The Adventure Begins

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. — Confucius

I just sent a check to a guy I’ve never met to buy a car I’ve never seen. If the seller is really a swindler and not the well-intentioned biodiesel researcher/father/surfer/California renaissance man I was entrusting, I do hope in the least he possesses the biodiesel Land Cruiser I think I’m buying and that he spends my money wisely in a long road trip to a fantastic place. Barring that, I’m hoping to be in the driver’s seat myself on Friday the 5th. To say I’m excited would be an understatement. I feel as though I’m starting a new romantic relationship, which I guess in some form I am. There is romance with this vehicle and I realized quickly that there were emotions and symbols and needs and story fueling this purchase. It seemed, without even driving it, this vehicle was already taking me places I needed to go.

I’d been looking for a car for ages but hadn’t found myself willing to throw what I had toward anything I really wanted. I almost bought a Subaru Outback XT. It’s an awd wagon with a tuned-down version of the near rally spec STI engine so it’s all race car cool and quiet and smooth and well, somehow not quite right. I stared at its projector beam headlights and thought, “I wouldn’t want to have to replace one of those.” It got about 19mpg in town which seemed abominable given how small it was. I also feared the inevitable temptation to put its turbo and its 260ish hp to work one too many times and finding myself dealing with the red lights behind and the quick boost to my insurance premiums. The third generation Toyota 4runner was another candidate but its low mpg ratings and inevitable high mileage/price combinations weren’t that inspiring either. With budget I had, my choices weren’t vast but the purely practical/rational mind (if there were such a thing) probably would have put me in some kind of late model Toyota or Honda, say a nice little Civic or Corolla with low miles and a benign original owner.

But there was a piece of me that didn’t want any of those things or even newer, shinier things well above my budget. And that’s the piece of me that wanted what I couldn’t yet imagine. And this is where it all became personal, emotional. I had some deeper needs beyond resolving my desire to get myself and some of my stuff from A to B. I wanted a different kind of relationship. I wanted a conscious relationship with a vehicle that affirmed my positive views of technology and reduced the aspects I didn’t like. I wanted something that honored my interests in self-sufficiency, repairability, durability, fuel efficiency, practicality, all-terrain capability and preferably a vehicle that offered some aesthetic charm. I also really wanted to have a vehicle that could run on non-petroleum based fuels. I wanted something, I suppose, different.

Enter 1985 BJ60 diesel Land Cruiser.

I had considered the imported-to-Canada-only diesel Land Cruiser before and occasionally looked at rusted hulks on craigslist in Vancouver or Calgary and wondered about the strength of my dedication to the idea when it involved getting up there, going through the importation hoops and all of that kind of thing. So when I found one in California on craigslist the other day and then bought it on ebay the next,  it seemed like I’d already embarked on a great adventure.

I used to write and spend a lot of energy talking about and worrying about what I was doing as a “writer.” I quit writing professionally which had never really been getting me to where I wanted to go as it was. I quit referring to myself as a “writer” because I really wasn’t one in the way I needed to be. And then I pretty much quit writing altogether. By then, I really wasn’t a writer at all.

In previous eras, I had high-paid gigs with glossy magazines and high-powered advertising projects but they were a bit like that shiny turbo Outback I almost purchased. Lacking some necessary grit and heart perhaps. All just kind of nice, but not right for me. It had been years since people had encouraged me to write or that I heard the phrase, “You should be a writer.” Those voices have come back and as I found myself wondering, questioning and opening so much on the eve of this vehicle transfer I decided to start this blog experiment.

Like my new relationship with the Land Cruiser, I don’t know where it’s going to go. I hope that the Land Cruiser is a functional daily driver that changes my relationship to technology, to our petroleum economy and that it is a vehicle that takes me to a lot of fantastic places I want to go. I hope it becomes an outreach tool and a point of conversation with strangers, leading to curbside chats about biofuel, the ecological footprint of maintaining earnest, well engineered machines. I hope it helps me get out into the world more. I hope it gets me to think more about what I’m doing with myself on this planet. And I hope the blog becomes a place where I feel comfortable enough to write about things I want to write about so that people say again, “yeah, you really should be a writer.”

But almost more so, I hope it inspires and educates and prompts some decent thought and discussion for others on how we lead our lives, what kinds of relationships we choose and what we do with our time on planet Earth. I hope I can learn about how to keep a 25 year old truck alive and functional and talk about how that feels and what it demands. You know, educate if i dare say. I hope to learn a ton about biodiesel – all of its ups and downs — and to share that with others.

I just want to share this experience because I think it’s going to be a good one and right now it feels really good. Maybe I’ll check in on Friday when I’m either driving away with a shit eating grin, or standing at the San Jose Airport like some guy in a really bad version of Punk’d.

Viva!

— twb