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

So I’m psyched because just a I run out of grease on the Farewell, My Subaru Carbon-neutral Book Tour (hardcover leg), I get a call from Danny at an outfit called Plant Drive in Berkeley California. I’m running on fumes at this point, albeit extremely delectable Kung Pao Chicken fumes, and this dreadlocked 40-something offers to sell me 70 gallons of prime waste oil, on almost no notice.

There were only three minor downsides to this stroke of good luck and kindness. One, Danny didn’t have a pump to ease the movement of vegetable oil into my tank, the way you would at a normal gas station (and like I do when I “dumpster dive” waste fryers for my own grease). So when I backed the R.O.A.T. into Danny’s garage and I began dumping five gallon plastic restaurant “cubie” containers of prime grease into my tank, the funnel I was using to (I thought) facilitate the transfer in fact created a massive air pocket in the tank. This, in turn, resulted in a Yellowstone geyser-like spurt of waste vegetable oil all over my clothes, bike, windshield and person in the R.O.A.T. bed as the last bit of oil in each cubie cascaded, temporarily, into the tank.

This leads to the second minor problem, which was that this messy mishap solidified my 1,000 batting average for showing up at my friends Michael and Ali’s place in San Francisco smelling like something horrible and unfamiliar. Last time, for instance, I turned up, shall we say, Organically Redolent after a week of showerless camping and dancing at Oregon County Fair. They took my grease cologne well, as they always do, observing but not judging my scent and offering me their shower generously and immediately. The R.O.A.T, unlike my clothes, was soon de-greased at a (gotta love Berkeley) solar-powered car wash.

The third issue, not really a down side when I think about it, is that Danny’s grease comes from a local vegetarian Indian Restaurant, leading to a new Asian Food addiction to add to my Thai, Chinese and Japanese ones. For the next 1,500 miles, instead of the normal Kung Pao Chicken exhaust, now the R.O.A.T. spouted fumes that had me pulling over for every chance at curry and dal.

There was nearly one more complication from this important tour pit stop on a gorgeous Bay Area spring afternoon, and that was it appeared at first like the Plant Drive bathroom had only the mildest of herbal “hand and body creams” with which to clean the greasy carnage off my hands, face, even feet (I was in open-toed Chaco sandals). I could believe a business purveying waste oil (actually the Plant Drive folks share their space with a bio-diesel cooperative) would have only such non-toxic natural cleaning agents. This was, after all, Berkeley. But then on a high, out-of-favor shelf (the same spot where any of us would stash the products of which we’re less than proud), I found one of those industrial “citrus scrub” abrasive cleansers whose bottles come from the factory already dirty and feature a pump action for your ickiest hands. Meanwhile, that fill-up got me all the way to Seattle without having to stop at a petroleum gas station. Thanks a lot to Danny and Craig of Plant Drive, and congrats to Danny on his new baby.

Postscript: One of the most fascinating components of being on a road trip – albeit a carbon-neutral one – in a time of the highest fuel prices in history, is the eerie phenomenon of no one driving on the Interstates. Their ghost roads, when it comes to passenger vehicles. This shot is typical, taken from outside the R.O.A.T. window on I-15 in Northern Utah.

The freeways all over the American West in April and May of Gregorian 2008 essentially consisted of the R.O.A.T. and a massive train of tractor trailers, their drivers keeping it at a fuel-efficient 65 MPH. (At truck stops when I’d stop occasionally for restroom breaks, more than one trucker saw my “Powered by Vegetable Oil” sticker and asked me in hushed tones if they could convert their engines, too.) Another way to put this is that there are very few American Griswald families on a National Lampoon Vacation this spring. There were some foreigners in RVs taking advantage of the weak dollar, but not many. Which really brings his whole R.O.A.T. project home for me. For all the greasy fill-up foibles, for all the munchies-inducing Kung Pao and now curry exhaust, I have been passing by gas stations from state to state to state, all but immune to the highest petroleum prices in the history of the industrialized age. And I feel fine. Here’s to sustainable Rugged Individualism. With a lot of help from vegetable oil purveyors in places like Berkeley (and later in Seattle – thanks, Matt, for that timely fill-up!). We’re all in this together – even all of us “individualists.”

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