So Much Depends on a Red Volkswagen

 With the auto auction in full swing this weekend, I am struck by the beauty of these old automobiles and how many of them, despite their age, are so well kept up, and so lovingly cared for by their owners. My father would have loved it. A couple. years ago when I went in person, I was overcome with emotion while inspecting an old Volkswagen bus that someone had brought for auction. Just leaning into it my nostrils will filled with the pungent smell that only an old VW has. Anyone who has experienced it knows it, and although it is impossible to describe in words, anyone who knows old VWs would recognize it blindfolded. Given all the time I spent in VWs when I was a child the smell tends to bring. back a huge salad bowl of emotions, especially ones related to my father, who loved and worked on VWs even into the 1980s when we lived in Fort Collins. When I was 15, he taught me how to drive on gravel roads outside of town on our later model VW bus.

Some of those came swelling back today not at the auto auction but while driving to the office supply store today. I navigated down past the 101 and was driving down the wide avenue when I saw the lights ahead of several police cruisers in the street. As I got nearer I could see it was a car accident. Growing even closer I could see a VW bus, painted dark red. Although I can never match my father's knowledge on this subject, I knew it was a mid 1960s model because of the divided front windshield. It had been converted into a "pick up truck" style by chopping off part of the back, a not uncommon modification.  

It was crossways in the intersection next to one of the police cruisers and there were orange cones placed around it. I could see the front end of it was smashed in and crumbled. The dual windshield panels were both cracked into spider web of the safety glass, and fragments of glass were all over the pavement in front of it. I heard it crunch under my tires as I drove round the orange cone placed the police. On the far side I could see the driver's side door was swung open. There was no person visible. I immediately said. prayer for whoever had been inside. 

I decided to park and take a look at it. I walked over to the nearest corner where a second police cruiser was parked next to a late model Honda sedan that looked to have minor damage in the front end. The VW had gotten the worst of it by far. I hoped no one was hurt and prayed for them again.

The emotion of it hit me hard. Just an automobile, yes. But at once I could almost see the whole history of the vehicle, driven over so many miles by different owners over the years, and now cared for by its current owner to keep it in good condition. Now after sixty years and so many hundreds of thousands of miles probably, it had reached the end of its road. 

Is it weird to say that it was like experiencing my father's death over again? The hardest things I have had to mourn in my life is when I feel like an entire era of the past has slipped away.  My Uncle Dick's death in 2021 was like that. because he was the last of that generation, and with him gone, there was no one left to talk with about the people I loved who were gone, whom he knew so well. 

There are many class VW buses still around, in good running condition. But now there is one less. The one I saw could be salvaged by the right person with dedication to restore the frame, but that is a big "if". Most likely will provide valuable spare parts for collectors restoring other vehicles, perhaps one of the ones at Barret-Jackson right now. Moreover, I know that the engine---undamaged in the back---could be dropped as-is into another vehicle. I once knew how to do that with my own hands.

I've noticed at Barrett-Jackson that the optimum years for classic cars right now is definitely the mid 1960s. There seems to be a universal acknowledgement among afficianods of classic America vehicles that the aesthetic of, say, 1964-1966 was the peak of American car design. 

Of course I myself am a "model" from that time period, and somehow even as a young child, I had the same intuition that collectors of cars have today about that era. It is one of the many reasons that sometime in my youth, I decided that I had been born at the peak of history, and that I needed to live myself with that knowledge, as a burden, knowing that if I wasted my life's potential, it was somehow a tragedy for all of western civilization.  

All those generations, all that history, just to produce me and others born of the same time, the boys and girls in my school in the same grade. Civilization had conquered disease and hunger, and perhaps even war. The world was opening up to new ideas and progress, unbound by the past. We were carrying all the hopes of the people before us, our ancestors who had fought to make the world we were born into. I went through my childhood feeling those hopes that had been placed on me, implicitly by everyone older than me. I wanted to live up to these hopes. I wanted to fulfill them. With everything that was still happening in the world to make it unsafe, unjust, and chaotic, and with all of that being linked to America itself, I wanted to justify America by my own life. 

I could tell myself rationally that everything I said is just constructions in my own mind, part of the oldest and most durable layer of the mythopoetic story I invented for myself when I was a child, and which kept growing as I got older. How silly to carry such burdens in one's childhood. But I wanted those burdens. They gave my life meaning, and I was sure I was up to fulfilling them. I wander if others my age felt anything like that. We were born thinking we were to be the last best hope for America, if all else failed and America stumbled. Even if there were only a few of us, we would be enough. In case of emergency, break glass. I spent my life preparing to be exactly that. Such a conceit of ego!  Yet this is how I imagined my life's mission for myself for the first half of my life, and it has never gone away completely.

There was a reason I was given all the things I was given in my life--to love and serve God, and to do His will. Amen

So much depends on a red Volkswagen.