Troubadour and more

At 4 a.m., even the sun is still sleeping, but freshman David McHale isn't. Instead, he's on his way to this university, commuting early in the morning three days a week to fit in a workout and, more importantly, save some money.

With some of those savings, McHale, an aerospace and mechanical engineering major, collects instruments. A mandolin. A violin. A didgeridoo. The latest is an accordion, but he didn't buy that one. He found it dumpster diving — a common pastime of his — behind Shanghai Cafe about two weeks ago.

A blue plastic cube with two glittered butterflies etched into the top, the accordion looks more like a jack-in-the-box than a musical instrument. More likely, it's a relic of an outgrown childhood, when a few nasal notes from that box was all it took for a smile.

McHale, 19, still thinks life works that way. He wanders across the campus in his free time, his red hair and beard flashing in the sunlight, playing the instrument of the hour. People have noticed the accordion, perhaps because it's so unexpected. He always hopes people will ask him about it, maybe even try it themselves.

"I put great stock in how important music is to people," McHale said, his lilting accent stuck between Scottish and other unknown dialects. "I know in America, music is very commercialized, and it's something of a listener sport, and I think that's really, really strange. I think that's a bummer. I think music should be something that is very, very participatory in nature."

In his spare time, McHale builds bridges. And trails. And rock stages, when necessary.

The building projects started at the age of 14, when he headed to Eugene, Ore., on a whim. After years of traveling with his family, it was finally time for him to explore on his own.

He joined the Northwest Youth Corps, a group that builds structures, such as bridges, to facilitate access to the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. He was there for six months. When he returned home, he wasn't ready to leave his work in the wilderness behind, so he got an associate's degree in engineering technology from Anne Arundel Community College.

This summer, McHale returned to the West, this time to design bridges and trails like the ones he'd spent so much time building.

For the second round, he was in the backwoods of Idaho. He built switchback trails for horses up the steepest of mountains that wound back and forth at dizzying angles. Halfway through, the group realized this project was pointless: If a horse wants to walk up a mountain, it won't bother with fancy turns.

Instead of finishing, McHale and his friends started an unofficial boulder contest, taking ownership of massive rocks and watching them roll down the mountain at terrifying speeds. Fifty miles from civilization, he needed nothing but some boulders and good friends to amuse himself.

McHale sat outside Stamp Student Union Friday, enjoying the sunshine and playing the accordion. He was approached by a member of a group that was selling baked goods to buy school supplies for children in Sierra Leone.

The man said he would pay McHale 50 cents if he would play his accordion next to the group's table. McHale obliged.

More and more students, attracted by the accordion and the leprechaun-looking man who played it so happily, came to the table. Some asked about the accordion. Some donated as a result.

McHale got his 50 cents. He spent it on a brownie, donating his hard-earned money to a greater cause.

In his spare time, McHale invents machines that could make the world a better place. In the future, he might find the funds to develop an advanced robotic arm.

For now, he's focused on his soup machine.

McHale believes world hunger results more from an inability to store food than a lack of it, so he created a module that combines all the processes of making and storing soup into one unit.

The machine fits on the back of a pick-up truck. It can produce gallons of soup from concentrate or raw ingredients. A bicycle hooked up to a generator powers the device, which stores the soup it produces for at least seven days. All of the safety measures are more advanced than the Food and Drug Administration's requirements.

McHale has taken the machine through three stages of prototyping. He taught himself patent law along the way. Now he's working on creating a commercial version that the U.S. Army and Red Cross can use. He hopes it will make a difference.

McHale's mother teaches online for the Board of Education. She tutors an average of 10 kids, all of whom have had circumstances, from getting pregnant to breaking a leg playing football, which kept them from going to school.

Over the past few summers, McHale gradually started standing in for his mother. He taught English. He taught world history. He taught personal finance. His students were three or four years older than him.

"You can do all this stuff, and it's so within your reach," McHale said. "I feel like people have, I don't know, very negative views of what they can accomplish, and there's so, so much you can do if you have a positive outlook, and you're willing to do a little bit of work to have some fun."

There are things McHale isn't good at. There are things he doesn't like. He's horrible at pool (though he won a miraculous game last week). He can barely communicate through sign language (though he tried with an autistic child who couldn't speak English but was fluent in Japanese). He hates hummus (though that's only because it and tofu were his only foods while working in the woods as a teenager).