Over the past summer, I had the fortunate experience of taking a seven week road trip in a cherry red 1979 Mercedes-Benz station wagon that runs on vegetable oil.

It’s possible, although it does involve driving slowly, and sometimes aimlessly, through towns across the United States.

In each city, we asked Chinese restaurants for hand outs of cooking oil, and when we got a yes, went into the standard routine. We pulled out the greasy oil gear, pumped out the tank, re-packed the car, drove to find a suitable place to filter, took our shirts off, got filthy and put the finished product in a gas tank buried under our packs and food.
At about 23 miles per gallon (diminishing to nearly single digits in the Rocky Mountains due to the Mercedes’s 77 horsepower), a full 25-gallon tank covered about 575 miles of our 2,180-mile trek to Seattle from Petoskey, Mich.

Those seven dirty summer weeks aren’t going to help me land a job, but I learned more riding around with three and sometimes four other shirtless guys in a constantly cramped and smelly station wagon that I ever could have with an internship.

My parents instilled in me a great appreciation of both nature and experiential learning. Seeing, climbing and hiking the great American West fulfilled the first. I realized our scale and surroundings: the natural things around us are amazing, and we (and our petty problems) pale in comparison. We saw deserts, snow, mountains, and rock: beauty right in our country. We had ups (hiking mountains in Colorado) and downs (having to drive on diesel for a few hours on a late Wisconsin night), but we learned how to adapt.

My newfound outlook on life involves worrying less, allowing situations to take their natural course and being constantly aware of my surroundings. On at least 10 occasions, I was fully certain that the car was going to break down with a violent bang, leaving us stranded on the side of the road, with no option but to hitchhike to the closest airport and buy a plane ticket home. But it never happened.

Smaller worries turned out to be equally insignificant. We took a few wrong turns, a few hour-long detours, but we arrived. Only three times over our seven week trip did we have to be somewhere on a deadline (and one was for a drive-in movie). We lived carefree. With the car’s top speed at around 60 mph, we had no other choice but to take our time.

My friends and I embraced our youth. Gawkers at our car told us they were jealous, wished they would have taken our trip. We basked in the interest strangers showed in our adventure. The thrifty lifestyle I adopted gave me the confidence to emphatically pronounce: this is who I am and this is what I do.

The owner of the car had traded his functional Volkswagen Jetta for the Benz and spent $1,500 of a limited budget in order to convert the car. Environmental reform needs to actually happen with our generation. We will be inheriting the problematic planet. Our commitment to learning by doing made the trip a wild success.

It was fine that we didn’t know when we were going to find more food, where we would sleep on any given night, or where to get oil. These things excited us. We solved these questions with clear rationale and rolled past them; we lived in the moment.

We took it all in. Opened our sense to America and tuned in. In return we met an array of people and heard their stories. Our Ann Arbor perspectives were constantly challenged and I now have a greater knowledge and appreciation for our country. We smiled at the shining sun, washed in rivers and lakes, cooked with the same oil we put in the car, listened to truck drivers and stuck our heads out the window — all to the tempo of Creedence Clearwater Revival and beautiful Colorado afternoons.

It’s true, what I did last summer can’t be summed up in concise bullet points on my resume, but that’s part of the reason why it was worth doing.

—Patrick Tait Morris is a junior in the Ford School of Public Policy