by Doug Fine
* * *
THAI PEANUT CHARD STIR-FRY
4 garlic cloves, minced
Handful of shiitake mushrooms
1 leek
¼ cup pine nuts
3 tablespoons olive oil
8 rainbow chard leaves
¼ cup snow pea pods
¼ cup carrots, sliced
2 tablespoons tamari
1 teaspoon Thai red curry paste
1 tablespoon peanut butter
1 lime
3 sprigs parsley
Over medium-high heat, sauté garlic, ’shrooms, leek, and pine nuts in olive oil until garlic begins to crisp.
Add chard, pea pods, and carrots. Top with tamari and red curry paste. Sauté, stirring periodically, until veggies are blazing hot but still firm. Remove from heat.
Stir in peanut butter. Squeeze lime over finished stir-fry. Garnish with parsley. Give thanks for the bounty and for all kind hearts.
* * *
I noticed as I was cooking that I wasn’t exactly dressed for a night on the town. Bright red goat medicine stained my T-shirt and my coating of alfalfa hay was pretty much permanent. It was useless for me to try to “clean up” for a date or for anything else now that I raised goats.
In fact, I now emitted ambiguous green, leafy material on bank tellers and co-op employees every time I pulled a dollar from my pocket. It would have made me a little nervous had I lived in any state except anarchic New Mexico. Hay seeped into every cranny of my clothing, skin, laptop, and washing machine, to the point that I was constantly apologizing to supermarket check-out women and burrito waitresses. “It’s, ah, just alfalfa.”
“Too bad,” their expressions said.
But Lupy didn’t seem to mind: we stuffed ourselves on stir fry and beer and watched a Wim Wenders movie while the lightning danced outside.
I woke at dawn—even earlier than Lupy would have rousted me for a run—left her sleeping, and bolted to the corral. The world smelled of lemon because of these flood-loving limoncillo blossoms—tiny yellow powerhouses of olfactory joy. I wanted to roll in them, but I was on a mission, so I trotted on down the hill from the ranch house.
“Mmbah!” Natalie shouted in a strong soprano before I even reached the barn. I recognized the tone. It meant, “I’m hungry!”
I almost collapsed with relief. I uttered a quick but sincere prayer of thanks, since Melissa had joined the chorus, and soon the two of them would be waking ranchers in Montana with the racket. They didn’t like it when I tried to do something unacceptable like write, sleep inside, weed the garden, trek for hay, or otherwise not hang out with them. They let me know this loudly.
“Mmbah?” one of them asked in an insistent, vibrato-filled bleat that I recognized as Melissa’s hungry voice.
“OK! OK! I’m coming! Pizza delivery’s on its way!”
“Mmbah!” Natalie growled again, which I took as, “Hurry up! I haven’t eaten for two days.” (This is a Gandhian hunger strike for a goat.)
“Mmbah!” I promised in a baritone, thankful that no neighbors lived in this part of the canyon. The goats and I often got trapped in this conversation along the lines of the “shampoo, rinse, repeat” loop. It was fun for me that they understood my accent. Even when they were out of the corral, one “Mmbah” out of me and they always came running.
A goat waiter in boxers and a cowboy hat, I was floating as the goats kept shouting. I had right-wing ranchers pushing apples on me, and pretty environmentalists fording rivers to save my goat’s life. Love thy neighbor, indeed. It was the least I could do.
After the requisite morning exercise, Lupy made some breakfast (ice cream and leftover chard) while I went to meditate with the goats in the corral. Both Pan Sisters were back to their usual shenanigans. Natalie swiped my hat off my head as soon as I sat down, and Melissa hitched a ride in the wheelbarrow I had wheeled down to clean out the corral. Any goat book will tell you that both of these behaviors are clear indications of robust health.
Heather Thompson, my fourteen-year-old kerchiefed neighbor and the acknowledged Mimbres Valley goat expert, had told me it was never too early to start practicing the art of milking, so that the eventual nanny would be comfortable with the process after she gave birth.
“Do it every day,” she told me. “You’ll be thankful in a year.”
You didn’t ignore Heather when it came to anything caprine: if Martha Stewart did her own stunts, she’d look like Heather. She’d been milking since she was four, and was as relaxed around goats as I was around a McIntosh. So I had worked this into my meditation routine: sit in silence for twenty minutes, stretch vigorously, then start faux milking. I’d love to see this practice incorporated in a yoga book. In fact, that’s how Lupy found me to tell me breakfast was ready: in lotus position, chanting “om,” and massaging a goat’s nipple. It was too late to flee now. She had already spent the night.
* * *
The latex for safe birth control comes primarily from the tropical rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis), with the best quality found in Malaysia and Thailand.
* * *
I left the corral door open so the Pan Sisters could have some forage time of their own while Lupy and I breakfasted inside. And how did they repay me for all my vigilance and doctoring? As soon as I turned my back they beelined uphill two hundred yards for my rosebushes—rose stems are goat filet mignon, evidently.
The little bastards had forty-one acres of flood-provoked wildflowers and bountiful, nutritious greenery to munch, and when I discovered them, they were chewing my favorite blossoms and stalks with exaggerated innocence. I could swear they were smiling. I scooped up one kid in each arm, tossed them back in the corral penalty box, and began my fruitless yearlong attempt to build a rosebush Green Zone. The fact is, goats can get into anything. Houdini learned from them.
Over the course of the autumn, Melissa became the ringleader in this habitual assault. She was amazingly varied in her methods of access. And in fact, this clever, think-on-the-fly, intentional mischievousness is why goats are such incredible survivors. Where other livestock drop dead from thirst, they suck moisture from inedible-to-most Apache Plume plants. A flood comes? They can perch on the narrowest of high ground—say, a Subaru roof rack.
The problem was partly my fault: since I was herd leader, they wanted to be where I was. When I was inside the ranch house violating their social boundaries by eating a meal without them, they tried to get in with increasingly powerful horns applied to my sliding glass window. They actually knocked. And when that didn’t work, like any kid who seeks negative as well as positive attention, they went for the roses. Especially once they had learned that was exactly what I didn’t want them to do. Welcome to the caprine mind. They knew that entrée to the roses would bring me out running, screaming, and disciplining. But at least I was around.
About once a week they progressively decimated my roses. Sometimes it left me fuming and violating every parenting rule about not disciplining while angry. But no matter what the Pan Sisters pulled, I couldn’t stay mad at them. They were so ridiculously soft and so important for my project that I hardly noticed that I, a boy sensibly raised on a modern diet of stuffed crust pizza and Brady Bunch reruns, was working on their well-being at the expense of nearly every other task in my life.
I didn’t realize when I made a goat pickup off Craigslist that my “morning ranch chores” would generally take me well into the afternoon. That I could put “goat vet” on my tax return. That two little cunning imps would become members of my family. All they had to do now was stay alive for another five hundred days, and I’d be the valley’s premier local, organic, high-end ice cream producer.
PART THREE
CONVERTED
The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become in the course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar products of the present time.
—RUDOLPH DIESEL, died 1913
SIX
THE CARBON-NEUTRAL PATRIOT
It was forty-three days before I could get the LOVEsubee across the Mimbres River. I couldn’t help noticing that Noah only had to endure forty days in his highly publicized flood. But then he had to clean up after elephants as well as goats. On Day 44, as soon as I found my car keys (in the ignition) and started using fossil fuels again, I decided it was time to do something about the roughly 12,430 gallons of unleaded I’d churned in my twenty years as a driver.
One day during the flood, while I was yanking the Pan Sisters out of the roses, I’d gotten a callback from a mechanic I’d Googled up in Albuquerque. He proceeded to assure me that with a simple engine modification he could have me driving on the waste fryer grease from the local burrito shop. That sounded like too good an opportunity to pass up. But there was a catch: my fuel would be both free and carbon neutral, if (and this was a big if) I was willing to part with the LOVEsubee and get myself a diesel engine.
I carefully checked out this Kevin Forrest’s website (his operation had the timely name Albuquerque Alternative Energies), and when it looked legit, I realized I half wished it hadn’t. Parking brake lessons aside, I had a bit of separation anxiety when I thought about ditching a vehicle that had been reliably propelling me around North America for twelve years and 204,000 miles while spending about the same number of nights in the repair shop that Bill spent with Hillary.
But thanks to two healthy goats, I was on my way toward oil independence when it came to my dairy protein, so if I was serious about kicking unleaded once and for all, I had to take the next step. This meant crossing a few mountain ranges, and driving two hundred forty miles north to New Mexico’s big city in what I hoped would be the final fossil-fueled road trip of my life.
I slipped and went down hard two steps into the Albuquerque Alternative Energies warehouse. My host, who pretty much lived in restaurant grease, didn’t even notice. And so I got a second chance to learn that “stepping” is not the right way to think about moving across a concrete floor covered in vegetable oil. “Gliding” is more the technique. The floor was a nearly frictionless surface resonant of a glacier. Ice crampons would have helped. Regardless, my early tumble that March afternoon was a clue as to the important role that grease was going to play in my life from now on. Weaning myself from fossil fuels would be a slippery process.
“It’s a pretty simple conversion,” my tour guide, Kevin, explained as he led me inside the warehouse without so much as a “watch out—the floor’s a little slick.” (I had already figured that out and was dusting myself off in mild agony.) “It’s just a matter of repositioning the fuel filter behind the lift pump, adding the heated VO filter, and bolting in a second fuel tank with a Hotfox unit in it to heat the fuel.”
My eyes glazed over the way they do whenever an expert in any field speaks in jargon. Kevin, who bore the unmistakable aura of the mad scientist, had already convinced me he was going to make gas station fill-ups a part of my past. At the moment he was trying to describe how the system worked.
Kevin skated around the warehouse floor in coveralls that gave him something of an Oompa-loompa appearance (they were hiked up to wedgie levels), holding up engine parts for my edification. I tried to simultaneously train my attention on the mechanic and keep my balance on the warehouse rink. The twenty-seven-year-old didn’t sit still for a second—it was like watching Gilligan’s Island when they sped up the film to show that someone was really scared.
Maybe it’s a sign that biofuels were coming of age, but Kevin was so busy I couldn’t figure out when he slept. Pounding Royal Crown Cola from a three-liter bottle, he dashed between Kirkland Air Force Base, where he was an active duty Air Force Specialist, occasional visits to his wife and infant son at their Albuquerque home, and the downtown space that Albuquerque Alternative Energies leased from, ironically enough, the neighboring Chevron dealer.
For a pioneer in alternative energy, though, Kevin Forrest was no tree-hugger. The two-tour Iraq vet sported a buzz cut and made clear right away that he was firmly in the No Forgiveness for Jane Fonda demographic. I knew this because I always like to ask military folks why they tend to support a coke-head draft dodger for commander in chief (Bush) over a challenger who at least showed up for military duty. Kevin said he felt betrayed by John Kerry’s antiwar stance after his service. (The future senator appeared at demonstrations with Fonda. Before Kevin was born, but nonetheless.) So why was a fellow who leaned a little to the right of Bill O’Reilly helping his country reduce its dependence on foreign oil?
“I’m a patriot,” was how the vegetable oil mechanic put it in the warehouse, gesturing toward the Persian Gulf. “One day when I was landing over there, it occurred to me that the people firing at me are financed by the oil that we buy and put into our vehicles. It’s a ridiculous loop. I just thought we should see if we could put something else in.”
We can. It’s not even that big of a deal. Rudolph Diesel, the fellow who invented the engine that bears his name, actually intended for farmers to grow their own fuel. This is not processed biodiesel. This is straight veggie oil. These days it usually comes from waste oil from restaurants. No chemistry necessary. Just some filtering of french fry and sparerib bits. Stuff that would otherwise get sent off to commercial cattle and hog feedlots. Hence the fact that the Albuquerque Alternative Energies warehouse smelled like something between the local McDonald’s and some Chinese takeout past its prime.
In fact, inhaling the warehouse scent while listening to Kevin talk about his vegetable oil system (a “VegOil rig” to us green geeks), it occurred to me that a plate of really delicious Chinese take-out left out overnight was probably the best way for me to visualize how the whole magical conversion of my vehicle would work. Imagine: I come into the kitchen in the morning, three quarters asleep, to the sight of my coagulated Kung Pao chicken leftovers. The sight always makes me want to retch. How did I ever eat something so full of chunky white fat globules? I wonder. And where were those fat globules last night?
The answer is: when my Kung Pao chicken was piping hot, they were tiny liquefied molecules about the size of BB pellets, pellets that flowed right into me invisibly. These small liquid fuel pellets were what I wanted going through my engine, Kevin said, though he put it in terms that only a senior NASA engineer would understand. What I definitely didn’t want were those solid fat globules that form on my leftovers when things cool down. Kevin had developed a system of heat and fuel distribution that would ensure I was always getting hot, liquid Chinese food oil in the engine. Never goopy leftovers. And I mean this literally: my vehicle would run on the exact same grease used to cook the Kung Pao chicken I so love. And anything else that comes from the Heart Attack Accelerators known as deep fryers.
To make this experiment work, though, I’d have to get a diesel engine. Even under Kevin’s veggie oil system, my vehicle would actually run on bad ol’ traditional diesel fuel when I started the engine. But only for a few minutes. Once the engine heated up, the system would switch to a special fuel tank full of fryer oil. If this grease wasn’t hot enough, though, it would clog my fuel lines like a Green Bay Packer fan’s arteries. But once the system reached the magic temperature of one hundred forty degrees, I was carbon neutral: I could drive around the world without guilt if I wanted to.
SEVEN
THE RIDICULOUSLY OVERSIZED AMERICAN TRUCK
Buoyed by that encouraging prospect, I had started the day shopping for a LOVEsubee replacement. I knew I not only had to go diesel, but that I also needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle, because the last dirt mile leading to the Funky Butte Ranch was maintained with the frequency of the highway system in Somalia. So unless I planned on importing a smaller diesel truck from one of the wrong-side-steering-wheel countries, my truck would be (brr) from the Big Three and would come in one of two sizes: XXXL or XXXXL. I leaned toward XXXL. It’s hard to convey what a leap this was for a guy used to driving a Japanese compact car whose only maintenance, for twelve years, was th
e occasional radio station change. But when it came to carbon output, I had an almost Swiss-like dedication to neutrality. So I braved what I knew would be a difficult morning.
* * *
Toyota’s 2005 profits were $2.5 billion in North America.
* * *
Just four miles from the Albuquerque Alternative Energies workshop, the Used Truck Sales Department at (“It’s a Great Day at”) Rich Ford in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 2007 is a quaint throwback to every cliché about used car sales, right down to the good cop/bad cop sales approach. They in fact had a diesel truck on the lot, in forest green, appropriately enough. At one point in the negotiations I heard (or was intended to hear) the manager, from behind the half-open “private” door, yelling at my salesman that he would never budge on the price for such a “cherry” six-year-old vehicle as the one I was considering.
Frankly, I’m impressed that I left that day unsure if I was snow-jobbed or not. I was the one with the English literature degree. They were the ones with my money. Quite a bit over Blue Book. The whole thing felt suspiciously like dealing with used car salesmen. And when I asked the warranty department folks what pumping vegetable oil into my tank would do to any extended warranty I might purchase on my three-quarter-ton F-250 pickup, the response was unambiguous: such a move would invalidate it. That is the Ford Motor Company’s official policy in the era of Peak Oil: you might as well dump sugar in the tank. How cutting edge. It made me wonder how this corporation could be losing money.