Story Break
The Ratgas Stove
Nuts and bolts and tin snips take you only so far. A mechanic makes things. A visionary dreams them up first. I’d like one of those new cars. One of those hybrids. Maybe. Not sure if they’ve gone far enough yet. It could be that people need to dream a little more first. There’s the full electric car, and then there are designs with other kinds of batteries, like the mechanical flywheel battery or the car that runs on compressed air, or the hybrid that stores up energy in a hydraulic system every time you step on the brakes.
Imagination can take you places you never would have thought. That’s where I went one day while daydreaming and came up with the idea for stove that runs on rodent farts.
Biogas, from little Herbie, my hamster pocket pal, or a larger stand-in, more rugged, with bigger output than my friend. Sort of an industrial version of my pet. Like a rat. I feed Herbie a lot, and he poops it out. Why not hook up his butt to a little tank and catch all his gas? That was the original inspiration.
I was thinking a small lubricated catheter sliding up under his tail, connected to a thin rubber hose, connected to a tank. The tank could be an air tight plastic bag of some kind. When mealtime rolls around, just set a rock on the bag to pressurize it and run the gas through the hose into a small stove. Voila!
But Herbie didn’t like it. At all.
I would have needed a valve on his end to stop backflow too. Another complication. To prevent hamster explosions.
I tried having conversations with Herbie, to get his point of view, but I’m not really sure that he was listening. He wouldn’t even sit still. Even inspecting his undercarriage was touchy, him being fairly protective there and all. If you’re on good terms with one, you can just pick up a hamster and look at pretty much anything you want, but they’re so small and twitchy that you can’t even begin to poke around with your fingers. Fingers as big to a hamster as telephone poles would be to one of us.
Hamsters, when they stay still, do it for about two and a half seconds, max. Tip: Don’t try poking around with the point of a pencil unless you’re wearing gloves, even being delicate. Hold your hamster gently, over something soft, like a pillow. In case he takes off like a moon rocket instead of just deciding to bite your thumb off, which he’ll usually do. He can’t always control his reflexes and deserves a soft landing whether he leaves you bleeding or not.
Anyhow, that idea didn’t get too far. I decided pretty soon that no hamster really wanted to be “on line”. I never really tried to hook Herbie up, exactly. Not all the way. Did some early experiments, but I backed off before it went too far, with some strong encouragement from him, and since then we’ve managed to reestablish our friendship for the most part.
I did take an earlier version of Herbie to school once, and that probably taught me all I needed to know, really. I was about 14 and thought it would be fun to take my little buddy along for the day. Since hamsters are nocturnal they usually just want to curl up and go back to cutting zees as soon as possible, whenever you have them out during the day.
I used to take him grocery shopping with my parents. Mom, Dad, me, and Herbie, in my shirt pocket. He’d stand there inside my shirt pocket on his back feet, with his little hands gripping the top of my pocket, and look around at everything, little nose whiskers twitching, sniffing the air. Bright, beady eyes shining under the fluorescent lights.
Going by the produce section I’d grab a pinch of lettuce or celery and feed him. After that he’d curl up inside my pocket and go to sleep, popping up again to watch checkout time, if at all. No one ever saw him. He never made a fuss, just stood there in my pocket and watched, or curled up inside, down in the bottom next to my heart, and slept. Like I had one furry teenage boy breast.
Didn’t work quite as well at school that winter day. Oh, Herbie behaved himself in the left pocket of my cardigan. That was all right. He slept curled up in his usual little ball. But it was about halfway through Latin class, around 10:30, that I realized this wasn’t a really good idea. I sat there waiting for him to wake up and climb out, looking for a place to pee, or for a snack. Or maybe he would just decide to try sleepwalking for his first time ever, right there and then.
Never seen a hamster sleepwalking, but Herbie was adventurous and unusually intelligent, and if one of us could do it, it would be him. He could do anything. But if he’d never sleepwalked before, he wouldn’t have been very good at it. He would be winging it, learning it right there in the second half of Latin class, or next period, in English, or maybe in the hallway between the two. I didn’t need him to bail and tear down a hallway crammed with goofy trampling teenager feet.
I saw a mouse in a library once. It was running across a carpet, chased by half a dozen well-meaning students. I didn’t want that for Herbie. I didn’t want to see him stopped dead by the sole of someone’s shoe, with tread marks all down his back. He was my friend. You don’t do that to friends, and if you’re the small one in the relationship, you don’t want that happening to you.
It could be that he was partying hard the night before. Something worked. He remained unconscious. He kept up his tiny snoring all the way through Latin class, then through English. At noon I took him home and put him back into his cage. He never said anything in particular about that day but I think it could be that he was relieved too.
You know, that makes me think. It would be even harder carrying a hamster on a backpacking trip. One wouldn’t be enough either. Anyway, hamsters are too small. You’d need rats. And there’s the tail. My sister likes rats, but have you every seen a rat’s tail in person? Like a creepy pointed snake being dragged around all over, backwards . It’s almost alive all on its own. I still don’t know if rats ever fart, but even a rat fart has to be pretty small, so you’d need a lot of them to run even the smallest stove.
You could collect a bunch of droppings, maybe, in a plastic bottle, and let them ferment. Change that stuff into methane, but you’d need a week with a tweezer to pick up enough rat poops ahead of time (like grains of wild rice, black). Forget about it on the trail.
Maybe better to collect some of your own poo on the first day of a trip and make gas from that. Maybe not, come to think of it. Lots of issues there, even on a solo trip, gag reflex and all. You can’t tell anyone what you did, even if it worked OK. Ever. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. Not with poop exactly, but well, let’s drop it now, if we can use that word here.
What you’d end up with is like a portable sewage treatment plant made from tubing and plastic bottles (plastic bags would be WAY too likely to break open — let’s not go there either). Wouldn’t know just where to carry it. Big downsides if this gizmo came apart in your pack. Very big. Could put you off your feed for a good while. People you met on the trail would know something was up, even standing way back. They could tell.
Don’t know where to take what’s left of this idea. Have wondered how this might work with one medium-sized dog rather than a 12-pack of rats. You can train dogs, anyway. Maybe it needs more thought. Maybe not. Might make a good display at the dung museum in Glandular, Wyoming.
So long.