plus some of the wires I had patched together were clearly “live.” I didn’t know why. I could tell by the burst of sparks they would occasionally and unpredictably emit on to things like my hair and newspaper. I was missing a step, when it came to playing with electrons.

The further I got into my initial green electricity project, the more the overall effect became Frankensteinian. Right down to the old-school laboratory switch I would have to flip once I had the mini car dome light bulbs dangling from the cords that ran into the house through a PVC tube in the wall. The wires started at the giant old truck battery sitting on the roof next to the solar panel and the resident lizard. I had named her “Liz.” The reptile, I mean, not the solar panel. Each day she came to visit through the PVC tube as I wrote.

Furthering the gothic laboratory feel of the evening, it was just before midnight when I dramatically threw the monster-lab switch, flooding the straw bale’s mud walls with about the burst of illumination you experience when you flip on the overhead light in your car if the battery’s low. Yeah.

When, a week later, I proudly presented the lab-switch to the Life Coach, she flipped it cautiously and asked flatly, “Is it on?”

“It’s dusk,” I told her. “It’ll seem much brighter in a couple of hours.”

More and more I begin to see why that relationship didn’t survive my tenure at that house. We had a lifestyle gap wider than Dick Cheney’s ethical lapses. It didn’t help that I overheard her describe her visits to the straw bale house as “camping.” Nonetheless, perhaps she had a point. Maybe “flooded” is too strong a word for my initial solar moment. There was not much light, and truth be told that first night I still bashed my knee into chairs and clotheslined myself on live wires as I worked on the piece de resistance: the fist-sized Radio Shack car inverter that would plug into DL’s 1970 Cadillac cigarette lighter. With it, I could charge my laptop. Theoretically. It was worth a try.

Beyond my confusion over wiring, I didn’t really come into this process understanding the underlying principles that would allow all this electricity to happen. Ohms and amps and all that. For that I had taken out the children’s book The Way Things Work from the Young Readers section of the public library in town. All books should be written with such lucidity. In fact, all engineering professors should be forced to read it, for a primer on what “explaining” means. The librarian had kind of looked at me funny when I stumbled in, wild-eyed, wasp-punctured and covered in straw, to ask for “the simplest book you have on principles of electricity.” But he came through for me.

The inverter was the key device here, I learned. Essentially, it changes the “direct” current (or DC) that comes from the sun and charges the battery, into the “alternating” current (AC) that powers most of our appliances these days. I took more wires from the battery on the roof, twisted them into the cigarette lighter, and plugged in the inverter. To that I plugged in my Apple Macintosh Powerbook G4.

Dangling like a hanging carcass, the plastic rawhide inverter rig worked, but it was undeniably dangerous. I began to see why there are home inspectors. The straw bale house’s combination dining room/living room/kitchen/office was barely big enough to contain a person, and even during the daytime when objects were visible, I was continually bumping into chairs and dodging wasps like Muhammad Ali avoiding Frazier jabs. This, naturally, resulted in a lot of stumbling. During one of my pratfalls, I grabbed a cluster of black and red wires hanging at neck level to save myself from bashing my head on the cast iron wood stove. The moment my skin touched wire, I shocked myself so severely that for a second I could see through myself. For several subsequent minutes I could smell myself, as well. Burning. Internally. A few days later I noticed that the right side of my hair was growing horizontally, like a too-hip haircut. The message I was receiving: get grounded.

Shock pain is so fascinating because on the one hand, it’s not the direct pain of, say, slipping on a greased concrete floor – you barely notice the first surge of electricity. On the other hand, shocks obviously exist, because when a really forceful batch of electrons hitches a ride across your nervous system, it will take you with it backwards into the nearest wall.

Despite the danger, I was thankful for all that a 1970 Cadillac cigarette lighter was able to bring into my life in that straw bale house. Leave it to an American automobile manufacturer to get the death stick lighter right: 35 years after manufacture, the Caddy’s engine was never going to run again. But that lighter booted up my Mac with only a vaguely disturbing waft of foul-smelling smoke.

And I was on my way. I had juice. With no fossil fuels involved. No coal-fired electric plant. No utility bill to pay. I had gone solar.

For a couple of minutes. It being nighttime, the corroded battery resting exposed to the lizard on the roof didn’t have much juice left in it. Slowly the inverter petered out as the putrid smoke in the house thickened. I think the smoke came from the plastic melting on one of those protective hats I screwed on to connect a couple of random wires, now hovering like a booby trap somewhere in the semi-illuminated house. No point opening the door. There were enough pre-existing ventilation holes in the wall of that house to allow for star-gazing, let alone smoke egress.

But, with a lot of help from my friends and supplies from Chinese factories, I had done it. I was off the grid. I felt so independent of The System that I nearly forgot to eat some of the pre-roasted chicken I had bought at Wal-Mart earlier that day. As far as I was concerned, the PNM Power Company could go away tomorrow and I would be able to survive and write as long as I figured out a place to eat outside of box stores.

I carried this glow, often literally, for almost six months, until my buddy Wentz, a self-described Failed Hippie (no matter how hard he tries, he accumulates money) and possibly the finest solar electrician in the history of the world, showed up at the straw bale shack for an NPR story we were doing about solar power. He ventured one step into the house and took on the expression that a vegetarian might wear upon entering a glue factory.

“Check carefully,” he instructed me. “You’re sure you’re still alive?”

Wentz went on to explain the grounding concept that Ben Franklin had stumbled on a couple of centuries ago. It sends extra electricity to a place other than you, “a ground,” so that you don’t die from the force of, say, 100 lightning strikes if you have a sudden power surge.

Pointing at the tangle of wires that had so visibly electrified me when I’d grabbed it, Wentz observed with professional discernment, “That’s 10 gauge wire you’ve got exposed there with no real ground.”

He might have been speaking Urdu. “I don’t know what that means,” I confessed.

“Well, let’s see,” Wentz said, pulling out his pencil and pad from his shirt pocket and making a few indecipherable symbols. “Touch that during a surge, and, well, let’s just say you’ll feel it.”

“I thought it was a good thing to be in touch with my feelings.”

“Not this in touch. We’ve got work to do here.”

He sent me outside to dig a 20-foot grounding trench in which I was to bury expensive copper rods. The house wires would connect to these. Metal was the key to grounding, evidently. An apple was no good. Meanwhile, trench-digging felt like penance for everything that wasn’t yet grounded in my life. I was in an spiritually unsatisfying relationship which I was going to have to face sooner or later. I lived in a hovel. And my attempts to thrive off the grid had given me a punk haircut.

I can’t believe how much better everything is, just two years later. Maybe it was the electroshock therapy, But now I have 11 panels motivating electrons on the Funky Butte Ranch, and I haven’t been nearly electrocuted in weeks.

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