We ended up leaving the car with mechanic Elijah Kane in Austin Texas. I met with him as soon as he got back into Austin. We stayed up until 4 am talking about the car, oil recycling in Austin, and the creation of a nationwide network of vegetable oil cooperatives and mechanics and resources, educational programs, and other ideas...
I will be returning to Austin in two weeks to pick up the car, play a show with members of Grupo Fantasma, collect oil and information for the return trip, and show the car for the 1700 miles in between Austin and New York!
I am looking forward to completing the trip and driving the car around New York. I just walked past an old Mercedes diesel sedan parked around the corner from me in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, and am putting together a note to leave to the owner. Veggie Benzes on the rise. Now if we can only convince some big Willie rapper to convert his diesel Hummer to vegetable oil...
A note: I had writtten earlier that in Texas that all of the grease vats are locked. That turned out not to be true upon checking more restaurants. The majority are indeed locked and property of Griffin, a large Texas rendering plant, but there were a large number of normal 50 gallon drums of grease outside of different restaurants with usable grease.
Here is my friend and neighbor Santos Peņa Ibarra on top of our superadobe temazcal. Phase Two: Plastering and finishing will commence in late spring.
Austin is a beautiful place. There is a lake in the middle of the city (actually a dammed part of the Lower Colorado River).
There is good Mexican food everywhere.
It is mid-February and the sun was hitting my shoulders as I walked around in a white tank top.
Adrian and Celeste are taking good care of us here. Last night they showed us a tape of bboys from Texas--some of the most incredible breakdancing I've ever seen.
Hard to believe GWB was running the show a few blocks away from here for so long.
Give thanks.
saturday afternoon, driving up highway 57 outside of matehuala, san luis potosi, mexico, 35 mph. a slight but long grade of highway is in front of us.
halfway up the car stalls...i conclude that it is not going to make us much further through any mountains...
we get a tow from the mechanic across the road to the border through 600 KM, five military checkpoints including one thorough revision of my car and its contents.
meanwhile, i am in the front seat of a newer Chevy pickup with the mechanic and his wife, packed three across. Nicole is lying like a pretzel in the back seat, reeling from stomach cramps, and a throbbing headache. It is 15 degrees out and there is no heat.
we make it to the border and pay Waldemar 6000 pesos...just under six hundred dollars.
On the flat ground of the S. Texas desert, the car runs a little better, sometimes up to 50 mph on flat highway, spewing embarrassing black smoke. I feel like shit for polluting so much but have to get it to the mechanic in Austin.
On the way, we find 15 acres of Mercedes parts and buy a used fuel injection pump and 5 injectors from a Tejana named Claire Rodriguez who is running the show like a drill instructor.
We get up to Austin and the mechanics at German Automotive are afraid to touch it, so back to square one to find a repair shop...
Elijah, a mechanic and Austin-based greasecar specialist, is getting in tonight around midnight and will be coming right over for a prognosis.
The Antibalas photo shoot is Thursday morning at 10 am. I feel like shit for letting them down and hope I can get there on time.
Meanwhile the trip is starting to get very expensive after being extremely cheap...
The good side is that we are in Austin with beautiful sunny weather, in the hospitality of Adrian and Celeste who have received us into their beautiful home...
so it's the fuel pump and/or the injectors that have been causing us to roll at between 25 and 50 mph for most of the trip.
it seems that the first tank of mexican diesel fuel was lethal and may have started to wreck the fuel pump.
now the mission is to get to texas as fast as possible to repair it because there are no parts here and nobody wants to touch it.
to top it off, i have some sort of weird intestinal problem.
burp.
First, the good news. Over the past 2 days, I gathered 40 liters of recycled oil from the enramadas (beachside fish restaurants) in Caleta de Campos, La Soledad, and Las Peņas. People were a little tripped out, but amused and very cooperative. We found that some of the cooks use it for lumbre (cooking fuel) along with wood.
The bad news...
After changing the diesel prefilter, the diesel filter, the veggie oil filter, and cleaning the veggie prefilter, the car stops dead once I switch over to veggie.
Plus, while running on diesel, the engine suffers from a severe lack of power and pick-up.
My guess: 1) clogged or dirty injectors AND 2) a dirty veg. tank with a clogged line running out from it.
The good news: Richard, the mechanic, is on the case and will be picking up where I left off tomorrow morning.
Keep your fingers crossed...we have six days to make it back to NYC!
After hustling into town and getting cement and chapopote just as the hardware stores were closing, we have decided to stop working for the moment. Time has run out on us for the moment in Las Peņas. I have 6 days to get back to New York City in a car that hasn't been doing over 55 miles an hour for the last few weeks (see next entry), and we still have to pack up the house for the rainy season, which takes a good solid day.
We were able to lay a good waterproofed concrete slab of 2 inches thick inside the temazcal, thanks to help again from Don Raul (el Inge) and Don Genaro.
Tomorrow afternoon is the piņata for all the children who participated in the project. Last year, it took several serious hits before the pinata broke, and instead of shattering, it flew of the string, scattering about 1/4 of the candy and leaving the other 3/4 of the candy in the piņata shell which was picked up by one of the more sly children...
So this year we are going to have a piņata filled with...what else but superadobe mix (shh...it's a secret), and give the kids equally sized gift bags to make sure nobody gets left out.
So the clock was ticking and my back and hands were aching from mixing nearly all the soil-cement. The kids had stopped coming, also tired from filling costales (the earth bags) day in and day out. It was time to bring in the hired guns for a day.
Don Raul (aka Inge) and Don Genaro came and mixed the soil for the last four rows. The building finished up strong. The hardest part was making such tight curves with such fat bag (the bag is 17.5 inches wide when empty, and about 14 inches wide when full), so some of our curves did not happen as clean as we wanted them, but we followed the form of the lancet dome for the most part.
Today we mixed cement and Don Genaro did a sand-cement mix for the floor, which needs to be waterproof.
Tomorrow is the plastering day, and when that dries, a coat of chapopote, a black tar-like waterproofing agent available all over Mexico.
The final touches, which will have to wait for the next trip down...
a door, volcanic rocks, interior plastering, and a ceremony to bless the temazcal and get it ready for use.
Santos peeking out from inside
Santos on top
Luis Manuel and Santos on top
So the kids had some vacation days off from school and spent their days playing soccer at the beach instead of mixing soil and hauling it down the hill. How can I blame them. Alejandro and I kept at it, with some pretty backbreaking work. We calculated it to be about 7 tons of soil we've mixed by hand so far.
We are a few rows from finishing... Once finished we apply the outer plaster, then a waterproof coating for the heavy rainy season. We also need to do the inner plastering, a light concrete slab on the floor, the door frame, and door.
I think we can get the structure done, but the plastering may have to wait till the next time we can get back here...
ps. thanks to the people who have been contributing money to the project! it goes quite a long way here! (if you want to donate, click on the PAY PAL button on the lower left)
Alejandro filling the superadobe bags
Santos, with some almonds from trees in the yard
A shot of the building from above
Carlos, Ivan, Samuel y Osvaldo: Making mix in the street
Sending mix from the street down to the building site
even down here, where time moves slower and nothing seems to change, the days are flying by. in 11 days or so I will be heading back to New York, back to the winter, back to the concrete, back to the empire, back to lots of friends and family.
alejandro and i were driving into town today, remarking on how cool it was that our neighbor refused to accept any payment or even gasoline for an hour's work with his chainsaw. "la gente de aqui son tienen menos presiones" People here have fewer pressures. That is why everyone is so nice... Nobody has to hustle each other for a piece of land, to worry about rent, etc. Yes, there are worries about basic needs, plus the anxieties caused by watching too much tv, but besides the two small grocery stores in town, there is nowhere to shop, and I have concluded that thatis a very good thing.
driving only twenty minutes into a larger, urbanish area, the vibe does change. there are still friendly people here, but the pressures are palpable, as is the dust and smoke from the highway and trash fires. the ideal size for a town lies somewhere in between.
yesterday and today have been great days as far as building. the long bag system works pretty well, especially with 6 or seven people passing the soil mix down. Today we going with two people making the mix, one person passing it into the bag, three people holding the 12 m (36 ft. long) bag, and one person packing the soil into the building bag.
we are trying to think of what would be the most appropriate inner finish. Something that has to resist 115% heat and lots of humidity every once in a while, with water condensing all over the surface, then falling into the gutter.
we built the floor into a convex shape, then put a soil cement finish over it. i think we may do a regular concrete floor because it will get wet.
on an unrelated note, my neighbor Margaro came over with his chain saw and chopped up a 20 foot long fallen tree trunk that had been in the yard for years. A few sections serve to make good benches, and the limbs can be used for the lumbre (log fires) used to cook tortillas.
to all the readers:
my apologies for the lack of new photos. the internet service here is very slow. it took me 15 minutes just to open up my hotmail inbox. we have been taking lots of snaps which will be uploaded soon.
on the plus side,
three different people have dropped by to share the local michoacan cannabis flavor with us over the past few days...probably three or four ounces in total (that is a new york street value of around 1600 dollars for those who care to calculate)
being able to smoke something that is an everyday plant instead of a commodity changes everything.
my neighbors hadn't heard of fruit dehydration so i built a screen and we are going to try drying out some papaya later on today...perhaps some tomatoes, too.
thousands of pounds of fruit go to waste because there is simply too much, and it gets too ripe before it gets to market.
time to dry...
The car is running now, but some recent WVO oil that I got from the enramadas (beachside seafood restaurants) has given me some trouble.
I cleaned the prefilter but may have put in on backwards (have to check this afternoon).
The trip to the coconut oil plant is on hold because it's about 6 hours away and I want to make sure the car is right and tight before making such a big road trip.
The salty air is taking its toll, enlarging the once-little spots of rust. I hope to nip that in the bud this week.
We have spent the last few days waiting for the big delivery of soil and using what we excavated from last year to build up the floor to a convex shape with a small pit to hold the volcanic rocks.
We sculpted the shape of the with loose soil, then wet it a little bit and tamped down. Then we put a 30% cement 70% soil mix down over that. It's not the final floor, but rather something to hold the shape.
For the floor covering we need something with more cement to be able to resist the heat and moisture in the temazcal, even if it's not on a daily basis.
We also dug a little gutter around the inside of the floor so the water, once condensed, can flow into the drain, which we dug up on the low side.
The soil finally came on Friday morning, and the mixer came yesterday. It was of the cement kind, the small egg-shaped cylinders which are more for pouring concrete slabs.
I didn't think that kind would work well in making the superadobe mix, which is 10 parts soil to 1 part cement to 1 part water, but the operator told me that it would...
When it finally came down to it, we put in the mix, and the soil formed large golf ball size balls that refused to break in the mixer. They didn't seem to think it would do the trick, so we loaded it back up on the truck and it went away.
