My Volkswagen Years

My first car was a used 1965 bug that I bought in 1972. I had been inspired by my mother, who owned one of the first Volkswagen bugs in our town when I was 11 years old. I learned to drive on her VW, plowing through streams, snowbanks and back roads, treating it like a Jeep. Buying my own tan dome-shaped bug began my decade of Volkswagen adventures. What I lacked was any idea of how to take care of a car.

One night I drove with two friends to northern Vermont from Connecticut. It was late when we started and a little red light blinked at me. I ignored it because how bad could a tiny red light be?

The first rosy hint of sunrise appeared and the engine exploded with a bang, which is what will happen if you run a car with no oil. It sounded like a load of bricks in the dryer on the fluff cycle, complete with billowing black smoke. The guy at the gas station said the car was a goner.

One year later I moved to Chicago for a job counseling at-risk teens and I bought another VW bug, a 1968.

"Does that gray smoke coming out of the tailpipe mean anything?" I asked.

"I don't know," said the schoolteacher who sold it to me.

On a move to Oregon via Southern California, my eventual husband Frank was driving the VW when it blew up.

"I didn't do anything," he lamented, "it just exploded."

I'd put plenty of oil in Bug Number Two, but there was more than one reason for VWs to blowup. We hitched it to the back of Frank's truck and towed it to Oregon.

In our one-room cabin along the McKenzie River, we took the engine apart, until we excavated deep enough to discover that a piston had blasted right through a cylinder head. We had the cylinder head repaired and put everything back together again. Much to my amazement, when I turned the key, it started. I felt like I had decoded the very stuff of the universe.

Life with Bug Number Two continued without a crisis for a few years, while we moved up in the world and lived in a converted garage south of Eugene, Oregon. As I was driving home from a concert one evening, the VW exploded again, complete with black smoke and bone-rattling detonations from the engine compartment.

I left the car on the side of the road and jogged down an embankment, through backyards and alleys until I arrived at my friend's house. I felt like I had let VW Number Two down, that I had somehow neglected her. I vowed to do better.

The next morning Frank picked me up, ready to hitch the VW to the back of his truck but my VW was gone. Someone had stolen it. The police said bugs were being stolen for dune buggy parts.

I wasn't ready to give up on VWs. They were too much a part of my can-do persona, so I bought another one. This time it was a maroon and white 1964 VW bus. The previous owner had built a pull-out double bed, closets and little fold-out table. I learned to adjust its valves and even replaced the clutch cable. I studied the repair book, "How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, A Manual for the Compleat Idiot."

The strong suit of the bus was camping. We could just pull out the double bed and presto, no tent poles, no hard ground. Even while we reveled in its cozy bus-camping on the Oregon Dunes, its other less-stellar traits started to take center stage.

Some vehicles have more personality than others, but this bus was a pure cluster of traits that attracted any weird events, people or animals that might be in a 100-mile radius. Oversized raccoons tried to invade the bus, hitchhikers we picked up were prime candidates for a cult and our golden retriever would hide under the kitchen table rather than ride in the bus.

The electrical system was the weak link of the bus. If it was raining, as it frequently was in Oregon, and if it was dark, there were serious choices to be made. If you used the wipers with the headlights on, the headlights dimmed dangerously.

The bus also tended to catch on fire. There was a problem in the electrical system that we could never figure out, even with the guidance of the repair manual. There were so many things with VWs that you just had to accept. The bus went through moods when it would only start if I hot-wired it. Frank insisted that we carry a fire extinguisher in the bus.

We were married at our friend David's house. He tidied up by vacuuming the living room, including the fireplace, which still had some hot embers in it. The vacuum cleaner caught fire and smoke billowed from David's junk room. We called the fire department, but even before they arrived, Frank ran out to the bus, grabbed the fire extinguisher, and doused the smoking vacuum cleaner. It was like the bus was either trying to kill us or save us.

What ended my lineage of VWs after 20 years? Was I finished with the life of sliding beneath the bus to change the oil or squatting alongside it to adjust the values? That wasn't it.

The bus had put us on edge, the hot wiring, headlights that dimmed to candlelight when I turned on the wipers. It's moodiness. We had been through too much with the bus and decided to sell it. We didn't want to sell it locally because whoever we sold it to would hate us.

Frank drove the bus to San Francisco where everyone wanted a VW bus and he sold it. When the deed was done, he drove off with David as fast as he could, as if he was afraid the bus would try to follow him. He sold it for $400.

I just looked up 1964 VW buses online and learned that one had sold for $112,000. I'd like to think it was my bus, and it remembered me.

Jacqueline Sheehan is the author of six novels and a New York Times Bestseller. She has been a commentator on New England Public Radio. Jacqueline is a founder and past president of Straw Dog Writers Guild. She teaches writing workshops in Massachusetts. www.jacquelinesheehan.com Read More