Story Break
Types Of Fuel
What you learned in junior high science class still applies, at least in our universe. Matter comes in three forms: solid, liquid, and gas, and so does stove fuel. We’re gonna mostly forget about some of the fun things like high energy plasma, neutronium and whatever it is that black holes are made of.
If you’re familiar with these, then I can’t help you. In fact, I don’t want to know anything about you. Don’t look me up, I’m doing just fine on my own. I don’t need to be irradiated or probed in any way at all. Like I said, we’re going to deal with what’s in our normal universe, which is things right down here on old terra firma, U.S. of Earth, where we know up from down, right from left, and where we don’t make campfires from neutron pulsars or gamma rays or anything like that.
So, you don’t need me to tell you something totally obvious like whether to buy a stove that burns liquid fuel instead of compressed gas, or fuel tablets, let alone recommend the brand of fuel you should buy. It all depends on what you think is right, based on how you do your backpacking, and you’re an adult, so let’s stop there. Once you decide to go shopping, you’re on your own. They’re all out there on the shelves, or you can make your own. We’ve got some simple plans in this book, and a reference section. Right here, right now we’ll do a little something different for a minute.
I like to daydream, so here’s a couple of things for your head to play with.
How about a universal stove fuel? OK, it’s fuel, so you can burn it, granted. But what if you could brush your teeth with it too? I guess ethyl alcohol is a little like this, but not too much, and why stop with teeth? What if you could burn this for fuel and brush your teeth with it, and wash with it and shampoo, too? At least when you can find time and water and a warm sunny spot.
And how about if this stuff repelled bugs? And was a sunscreen? Right away you can see a little problem, like if you got your hair all lathered up and were covered with suds and then there was a spark? So it would have to be flammable when you wanted it to burn, but maybe not so much when you had your hair full of it. Anyway, you’d have to be careful. You get the point. We recognize the problem here and we’re working on it.
Then, like plan B, say, if you do your cooking in ziplock bags, you end up carrying a lot of used-up bags. It’s not like they add weight, because you’re eating the food as you go along, and lightening the load, but then again there you are, with a growing wad of garbage. You can keep stuffing used bags into other used bags and have them all stay relatively compact and scent-free, but, let me say it again, you keep getting a bigger and bigger wad of garbage.
So how about bags that burned? Not ordinary plastic bags, but something special. Plastic doesn’t really burn, not like stove fuel. Say that after you cooked your lunch and ate it out of the bag you could like rinse out the bag and then let it dry and it would get crumbly and turn into solid fuel flakes? Sweet.
If you’ve burned waste paper, you’ve had problems. This new stuff would have to be different. Burning waste paper is iffy — you never know what’s going to happen. You can get sparks floating away, or end up with a half charred mess. How about a way to convert your garbage into a dry compact little heap of flakes, which you could then measure out and burn in small tidy quantities? I’d like to see this one.
Next step. You realize that the world is filled with ratty dead stuff. All natural. There’s grass and old decayed bark, and pine needles, pine cones, dead leaves and twigs and so on. What I was thinking is what if there was some way to just grab a few handfuls of this and convert it into a generic fuel?
Shove some of it into a jar, and add some water or something, maybe with a pinch of powdered spores, and let the spores ferment it into a clean cooking gas.
Gas like methane would be a little tricky, but it would be cooler if you could ferment your own alcohol as you walked. Of course you’d have to distill it, so maybe methane wouldn’t be so bad. You could just grab a some dry grass every day or so and refill your fermenter and never have to carry fuel or buy it or hunt for it.
Instead you can just burn twigs and pine cones normally, but then you have hot coals and ashes laying around when you’re done, and you always need to worry about finding dry stuff that will burn. If you gassify it, there’s no problem.
Then maybe there is a way to create a fuel that could hide you. Imagine that burning it disguises you by hiding your smell, and the smell of your cooking. Wouldn’t that be great? Think about it. You could stop for lunch, and break out the stove, and as soon as you get it lit all the flies and mosquitoes would sort of blank out and lose track of you, and just crash into trees.
Somehow I attract a lot of flies and mosquitoes so this would be a good one for me. I’ve walked for miles with the same flock of horseflies circling around me for hours, and there I’d be, waving my trekking poles at them, wishing I had some kind of battery-powered zapper that when I pushed the big red button on it, the one with the white outline of the dead fly, it would kill all horseflies within 50 feet. God I’d love to do that and just watch them all drop out of the air and hit the ground with a dead fly bounce.
Well, then why couldn’t we have something, some ingredient in stove fuel that made us invisible to those nasties? Think about it, just sitting down to lunch or supper and sort of dropping off the radar.
Maybe eventually someone could improve it to the point that you could find a campsite, and sit down and cook, and this secret ingredient in your fuel would make your whole campsite invisible to anything with a nose. Then you wouldn’t have to stay awake all night wondering if you heard scratching and sniffing out there or not. Mice, wood rats, skunks, raccoons, bears, whatever. The cloak of unsniffability would linger for hours so you could eat in peace and go to bed and not have to worry. Damn that would be fine.
And suddenly I find myself thinking back to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Left Hand of Darkness” and the micro thermo nuclear or whatever it was stove that they had in their tents, that you could carry in a pocket but it would set up and run forever and be totally safe, and you could just dial it up or down as needed for your chosen temperature range.
OK, we won’t see that one soon. If we had technology like that, you might want to forget it, to go out naked, with only a pointed stick, and leave behind all technology from the last 30,000 years, just so you could feel real.
Whatever.