Vans and the Art of Camp Stove Maintenance
We’re in the mountains above Albuquerque when the stove gives out. I pump the plunger back and forth, but there’s none of the mounting resistance I’d expect as pressure built in the chamber. I open the valve up to see if maybe I’m wrong; a trickle of white gas leaks out into the burner and then… nothing.
So something is wrong. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The stove is older than me by a good few years. I picked it up for thirty dollars before leaving Seattle to live in a van. It had been serving well so far, but it seems like this was the end of the line. Time to buy a new stove.
But that was not what I did. Perhaps it’s a certain level of stinginess that’s set in living without an income. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the narrator’s worldview is starting to rub off on me. Or perhaps it’s just my latent anti-consumerist tendencies coming to the surface now that I have nothing but free time. Whatever the cause, I decide to fix the stove.
The first step was to understand it.
The stove that we have in our van is a white gas stove, and as such, has a lot of moving parts. There’s a chamber that you fill with white gas, an inflammable liquid fuel closely related to gasoline, but further refined to have fewer toxins. That chamber is pressurized by hand and the gas squirts out of the regulator valve thru the generator, which, despite its fancy name is nothing more than a pipe that carries the gas to the burner, traveling over the flame so that by the time it arrives, it’s vaporized and can burn cleanly and evenly.
There’s also a throttle, used to get the stove up to operating temperature, and another regulator valve for the secondary burner.
There are some advantages to gas stoves over propane stoves that I could point to if required to justify having this piece of gear. They use less fuel, and the fuel they do use is cheaper and easier to find. Hell, in a pinch you can burn gasoline if you can’t get anything else. They burn a bit hotter and are dirt cheap to pick up used. But the disadvantage is that they’re complex. It’s hard to understand everything that’s going on with them when they’re working perfectly. Now that it wasn’t I was at a loss.
We increasingly do not understand the objects around ourselves.
Year after year they proliferate in both number and complexity. It would be impossible for any human to keep up with the functioning of all their objects. They have become blackboxes that we activate to achieve a desired result, until eventually that result is no longer achieved. So then we say the object is broken and get a new one. There’s no other choice. There’s no way to fix something you don’t understand.
And so that object goes out, laid to rest in a landfill far out of sight. It sinks into the husks of shipping boxes and bales of plastic wrap, as somewhere halfway around the world its replacement is conjured into being in a cloud of smog and carbon dioxide. A replacement more loaded down with complexities. All the glued shut compartments and inscrutable integrated circuits that can’t be understood, but can still break.
But I’m going to fix the stove. So I set about understanding it. I pull up some maintenance guides and begin to test various components. The O-ring holds pressure, so that isn’t the problem. Similarly the valve doesn’t seem to be leaking. That suggests the problem is in the pump unit. After some research, I find that a common problem with these stoves is that the pump cups wear out and can’t build pressure anymore. If I can get a replacement, rebuilding the pump unit is a fairly simple task. Just take out the pump shaft, break off the retaining clip and cup, put on the new cup, and then clip everything back together again.
But where to get a replacement part for a thirty year old stove? Luckily it seemed that this was still a part the was stocked at most Walmarts. There were several superstores right down in the valley in Albuquerque, and so the next morning we were off.
The first Walmart we go to doesn’t stock repair kits. Just an aisle of new stoves. We’re told that they can order it. It takes two days to arrive. Unfortunately, we already have plans to head south to Roswell that day, so we can’t wait. They say that there’s another superstore 10 minutes drive away that has the part in stock. We drive there.
In this Walmart, we go to the sporting goods section and quickly find the rack where the pump repair kits should be. They’re out. But that’s a good sign. This store clearly carries the kits. Maybe there are more in back? We set about finding an employee to ask.
After several minutes wandering through the aisles, we find an employee. He’s hunched over a garbage can near the front, clipping his fingernails. We approach, “Excuse me.”
He looks up, surprised, and not altogether happy to see a customer addressing him, “Hmm?”
“We’re looking for an item that it looks like you’re out of. We’re wondering if there’s more in back?”
“What item.”
“Repair kit for a Coleman stove pump.”
“That’s in sporting goods. Did you ask the guy there?”
“There’s no one there.”
At this point he’s getting nervous. He may have to leave some nails uncut and help us. He glances around one last time, and he’s in luck. He points to a man currently pushing a pallet out the front door and say, “That’s him. That’s the sporting goods guy. Ask him.”
We run after the sporting goods guy and he returns to his morning grooming ritual.
By the time we get to the front door, the sporting goods guy is nowhere to be seen, so we elect to loiter about the stove aisle until he returns. When he does we ask if there are any pump repair kits in back, as they appear to be out. He says they have some.
We follow him to the camping aisle and he hands us a tent patch. I say, “This isn’t what we want. We need a pump repair kit for a Coleman white gas stove.”
He says, “Oh, I just heard repair kit and assumed you wanted this.”
“No,” I say.
We return to the stove aisle and he looks at the empty rack, “Huh. I guess they must have been stolen. We won’t get another shipment until next month.”
We leave that Walmart hastily. It seems that prolonged exposure to it has detrimental cognitive effects.
Defeated, we go to have breakfast at a local diner shaped like a giant owl. Over huevos rancheros, we regroup. We’re going to be in Roswell for a while, so if there’s a Walmart there, we can order the parts to it. We look up Roswell and find it does have a Supercenter. I try to order the part only to be informed that’s not needed. They already have it in stock there.
I finish my third refill of coffee and we’re off.
There’s something scary about things you don’t understand. They can break any time unexpectedly, leaving you to eat a cold dinner and wonder what went wrong. They leave you tied to those parts of the world where you can find a technician on demand. Or if you do head out into the wilderness, to do so furtively, always wondering when the other shoe is going to drop.
But it’s the wilderness where vanlife takes you. Boon-docking at the end of a washed out forest road. Cruising past a “No Services 103 Miles” sign. Spending days at a time in a canyon where there’s no reception for a phone call. It can be beautiful. But it can also be daunting when you carry the weight of uncertainty with you, that constant nagging dread that anything could break anytime, and when it does, there’s nothing you can do.
It’s a sunny afternoon in Roswell. Overhead an endless stream of geese flies south. I slot the rebuilt unit into place and clip it fast. Apprehensively, I give it a couple pumps. By the forth I can feel the pressure building in the chamber. I give it twenty pumps, then, holding a lighter up to the burner, I turn on the gas.
A ring of blue flame erupts from the burner. At first its flames are thick, rising chaotically. But as the generator heats up and I ease off the throttle they become an even lattice of bright blue heat, hissing cleanly.
The stove will probably break again. Maybe in a week, or maybe not for years. But when it does, I don’t have to worry, I just have to fix it again. It’s all just metal and rubber and plastic. Metal and rubber and plastic that I understand. Today is not the day it has to go to the landfill.
It’s a good day on the road.
