Introduction
It goes without saying that every obstacle thrown at us presents
a litmus test of our value as a human being. If you can’t meet every challenge
with grace and aplomb, they might as well take you out with the trash. With
that in mind, I offer this true story from my archives. It takes place two days
into an 8-month bicycle tour (and was written a week or two later).
Note: I hope it’s obvious I was kidding just now.
How a Camp Stove
Almost Cost Me My Marriage - March 1994
Before setting off for a trans-continental bicycle tour, all
the guidebooks warn us, you must begin a daily training regimen. One book told
the sad story of a man who planned a long bicycle tour in Europe, but started
off too quickly and “ruined his knees.” His ended doing a moped tour instead.
Hardly a glorious enterprise, especially when you consider the French word for
moped: mobylette. Pathetic. With this cautionary tale in mind, my fiancée and I
are starting out slow.
Of course, along the way we’re learning how to not get
along. Prior to the last couple of weeks, we’d really never bickered about
anything. It was one of those really placid romances totally devoid of
passionate fights, of bathing each other’s hands in tears, of rending our
clothes, of screaming “I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!” and then getting to
take it all back later in a wonderful reconciliation. We never made our friends
feel important by soliciting their advice on matters of the heart. We never
balanced daringly on the edge of deciding to “see other people for a while.” Everything
has been really easy, and why wouldn’t it be? We’re young, unburdened, and had
been leading a luxurious life in the paradise of San Francisco, eating at the
best restaurants in the world, taking long walks in the gorgeous upscale neighborhoods,
and saving all of our bad moods for our co-workers.
But now, what with the hardships of the elements, the
fatigue of pedaling a loaded bicycle all day every day, and above all the tedium of
the myriad logistical chores we now face daily—packing up the panniers,
cleaning dishes without a sink, trying to dry out a rain-soaked tent &
ground cloth, trying to fold the map, et cetera—we’re both pretty grouchy. For
example, I’ll be impatient to load everything in the morning, so I’ll gripe
when my fiancée has to dig back into one of her panniers to get the toothpaste,
having realized she forgot to brush. Then, she’ll get impatient when we’re on
the road and I’m digging through a pannier for the compass since I’m uncertain
that we’re going in the right direction, and kind of want the security-blanket
feel of having a compass handy. (When you’re carrying your world around in
panniers, you’re always digging around for something, and out of eight panniers
total, it’s almost impossible to find anything. We were lucky to dig the camera
out in time to get a photo of a lizard. Preparing for the photo of the banana
slug was much less frantic—we could’ve painted its portrait.)
So, since we’re both perpetually crabby now, we’ve got
plenty of opportunity to practice those fair-fighting skills that so far we’d
had no need for. Our partnership is being tested.
Exhibit A: my first engagement with our new camp stove. Weighing
in at under 1.5 pounds, and capable of burning white gas, kerosene, diesel,
unleaded, jet fuel, and probably liquid oxygen (what couldn’t burn liquid
oxygen?), the MSR XGK II stove seems perfect. It has great features, was recommended
highly, and is the most expensive stove on the market. I had to have it. So I
bought it, threw it in the pile of “trip stuff” that seemed to grow as fast as
the newspapers in the recycle bin, and then didn’t look at it until it was time
to actually use it. The price tags were still on it, even.
That’s okay, I thought; a big, goofy, jolly guy I know who
wears lots of plaid flannel shirts and loves the great outdoors told me, “Working
the XGK II is a cinch. It’s way
easier than the instructions say.” This was a relief, since the instructions
run eight pages and seem to have been pretty hastily produced, without a lot of proofreading.
There are lots of confusing bits, such as “Use kerosene and
only in a ventilated area.” If taken literally, of course, this defies the very
selling point that sold me on this stove: that it would burn anything. I
imagine that the intended meaning was, “If you use kerosene, you should have
adequate ventilation.” But this too is problematic, since any idiot knows you
should use adequate ventilation wherever you run a stove on anything, so it won’t
burn your tent down or use up all the available oxygen so you keel over and
die. More enigmatic was the inexplicable blank space in the instructions that
ran for a couple lines after this stipulation, as though further instruction
had been wited-out.
[Note: I have just learned, via this random blog post from which I got the above photo, that it was indeed Wite-Out obscuring two lines of text. The obscured text originally said, “… should weather
conditions necessitate the use of the stove inside a tent.” My fellow blogger’s
instructions had been altered with a Magic Marker instead, perhaps because his were printed on glossier paper.]
Another problem was that the instructions given are for the
XGK model, not the XGK II. A little scrap of paper was enclosed explaining the
substitution of instructions, but not explaining how to operate the stove that
I had actually purchased. The main difference between the two stoves seems to
be that my stove doesn’t have a knob that strikes a flint, igniting the fuel. Okay,
fine: where it says to spin the knob, I won’t. (I mean, I can’t. There’s no
knob.) But how, then, do I light this stove? Obviously, I would need to use a
match: but do I need to take any extra precautions, so that I don’t light my
hand on fire? The instructions do mention the “Stop, Drop, & Roll” method
of extinguishing yourself, but I wouldn’t mind beginning my safety program at
an earlier step.
These are minor points, however. I was not worried about my
ability to get the stove working. It’s a simple mechanical device, nothing more.
We all know the exceedingly limited potential for any such device to cause
frustration. (If the last sentence did not strike you as ironic, by the way,
then you are abnormal, and should be building model airplanes or something
instead of reading fine literature like this.)
Well, I hooked everything up, turned the vapor control valve
knob, and waited for “about a teaspoon of fuel to collect near the jet.” This
process made me apprehensive since the schematic diagram of the stove, while
pointing out all the obvious pieces such as “fuel container” and “wind screen,”
neglected to point out the jet. No matter how long I looked at the picture, the
“jet” label just never materialized.
I figured I would just watch very carefully for the jet,
with a water bottle nearby so that if the jet turned out to be a centimeter
from my eye, I could flush it out. Well, the fuel never really collected
anywhere. So I dribbled gas on the place where I hoped the jet was, lit (with
great effort) a (scarcely lightable) waterproof match, held my breath, and lit
the stove.
The stove seemed to light, but it was impossible to be sure.
It made a terrible gasping, wheezing noise; produced a small, orange flame;
created a small amount of heat; in short, behaved in such as way as to create
an utter mystery: was it not lit properly and in need of tweaking, or was it
performing at 100% of its capabilities as a perfectly shitty stove? I realized
at this moment that the guy who’d said, “It’s way easier than the instructions say” was probably lying, so that I’d
look back on his words and think him some kind of genius. It’s a simple social
trick, available to anybody with a total disregard for the truth.
According to a test I took in a high school Health class, I
have a “Type-A Personality.” This means that I am a hothead and control freak; am
headed for an ulcer; am a pain in the ass to get along with; and will suffer high
blood pressure. The recommended remedy for this personality was a daily regimen
of being put in a dimly lit room with pastel walls, where I would lie on a
suede couch with a cold compress over my eyes and listen to New Age music. Since
I have failed to implement this protocol (though I did get a massage once), conventional wisdom has it that I’m doomed to have every little annoying
glitch in my life build up inside me while my face reddens, my blood pressure
building up higher and higher, until I ultimately explode, shattering my skull
from within and spattering innocent women and children with red pulp.
But I escape this fate through my own method of coping: I
share. I make my problem everybody else’s too, so that by comparison, I am one
of the less miserable people around. I vent, in other words, which is different
from whining, griping, and complaining in that it is an accepted method of dealing
with stress, like beating on an inflatable dummy with a Wiffle bat. But I don’t
even need the bat; like Caliban, I use foul language to release my ire.
As I fumed over the stove, my need to emote increased
significantly when I noticed my betrothed doing me the disservice of simply not
caring about the stove. She sat there and read a novel, like nothing was wrong.
Every so often she asked an innocent question like “Should I be smelling gas
fumes?” to which the obvious answer is “NO, YOU SHOULDN’T BE SMELLING GAS
FUMES, YOU SHOULD BE DRINKING HOT COCOA THAT YOUR FIANCÉ HEATED UP FOR YOU!”
Of course, venting shouldn’t get personal, so I spoke only
to the stove. Meanwhile, I tried to be more rational about solving the problem
I faced. For example, I considered using an alternate fuel, like firewood
thrust into the stove at high velocity. But the stove wasn’t the actual root of
the problem: the real problem was me, or more specifically my stupidity. I cursed
myself for not having tested the stove earlier, back when I could have gotten
help or taken it back to REI. Too late now … the receipt is either in Ashland,
Oregon with most of my stuff, or in Sacramento with the rest of my stuff. Or I
threw it away.
As time dragged on and the stove did seem to stay lit, I had
to wonder if—notwithstanding the gasping, choking sound it was making—it might in
fact be working properly? The answer was, how should I know? I’d never seen an
XGK II in use in my life! So, I decided to compare my stove’s performance to
the statistical results given in the product literature. Finally, something
objective to hitch my poor brain to.
Well, the specifications say that the XGK II will boil water
in 3.4 minutes. I looked at the fine print to find out what conditions they
assumed. Sea level, starting water temperature of 70 degrees, and white gas as
the fuel … okay, that’s all fine. But how much
water? A teaspoon? A gallon? The specs didn’t say. So, after failing to
bring a quart of water to a boil in forty minutes, I decided the stove was as
crippled as it sounded.
Furious, I vented my findings to my fiancée, who was still
kicking back with her novel. “Just blow it off,” she said. “We can eat
something else.” Unspoken subtext: “Just give up, since you’re obviously
incompetent and worthless. Why continue the struggle when you’re obviously no
smarter than a baitfish? I have no faith
in you … why do you continue to pretend you’ll eventually succeed?”
The problem with this method of undermining my self esteem
was that it was so passive. If she’d outright accused me of being lame, I could
have monunted a defense, perhaps challenged her to fix the stove herself, etc. Damn
it, when I’m overreacting, I want the company of somebody at least as
irrational and heated as I am! The downright sensibility of her statement
infuriated me (particularly as it gradually dawned on me that her castigation
was probably all in my head).
I decided to start over from scratch. I blew out the flame, completely
dismantled the stove, inventoried all the components, figured out which piece had
to be the jet (it’s smaller than a pencil eraser, by the way), took apart the
fuel pump, cleaned a little ball that is a part of the check valve system,
completely shined, polished, and praised every little piece, reassembled the
whole thing, figured out how it worked, and now it runs like a top (though it’s
still surprisingly loud). My stove now can actually boil water, in my lifetime.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the process (which lasted several
hours) involved quite a bit of that therapeutic venting, and by the end my
wife-to-be had decided that I must be angry at her, since surely nobody
could get that angry at an inanimate object, or at himself, for that long. I exonerated her by
explaining how the stove was a symbol of my ascent into manhood, and that
childhood camping experiences in which I was denied the opportunity to even
operate a stove, much less fix it, had set the stage for an inevitable camp
stove crisis with my entire ego hanging in the balance. We established that the
future of our relationship was not at stake, especially since I did eventually get the stove to work.
Amazingly, it appeared that, notwithstanding my embarrassing
display of anger and frustration, and my admission of the worst kind of
maleness, this woman somehow still wanted to marry me.
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