Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 09:46:51 -0500
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From: Ryan McGee <ryan@falcon.cc.ukans.edu>
Subject: Re: Do You Love Your Bus? (VL, very sappy)
At 01:31 PM 5/12/96 -0500, Ryan75@aol.com wrote:
>Do I love my Bus? Kinda tough right now, as I'm just a wannabus, but when I
>had one I did. And I don't understand why. Perhaps someone can explain it.
Here's an article I wrote once to try to explain just that. If you like it,
I'm glad, and I hope you attribute it to me, whatever you do with it. If you
don't, sorry about the waste of time.
Friendvergnugen
It seemed like a good idea at the time. I didn't like the car I had--it was
a big, ugly, gas-guzzling 1981 Oldsmobile my grandmother had given me when
she could no longer drive. I figured it to be worth about $1,200, a sum that
could get me what I really wanted, an early '70s Ford van, with some left
over for license and insurance.
Ah, an old Ford van. One with hardly any nose to it. One whose engine sits
between you and your passenger--you can take off the cover and watch it run
while you drive if you are so inclined. A legacy from a bygone era, when
cars were cars and computers were for the military. A vehicle you could work
on, depend on. Something that would get you and a half ton of cargo from
point A to point B with a minimum of fuss.
Every Saturday, I scoured the trucks and vans section of the classified ads
in search of the ultimate in simplicity and utility. I spent a few hours
every weekend driving and evaluating vans, and I soon learned that a vehicle
that is simple and utilitarian begs for abuse. Every van I looked at in the
first month had been ridden hard and put up wet. I wanted something in
reasonably good shape, so I wouldn't be starting out at a disadvantage. I
wanted to be the one to abuse the van, if there was going to be any abusing
going on.
So I turned to something more people took better care of: the Volkswagen
bus. In the microbus I found the simplicity and utilitarianism I was looking
for. What, after all, could be simpler or more utilitarian than a vehicle
designed in the 1930s to haul parts around Volkswagen factories, a vehicle
whose technology had changed little since then? The engine was designed by a
man whose name later became synonymous with speed and perfection in cars:
Ferdinand Porsche. The design was intended to be best for carrying cargo;
with the weight centered exactly between the axles and the drive wheels and
engine on the same end of the car, the bus could out-handle any of its
contemporaries.
I found a VW that was in exactly the shape and price range I wanted. It was
a 1971 with God-only-knows-how-many miles on it, but it didn't have much
rust and ran like a top. As an added bonus, it was outfitted with all the
necessities for camping: sink, icebox, tables, bed, electric and water
hookups. Not exactly the Spartan utilitarianism I had been looking for, but
gadgets have their place in my heart too. The bus was also easy to work on,
according to its owner. This was a plus in my book.
I soon learned that there was a reason older cars were so simple and easy
to work on: because you need to work on them. Unlike cars of today, my bus
wanted attention almost every time I drove it. In theory, Mabel (a short
version of the "Mabelline" Chuck Berry sang about, asking, "why can't you be
true?") was the simplest way to get from point A to point B. But doing that
was anything but simple.
Mabel and I became intimate quickly. Not five minutes into our very first
drive together, I had my head up her rear, futzing with the engine housed
there. I knew she was no powerhouse, but suddenly, she had become extremely
motion-challenged. I pulled over, looked around in the engine compartment
with the flashlight graciously supplied by the previous owner ("You'll need
this. A lot."), and discovered that the problem was minimal. A spark plug
wire had come off. I couldn't figure out why, but it had. This would turn
out to be a recurring theme in my Volkswagen experience. Either I would find
problems and not know why they had happened, or I would fix problems and not
know
how I had fixed them.
And Mabel and I had a lot of problems. Over the course of the 50,000 miles
we spent together, Mabel and I hardly took a trip longer than thirty miles
without stopping to get a little better acquainted. Sometimes, the repair
was easy and quick--a twist of the distributor here, a turn of a mixture
adjustment screw there. Other times it was more serious. Like the time Mabel
decided she was just too tired to move about 30 miles south of Cheyenne,
Wyoming. I got out, checked for the usual problems, read my manual,
scratched my head. I didn't know what the problem could be. So Mabel got to
ride into Cheyenne on the back of a wrecker. We spent a week there, waiting
for parts to be shipped and harassing a less-than-speedy mechanic.
Or the time Mabel decided she didn't need any oil anymore. We were on our
way to St. Louis for the midwest's largest gathering of Volkswagen buses:
Buses by the Arch. Outside of Odessa, Missouri, Mabel dumped every last drop
of her motor oil on the road. Thought she was in a James Bond movie, I
guess. So we had to stop. Within minutes I was riding shotgun in a real live
Missouri State Trooper cruiser, headed back toward Odessa. The trooper found
me highly amusing, and spent most of his time making fun of me for having
long hair and a "car made when Hitler was still around." We went to several
auto parts stores in Odessa in an attempt to replace the screw Mabel had
lost. At each, he was sure to tell the proprietor, "he forgot to put oil in
his Hitlermobile. You got parts for a car as old as that?" No one did. Mabel
and I ended up turning around and limping home with epoxy in the hole to
keep the oil in.
Despite Mabel's occasional mood swings, we had some good times together. We
camped, we fished, we hauled people and things, we just drove. Whether we
were in the mountains of northern Wyoming or on the interminable flat plains
of western Kansas, Mabel was fun to drive. When we weren't attracting the
stares of children who had never seen a car look quite so much like a bread
loaf, we were waving to and honking at other Volkswagen owners. Owning a
Volkswagen entitles you to automatic membership in a club with no official
organization or title, but whose existence is nonetheless real. I enjoyed
being in that club. When I waved to that guy in the blue 1967 bus somewhere
in the middle of Nebraska, I knew his pains and his joys, and he knew mine.
And we both knew that we would stop and offer what help and parts we could
if ever one of us should find the other broken down.
In those two years, I came to realize that the bus was much more and much
less than the best way to travel from point A to point B. Now I have a newer
car. One that goes where I tell it to when I tell it to--no arguing, no
fuss, no unscheduled stops along the way. One that requires a lot less time
and money to keep running. But Mabel and I are still together. She sits in
front of my house without moving for weeks at a time. She's always there
when I leave and she's always there when I come back. I give her a little
pat behind her airscoop ears when I walk by and I ask her how she's doing.
She just looks at me with a grin that I know means she's happy to be
resting. I shouldn't have two cars. I
don't have the money to outfit two cars with tires and insurance and all the
other things cars want. But I can't bring myself to sell Mabel. Because by
now, she's not my car, she's my friend.
****************************************************************************
Ryan McGee
Magazine Journalism
University of Kansas
ryan@falcon.cc.ukans.edu
Mabel--1971 camper
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