Laid to Rest or Put to Death: A Tragedy (Comedy?) in Three Parts

Part I: Insertion Failed

I am quite the film buff. I can spend hours sifting through movie trivia and rewatch certain scenes from my favorite films over and over again until I've memorized every inflection of the actors' words and every movement of the cinematographer's cameras. Since we have no television or DVD player in our living area I have come to rely on the DVD drive of our computer and our library's expansive film collection to fulfill my appetite. Much to my chagrin, our local library dealt with budget cuts by removing the ability of patrons to borrow any kind of media besides books from the interlibrary exchange program. I could borrow any DVD from any library across all of Michigan which pretty much meant limitless possibilities, but now I can only borrow from the thousands of movies our local library owns which is still pretty much  everything I could want except P.T. Anderson's Magnolia. One fateful day, a couple of months ago, I inserted the library's copy of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys into the DVD drive of our computer and in typical Macbook fashion, it snatched the DVD right from my hand and pulled the disc in by itself with a loud digital noise of unseen mechanisms sputtering to life. The noise grew louder as it attempted to read the disc and then it grew quiet. It rose again and quieted again and after another attempt or two it rejected the disc, spitting it halfway out of its mouth like an undisciplined child. Ever since, the DVD drive has refused to accept any DVD or CD. I have tried to force-feed it, but it remains tight-lipped. Woe is me! Now I cannot watch movies whenever I want! It really isn't so bad. I can still watch movies on occasion when I am not working and the upstairs living room isn't occupied during the week days.  

Part II: The Reanimated Man and the Replaced Phone

Ever since living in Grand Rapids I have looked forward to every October so that I can dust off my acting chops and don zombie-garb to do my part in the annual zombie dash downtown. Three miles of downtown Grand Rapids is transformed into the apocalypse for one night as hundreds of survivors attempt to run a zombie-infested course without losing their life-strips (white flags hanging off their hips) to hungry zombies. It is a great event and free if you play a part of one of the hundreds of zombies! This year I went as a zombie groom in a suit and blood-spattered collared shirt and tie. My wife expertly applies my make-up, using her skills to turn me into one of the best looking zombies of the bunch. This year we had to work until just short of the race and we rushed to get me zombiefied and out the door. When we got outside I sent my wife back inside to grab our new cellphone so she could take some photos of me so I could post them to Instagram which I just joined a few days prior with the first Smartphone I've owned since Instagram was invented. Since all parts of my body not covered by my suit were covered with makeup, my wife had to carry and load all of our stuff into the car and open the door for me so I could climb inside. Hurriedly, she snapped some photos of me and buzzed around the car to get our stuff in the car before coming back around to put me in the car. I felt like a mannequin, stiff, with my hands kept hovering in front of me like Mr. Burns to keep the makeup as fresh as possible for as long as possible. It was a really fun night as I hammed up my part as the living dead by falling out of bushes in front of scared survivors and tripping over the curb in my animal-like craze for human flesh. When we got home I looked for the phone so I could post the pictures, but could not find it in any of our bags. So we looked in the car. Then we looked outside where the photos were taken. Then we got flashlights and looked in both places again. Thoroughly. Finally, we decided to drive back downtown to look there. After we made the first turn in our car my wife noticed a small black object in the middle of the intersection where we made our second turn to go downtown. I jumped out of the car and rushed over to the object. There was our new phone smashed in total destruction. In the rush to get downtown my wife placed it on top of the trunk and forgot it there as we drove away. I couldn't believe it at first! Two freak accidents have ended the lives of both the Smartphones I have ever owned within a couple of weeks of purchasing them! Surely this must be a sign! For awhile I really liked the idea of going out there on the Appalachian Trail with no electronics besides a simple prepaid phone, but my wife really wants to be able to take photos out there. So, after thinking through various options we decided to buy another Smartphone to replace the broken one, but to abstain from a talk/text/data plan that would have cost $45 a month. So, we will bring my simple prepaid phone for calls and the Smartphone to use as camera, music player, and Internet browser when there is wifi in town so I can blog. It might not be as convenient as having a good plan for one phone and it will be a little heavier with the extra phone, but it will actually save us a couple hundred bucks in the long run, even after having to purchase our Smartphone twice. And we decided the purchase would count as our Christmas gift for each other. Since the hike seems so close now, we are trying even harder to save as much money as we can before we set out for the grand adventure!

Part III: Take a Hike!

An hour after dropping me off for drill with my Marine Corps Reserve unit, my wife texted with the news that she never made it to work. Instead, she was in an auto shop after being towed there when the two back tires blew not a mile away. The new tires and the tow set us back a couple hundred bucks and the mechanic told her the wheels needed to be realigned. The tires blew because the alignment was off. This was a problem we had no idea we had. I know absolutely nothing about cars, so this just came out of nowhere. We didn't anticipate having a car repair expense. Though, who ever expects this? A couple of days later we brought the car in to get the wheels aligned, but when the mechanic tried to do this he found the control arms were bent on both wheels so they couldn't be aligned until we replaced the control arms which cost several hundred dollars apiece. We decided not to fix it right now and have begun to use the car sparingly. To that end we bought bus passes, coordinated with a coworker for carpooling, pumped up our bike tires, and broke out cold weather clothes and backpacks for walking. In fact, the past two days we walked back from work. One way is 6.5 miles. It is good training for the Trail to be forced to walk like this.

                    

         

The Brave Little Stove

I heard about do-it-yourself soda pop can stoves a few years back and after reading in a few places that thru-hikers of the Appalachian Trail used them, I felt validated to follow suit. I gathered a few soda pop cans kept putting off the construction. I am not the most crafty person in the world with little patience to make sure everything is perfect, but I definitely did not want to spend between $40-$200 for a piece of gear I could make myself for less than a dollar that would work just as well for my purposes. Fortunately for me, since I kept putting off making the soda pop can stove, I came across a much simpler design using a cat food can. I wasn't sure if it would work as well as the popular soda pop can stoves I had heard so much about, but as I read The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide by Andrew Skurka, a professional thru-hiker, I found that he uses the cat food stove for all of his hikes. He even provides instructions on how to make one on his website here. I will also show how I made my stove, albeit a lot less professionally.

So I bought the off-brand cat food can and gave the food to my sister's cat. Then I cleaned the can and borrowed a hole-puncher from my mom. Then came the hard part. I had to punch two rows of holes at the top of the can. The holes had to be equally spaced with the bottom row of holes placed directly below the spaces between the holes of the top row. This was quite difficult for me and my first attempt looked like this:

After this was completed I rushed to our local hardware store to get the fuel. This type of stove runs on denatured alcohol which can be found in most hardware stores or paint stores, as well as in some outdoor stores. Denatured alcohol is cheap and I have read that increasingly, outfitters near the AT sell it by the ounce since it normally comes in large metal containers which would be too heavy to carry on the Trail. I brought the can home and poured some in the stove, below the holes. When I lit the fuel with a match I didn't know that it had lit at first. When I put my hand near it though, I could feel the heat. The flame is nearly invisible, especially in broad daylight. I placed a pot of water on top of the stove and watched the water carefully for several minutes until it finally began to boil. It worked!

I didn't touch it again until a couple of days before our hike of our Waterloo-Pinckney Trail. I bought another cat food can and with the help of my wife made sure the holes were pretty spot on where they were supposed to be. So now our stove looks like this:

I also had to make a windscreen because any kind of wind flow can greatly decrease the effectiveness of the stove. The windscreen was also simple to create, following Skurka's instructions here. I borrowed some aluminum foil from my sister and folded it in half lengthways. Then I simply folded all the edges so they were double thick. I then attached binder clips on the bottom to allow it to stand up more and to attach the two ends together when wrapped around the stove.

We didn't get a chance to actually cook a meal with the stove until our trip. We brought oatmeal, instant noodles, macaroni and cheese, and an onion soup mix. Our first meal was the instant noodles and we had a picnic table to set up the stove on. All of the shelters of the small section of the AT that I had hiked before had a picnic table in front, but the shelter itself could also work as a level ground. The third night out on our hiking trip we had no picnic table and had to cook on the ground. This was easy enough. Our 1.3 L pot does sit a bit precariously on our stove, but as long as we are careful all should be well.

We brought denatured alcohol in a small plastic water bottle, clearly marked so as not to confuse it with drinking water since the liquid is clear. After pouring it in the stove, lighting it, and placing the windscreen and pot in place we left it to do its work on the noodles while we set up camp. After a few minutes we noticed the pot smoking and rushed over to see what was happening. The fire was burning the plastic that cover the ends of the handles I had collapsed onto the sides of the stove. So we pulled the windscreen apart a bit and left the handles extended whenever we cooked for the rest of the trip. I think we just need to make the windscreen bigger so we can pull the handles a little bit away from the stove while keeping the windscreen totally surrounding the stove.

The tricky part about using an alcohol stove is that there is no way to put out the fire so we just let the fuel burn itself out. Hopefully we will learn quick how much alcohol we need for the amount of food we are cooking at any given time so as not to waste as much. We will never want to carry any more fuel than we need to get us to the next resupply point.      

The stove works very well and is extremely lightweight. It will be really nice to have hot meals, especially when it will be so cold the first several weeks of our AT thru-hike. For awhile I contemplated going stoveless as some do on their thru-hikes, but I think it will enable us to have a few more options regarding nutritional intake for our wearied bodies.