There’s a scene in Dumb and Dumber, when Jim Carrey turns to Jeff Daniels and says, “Wanna hear the most annoying sound in the world?” Then he screeches at the top of his lungs like a wounded wookie. Sadly, I have discovered a sound that trumps it: Iggy, using his Gomer Pyle voice.
By what we’d hope would be the final morning of our trip, on our way through the Nevada desert and on to California, I nearly strangled him with his seat belt.
“Well gawwwleeee, Greg, ah never knew it bawthurd yew sooo much,” he said.
“It wasn’t funny in New York. Or in Illinois. Or here in Nevada. Stop it now.” Iggy was on the verge of achieving the impossible: ruining our potentially triumphant morning in the Mercedes.
“Ah don’t know wut yer talkin’ about,” he said. “Ahm just talkin’ like nermal.”
“I see no downside to killing you. I get a great travel story from it, and you’re dead.”
“Gawwwleeee Greg, that’s terrubull.”
To piss me off even more, he turned to the show-tunes station on satellite radio. After two or three lines of “Bali Ha’i,” I punched the power button. He didn’t start talking in a normal voice until his throat started to get sore about a half hour later.
In anticipation of ending the trip and spending some much-needed time apart, neither of us had slept very well in Lovelock. We stayed at a dingy casino, where I won thirty-one dollars on video poker — the exact cost of the blue jeans in Fort Collins. Maybe karma had begun to side with me. The town itself was born out of a fertile patch of grassy marsh in the sink of the Humboldt River and was the last stop for pioneers before the parched Forty-Mile Desert, the most brutal stretch in the journey to California. There, the remains of wagons, livestock, and unfortunate migrants were abandoned on the spongy, lifeless alkali flats with horrifying frequency. People actually welcomed climbing through the treacherous Sierras once they crossed it, provided that they arrived by September before the snow. The Donner party, whose path into the mountains we would largely trace that morning, came a month too late.
We took to the highway from Lovelock with a sense of purpose. There was plenty of fuel sloshing in the back of the wagon to get us to Berkeley and the weather forecast called for clear skies and dry pavement. Dare I say that I was actually happy at that moment? Maybe Iggy put on the Gomer Pyle voice because my semijoy made him feel uncomfortable. Or maybe he was simply being obnoxious. All I know is when two guys share close quarters for 192 straight hours — basically separating from each other only during bathroom breaks — the quirks and tics that might have been amusing, or at least ignored, at the start of the journey gradually become unbearable.
Even after the gawwwleeees and aw shuckses ended, my annoyance lingered. Does he have to put his feet up on the dashboard like that? What’s up with that stupid vitamin water? Why doesn’t he just get water from the tap? It’s cheaper. I hate his short haircut.
Reno provided a much-needed interruption. It’s the gateway to the Sierras, where weary travelers cross the Truckee River and leave the long dusty desert behind them. Beyond it: California. California! We yawped and honked the horn as we crossed the border. Was our cross-country mission accomplished? Or did we need to get all the way to BioFuel Oasis?
Iggy answered my question. “The Oasis, man. If the car breaks down here, it doesn’t count.”
“How do you figure?” I asked. “We’ve gone from Vermont, down to Massachusetts and over to California. We’ve made it from the East Coast to the other side of the country.” I moved my index finger over an imaginary map to emphasize the long journey.
“If H. Nelson Jackson drove all the way cross country but broke down in Albany, would he have succeeded?”
“Yes!” I said, emphatically.
“No. He had to make it to Manhattan. That’s where he said he was going, and that’s where he finished.”
The rise into the Sierras brought a welcome sight: the color green. Not since Colorado did we find it in such abundance. A thin forest of swarthy pines ornamented the mountainsides, buoying our spirits even higher. Then a not-so-welcome sight: the needle on the temperature gauge had risen much higher than normal, almost crossing into the dangerous red zone. Even considering the engine strain of hauling such a heavy load up a steep highway to seven thousand feet in elevation, the wagon shouldn’t have been so close to overheating.
We slowed to about forty-five miles per hour, and Iggy flipped on the heat, which cooled the engine a little, but turned the vehicle’s interior into an Easy-Bake Oven. He said it was only a stopgap remedy and told me to take the next highway exit. I did as instructed and we glided down a valley road into Truckee, parking outside the train station. We suspected a coolant leak, possibly in one of the Greasecar lines. After popping the hood, we received a fair share of stern looks from the well-dressed pedestrians, because Truckee isn’t the kind of place where people work on their cars in a downtown parking space. The historic Western-style storefronts along the main street are so meticulously restored and maintained, and the sidewalks so finely pressure-washed, that the place looks kind of like an alpine Disneyland for grown-ups. Apparently, more than a few Bay Area dot-commers were smart enough to cash out before the bust and escape there. Peering over the engine, we saw that the coolant needed to be topped off in the reservoir, but there weren’t any noticeable leaks. Iggy suggested we keep moving, considering that the crest of the Sierras was only a few miles away, anyway, and from there the drive would be mostly downhill.
So we drove back onto the freeway, and before long found ourselves dropping down the western slope of the Sierras, into the Sacramento Valley. Heavy traffic collected around us as we went, like an atom gathering electrons, until the flow of the four-lane freeway almost halted. After spending so much time on empty expanses of interstate, I felt edgy from the volume of vehicles around us, yet I insisted on sitting at the helm as we arrived at the BioFuel Oasis.
The engine had cooled by the time we passed through Sacramento, but another small problem arose: the air conditioner wasn’t working. Iggy spent a few minutes fiddling with all of the buttons and knobs on the aged climate-control system, but only a draft of hot air jetted from the vents regardless. The Mercedes was refusing to let us end the trip in comfort. Iggy turned off the fan and tried opening the windows, but the assault of exhaust fumes from the cars, trucks, and motorcycles around us made him rethink. So we motored onward in the heat, our T-shirts darkening from sweat more and more with each passing mile.
The traffic thinned a bit in the agricultural hinterlands beyond Davis, and from the corner of my eye I noticed Iggy on the verge of starting one last meaningful conversation. He couldn’t resist. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, as he considered and reconsidered how, exactly, to start.
“So,” he said.
“So.”
“So what have you learned on this trip?”
“What have I learned?” I asked.
“Yes, what have you learned?”
I considered his question carefully. Where to start? My mind leafed through all of the insights from our eight days and thousands of miles spent on the road. There were lessons I would never, ever forget, and they practically spilled out of my mouth.
“Well,” I said.
“Yes?” Iggy looked eager to hear.
“Well, for starters . . . I learned that no man under sixty should wear tube socks when he’s got shorts on,” I said. “And that includes you, so please stop it. I say this out of friendship. I learned that your snoring is totally out of control and might require medical attention. Same goes for your belching. It’s not natural. I learned that you’re still not prone to introspection. I learned that I’ve really come to hate eighties dance music. I learned that you don’t floss. At least not while traveling. I learned that you have a strange fixation with squeegees. I learned that before taking a long drive again, I should get the air conditioner checked. I learned that the grease selection in Minnesota and Nebraska is lousy. Oh, and I learned that you actually are decent at fixing things, so it was useful for me to bring you.”
A frown creased his face. I hadn’t given him what he wanted.
“What about you? What have you learned?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.
“Nothing?”
“This isn’t about me. What has this car taught you? And don’t be sarcastic,” he said.
“Hmmm . . . It taught me that if two goobers like us can actually get in a car and drive across the country without fossil fuels or putting a lot of carbon into the air, the answers for sustainability are easier than people think.” I was too sweaty and tired to be more philosophical than that. But Iggy still wasn’t finished.
“So you think that grease power is the way to go?” he asked.
“No. But it’s a way to go. It’s a start. Look at me. I spent almost no money on a car that I converted, and I’m spending almost nothing on gas for it. Saving the environment is a side benefit to me saving money.” He did it. I was burning calories.
“But not everyone can afford what you did,” Iggy said.
“Not everyone can afford something cheap like this?”
“Well you paid four thousand dollars in cash for it. Who has that kind of cash? Then you spent another couple grand on the Greasecar kit and installation, and another couple grand on getting the car fixed. That’s a lot of money.”
My personal finances aren’t my favorite subject. “Those numbers aren’t totally right. Besides, Ann Marie and I pretty much spent our savings on this.”
“Let’s say you spent eight grand. You plopped a lot down,” Iggy said. “A lot of people get no-money-down loans for cars. They don’t have that cash.”
“But a lot of people in this country do have eight grand. More than eight grand. I know what you’re saying. I feel for the guy cutting down the last tree on Easter Island if he’s trying to keep his family warm. But if he’s doing it so he can move a big statue in front of his house, I have a problem.”
“So what’s the solution?” Iggy asked. “Wind? Solar? Something else?”
“That’s what the errands are for, right?”
“True,” he said.
“I’ll know better when, and if, they’re all done.”
“Well, your last errand is to report what you learned from the other errands collectively,” Iggy said.
“You want it double-spaced and typed, Professor?”
“A note will do.”
I nodded. “A note. It won’t be deep,” I said.
“I don’t care.”
“And it won’t be long,” I said.
“That’s all right.”
“Then I’ll get the fifty dollars?”
“Then you’ll get the fifty dollars,” he said.
We rambled through Oakland and marveled at the clear view of San Francisco — where Jackson began his trip — across the bay. Our arrival time in Berkeley was a few minutes before four o’clock, just before the real rush hour hit. The Internet-plotted directions to the BioFuel Oasis led us from the freeway into a quiet, dense neighborhood where warehouses sat between apartment buildings and tidy, two-story 1950s homes — all packed so closely together that neighbors could practically share a cup of sugar by reaching through the window. Iggy told me to take a right onto Channing Way, then a quick left onto Fourth Street. I followed his instructions, and we found it: the BioFuel Oasis, where waste oil that’s refined into bio-diesel flows out of a nozzle like unleaded gas. I had spent so many hours picturing this moment, of pulling up to the pump and filling the Greasecar tank, guilt-free, with its environmentally friendly bounty.
We had expected the Oasis to look like a typical gas station, but it was actually more like a small one-car mechanic’s garage. It was recessed into the bottom floor of a tall building and the pump was apparently located inside it. At least we thought it was, because the windowless garage door was closed and locked. I parked diagonally on the street and we vaulted from the car to examine the blue sign that posted its operating hours. Next to MONDAY it read CLOSED. It had never occurred to me to check if they’d be open on the day we arrived — my final, and biggest, logistical error.
I cautiously looked at Iggy, expecting a scowl on his face, but he was laughing. It did seem fitting, somehow, for us to celebrate our accomplishment alone, drenched in sweat, smelling like garbage. We had traveled more than thirty-nine hundred miles, from one edge of the country to the other, burning roughly 190 gallons of veggie oil and less than four gallons of fossil fuel — perhaps the first people ever to accomplish such a feat in a car. Iggy pulled out two plastic twelve-ounce bottles, handed one to me, and we raised them.
“To progress,” I said.
“To progress,” Iggy repeated.
I took a swig. Hey, this vitamin water doesn’t taste so bad.