the BioTour Vagabond Journal

We awoke at sunrise, and crawling out of the bus, found ourselves on the shore of Lake Michigan. Chris was already awake and practicing yoga, his palms pressed flat on the grass, one leg stretched up toward the sun. Jeremy sat meditating on a boulder by the shore. The rest of us ran passed them through tall grass down to a beautiful unpeopled beach.

We greeted the day swimming out into the lake, splashing in the shallows and taking an overdue bath. The sun rose higher and we didn’t see another soul on the beach or in the fields, save for a few hurrying joggers.

After a long recess, we drove to South Station and picked up Nick. Ethan bumped a fire hydrant backing up, but the bus barely felt it. We left Chicago celebrating Nick’s arrival with beating drums.

As we rumbled across Illinois and into Iowa, the bus began to stutter and stall. Restarting it drained our old batteries again. We stopped at Iowa 80, “The World’s Largest Truck Stop!” After checking out the slot machines and medieval weaponry display (apparently there is a market for spiked maces and broad swords among truckers), Ethan and I navigated through the labyrinth of tractor-trailers to the auto shop and bought a new battery.

We had the bus running again, but felt something more was ailing her. On the advice from the truck stop’s mechanics, we drove back east a few exits to Hawkeye International Trucks in Davenport, Iowa.

The mechanics at Hawkeye International thought our fuel pump was cracked. They couldn’t fix it, and a new one cost about three thousand dollars. But there was a fuel pump specialist in Grand Island, Nebraska. We decided to press on the 450 miles west to Grand Island.

The bus began to stall every time the RPMs fell and would no longer start without assistance. When we stalled out at stoplights, and in the middle of intersections, Cat and I would jump out, pull open the hood, open the air intake and spray WD40 and ether down the bus’s throat while Ethan turned the ignition and pumped the gas pedal until she roared back to life.

As we rumbled across Iowa, Cat and I searched our minds for an appropriate name for our vessel, something a little more personal than “the bus.”

“It’s pretty clear to me that the bus has the reembodied spirit of a brontosaurus, and it’s an herbivore you know,” I said.

“Yeah, it feels like a sleepy old maternal figure, like, Nana, the St. Bernard from Peter Pan,” Cat mused.

”I like that: She groans, and tires but ultimately takes care of us,” I said.

“But maybe something a little more…’Nanasaurus’?

“What about Busosaurus?”

Her eyes lit up, “Busosaurus!”

The name stuck; Busosaurus roared across the plains.

Stopping for grease outside Des Moines, we found a Chinese restaurant stuck in mini mall with. In the parking lot we met a singing telegram dressed in sparking silver dress and tiara. She sang a vaudeville rendition of “Happy Birthday” to us in the parking lot before leavining to deliver the message to the rightful recipient.

We broke down in Omaha, coming to rest in an empty church parking lot. Before long we’d attracted some interested folks: a veteran burner who told us about his old bus and past journeys to Burning Man; and a local young hip hop artist who invited us to an upcoming show, “Beats for Peace.” A guy named Toma offered to give me a ride to pick up some fuel filters in his van. He sipped on a can of “Sparks” energy drink and told me about his life as we rode across Omaha. He played freestyle Frisbee, usually by himself, throwing into the wind. He spoke of his love for his daughter, but how he wasn’t going to marry the mother just to create an unhappy household like his and his friends’ parents. He described how Omaha was racially and economically segregated,,

“Yeah, the South side is all Mexican. You gotta know Spanish if you want some tacos or somethin’. The north is black, east is lower class white, and west is bourgeoisie.”

And after just a glimpse into Omaha we were gone, on the road again.

That night, after taking a wrong turn and nearly getting stranded down a lonely road carved between massive cornfields, we made it to Grand Island. The bus sputtered and gave out; we rolled to a stop in the junkyard behind the garage. We weren’t going anywhere by bus until the shop opened, so Nick, Ethan, and I freed our mounts from the roof to explore Grand Island by bike.

Grand Island is an island amid a sea of corn, an agricultural trading post spread out among long fields, straight roads, and empty parking lots. Nick, Ethan and I found a warm pool of water, empty of swimmers, but it was inside a Hampton Inn, and the woman working at the hotel preferred that the pool remain empty. Escaping into the night, we peddled down a dirt path walled by tall stalks of corn. Back at the bus, we found the rest of our squadron lying out on the roof.

Nick mixed up some kalimodxo (a Basque word, pronounced ‘calimucho’), a concoction of Coca Cola and wine, he discovered whilst in Northern Germany. We sat across the roof, quaffing kalimudxo, looking out over the scattered lights of Grand Island, musing and laughing over the chain of events that had brought us there: Three years ago Ethan’s life revolved around basketball. Since stepping off the court, he has read a lot of Noam Chomsky, been in and out of love, traveled around the world, and now finds himself in a junkyard in the middle of Nebraska atop his vegetable oil mobile with a wonderfully motley crew.

The next morning, while mechanics inspected the bus, Chris and I peddled off to find food supplies and procure a connecting nozzle to link our travel stove to the propane tank. We rode around a town of one story ranch houses and grain elevators. Unable to find local produce, we returned from “Super Super Savers” with eggs, rice, beans, and avocados, plus the missing link to the stove. We set up our kitchen on an weather-beaten wooden pallet and cooked breakfast for the eight of us.

The mechanics reported that the fuel injector pump was cracked and lacked the pressure to send enough fuel to the pistons— that’s why we couldn’t idle and couldn’t start her up without ether.

“How quickly can you fix it?” Ethan asked.

“Well, I’d say ‘bout a week.”

We could not wait a week. Our team sprung into action, on phones, palm pilots, and the shop’s computer looking for new fuel injection pump. We found a part that could arrive in two days. As much fun as we had had the previous night, we did not want to spend two more days in Grand Island. We could have the part shipped to Colorado and wait for it in Boulder, but we’d have to risk leaving a place that could fix it for a fair price, to drive 600 miles to Boulder in the ailing bus and see if we could find a mechanic there to install the pump.

Until then, Ethan had paid for the bus entirely on his own, and was hesitant to take the additional risk. All of us agreed to split the labor cost of whatever mechanic we found, push on to Colorado and have the fuel pump meet us there. I decided then that I would to commit as a bus partner with Ethan, and buy the $1200 fuel injector pump. We set off for Boulder.

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Maya and I spent our last night together by a campfire in Maine. The next morning we drove back to Cambridge and said goodbye in an eddy of tears and kisses, laughter and runny noses, loving each other and parting ways once again.

The next day, the bus came lumbering down my driveway, Ethan at the wheel and Chris standing shotgun in the stairwell. They stopped just short of bumping into my basketball hoop. We embraced each other, gritting our teeth to contain our excitement. I dragged my trunk onboard, lashed my bike to the roof, and after convincing my mother to donate a beanbag chair from our basement (“Thanks, Mom. No grease stains, I promise. Love you.”), I waved goodbye to my family, slid into the cracked pleather saddle and eased the Bus onto the road.

Lillian Smith once wrote, “no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” Two years earlier, Ethan, Chris, and I circumnavigated the globe with Semester as Sea. That journey, and those since, changed us all.

I was beginning another journey and I felt it changing me already. We drove past New Bedford and Fall River to the Providence Zen center to pick up Cat. The bus ran smoothly on vegetable oil the entire way. We puttered past the Korean style wooden temples and flowering rhododendrons, finally resting beneath a willow tree. I stepped out onto the grass. Ethan climbed out behind me, stopping to fasten the pad lock across the door.

“You’re locking the door, E.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s a Zen Center, E.”

“Right,” he said, pulling the door back open.

I met Cat the day she and her friend Jeremy came to Ethan’s house to help renovate the bus. She painted a sunburst on our ceiling and decided—on the spot—to join us on our voyage to Burning Man. Cat greeted us from the Temple steps with her unsinkable smile. She led us through the meditation room, introducing us to a large bronze Buddha, then into the communal kitchen where we helped ourselves to curry and vegetables. We took several of the monks on a tour of the bus. “One of the original Merry Pranksters is with us meditating,” one monk told us, pointing to a small temple perched on the hillside. The original magic bus: duly noted. The monks wished us well, and we pointed northward to Boston.

“This bus runs on Vegetable Oil!” proclaims the side of the bus. Needless to say, we turn heads on the highway, often eliciting thumbs ups and honks of encouragement. But despite the support from our fellow motorists, the bus began to tire outside the city.

“We’re losing power, Captain E!” I yelled back to Ethan, who was lounging on the futon, trying to catch up on sleep.

“Probably a clogged filter. Switch to diesel. We’ll change it when we stop.”

“Right O!”

We wriggled through narrow city streets to the Cambridge Zen Center to meet Jeremy. With him were Luke and John, who had also decided (apparently the night before) to join us on our adventure West.

I clamored onto the roof of the bus, lashing another couple of bikes to the growing pile. A woman with long white hair and a simple purple dress called out from across the street:

“Your bus runs on vegetable oil!? That’s great! Have you seen Al Gore’s movie?”

“No, not yet, but thank you.”

“Well, you should. Oooh, I’m so glad someone’s doing something about it! You guys give me hope!”

We decided to fuel up before leaving the city. Being the most ironic option, we chose the Middle East Café. We dropped Ethan and Cat at the front door (“No, we do not want to eat falafel. We want the grease from your dumpster to fuel our bus.”), and I pulled the bus into the back alley to find the grease. Though Ethan and I were novice grease pirates by this point, our fellow journeymen, and woman, were still virgins. I passed out the rubber gloves: “You ready to get greasy?” The first step is to test the grease quality: dip strips of cardboard into waste oil barrels and inspect the dripping grease—honey colored oil is good, gravy is bad. Though we opted for the cleaner grease of the Chinese restaurant next door, the owner of the Middle East was still eager to help:

“I’ve got five gallon buckets you can have. Very useful.”

When the bus had drunk her fill, we rolled up our hoses and scrubbed our hands. As I steered us onto the Mass Pike, we toasted a successful first grease team operation with bottles of surplus pomegranate juice. I followed an orange sunset across Massachusetts—my first day behind the wheel of a 35ft school bus and I drove tentatively, checking and re-checking mirrors to make sure I wasn’t crushing anyone. But I didn’t crush anyone; I kept on across Massachusetts, letting my driving partner Jeremy take on New York.

The bus grew thirsty again outside Syracuse. We tried McDonalds, but the grease looked like frozen gravy and I think we frightened the night manager. We tried Applebee’s grease, and deemed the orange swill good enough (though we later learned it probably wasn’t). Cat dipped the suction hose into the dumpster while we talked to the employees outside on break. “Damn, I wanna ride the Bus!” exclaimed one of the Applebee’s bus-boys who had just moved North from Georgia. A maternal senior waitress wished us well and gave us twenty dollars, which we gratefully accepted.

With “Vegetable Oil Powered Bus” written across our hull, I felt almost guilty stopping at a gas station to fill up our petro-diesel tank. I sought out a Citgo to soften the karmic blow, supporting literacy programs in Venezuala over contributing to Exxon’s and the oil cartel’s record breaking profits. We pressed on across New York, joining the herds of tractor-trailer trucks that migrate across the country by night. Jeremy and I finished our six-hour shift, and Luke and John took over.

In the morning, we pulled over in a town called Westfield, aptly named, but still in New York. A bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln holding the hand of a young girl in a bonnet welcomed us to Main Street. It felt like the small American towns that exist more commonly in Norman Rockwell paintings than real life. There was a local hardware store, a spinning barber’s pole, and a crowded diner. The absence of a Wal-mart made Westfield feel anachronistic…but still, thankfully, there was a Chinese restaurant.

Back on the highway, hurtling over the asphalt once again, Cat took the wheel with Ethan co-piloting. Luke sat on the futon beside John and Chris, anxiously trying to access the internet.

“I don’t think you would have gotten on the bus if it was a mistake,” said John.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’m thinking that I’ve left too many loose ends and people I’m going to let down. I have obligations. I’m looking for bus tickets back to Boston from Ohio,” answered Luke.

“You’ve come this far for a reason,” Chris advised, but then left Luke to make his own decision.

We chugged through the corn-stuffed Northwest corner of Pennsylvania and into Ohio, stopping next in Cleveland’s financial district in front of a Fed-Ex/Kinkos. My fellow grease pirates ran off to send emails and buy groceries. I stayed next to the bus and fielded questions from a crowd of breaking janitors, construction workers, and eager kindergarten students with their peppy teacher. An African-American man wearing white overalls and a hard-hat admired our vessel:

“Vegetable oil? Y’all scientists?”

“No, we’re not scientists; anyone can do this.” “Well, I wish y’all luck, man.” Designer suits faced straight ahead and hurried by.

Our hazard lights had drained our ancient batteries; we needed a jump start. A “Manny’s Towing” truck rolled by and stopped at a traffic light. I walked up to the open window:

“Manny, could you give us a jump? Our battery’s dead.”

“All right, man. Where you at?”

We were soon back on the road, plunging into the sea of corn across Ohio and Indiana. With so many enthusiastic drivers there was plenty of time to relax inside our traveling lounge. Chris sat cross-legged on the love seat and explained to me the Mayan calendar— the second most accurate time keeping device that humans have ever created, behind the atomic clock (FYI: this world is set to end on the vernal equinox of 2012, so make sure to use up all your vacation time). John and Jeremy pounded African drums along with the beats of Michael Franti and Spearhead, Manu Chao, or The Matrix soundtrack. We read and wrote and talked. We watched the world pass outside the windows: the land, the sky, and the little worlds inside each passing automobile.

Sunset found us at a truck stop in the middle of Indiana. Triple-trailered Fed-Ex trucks streamed across the pink horizon. We tumbled out of the bus, stretched our legs, and tossed an Aerobie disk around the empty parking lot. It felt good to run around, and we resolved to institute daily recesses. Luke and John (who were childhood friends) danced around one another shadow boxing. They were laughing; Luke had decided to stay with us.

It was almost three in the morning when we got off the highway in Chicago. Nick, another shipmate from SAS, would arrive in the morning via Greyhound from Madison, Wisconson. We rolled through the South Side and into a maze of freight yards and truck routes. Luke successfully navigated us to a parking lot on Northwestern’s campus (his alma mater), where we slept soundly the remainder of the night.

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