Driving a Time Machine
Restoring a 1970 VW camper and learning to drive it--in French-- is not for the faint of heart. After ten months of sleeping with John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, and a harrowing stick-shift lesson on a quiet autumnal morning in Montreal, I braved a Halloween romp south of the Canadian border. Terrified!
“Honey she has everything! She’s just missing an engine.”
It wasn’t exactly love at first sight when I saw her for the first time. My mother had been talking about her “getaway artist” for a few years before I was overcome with the urge to meet her.
A dozen frigid blizzardy Quebec winters had made me desperate to see the rusty white 1970 Volkswagen camper my mother Peig had bought in 1985 for only $250. “Honey, you should see her —she has everything !” she'd exclaimed. “A refrigerator, sink and faucet, closets, a fold-down bed, a table with benches around it, and a roof that pops up with a little canvas army cot that folds down. She’s just missing an engine.”
So in the throes of a February blizzard Peig and I drove from her apartment in Caledonia to the storage lot in Leroy, New York where her vintage vehicle—which then had no name and knew no French—had spent three bleak and lonely northern winters.
While the wind howled and the snow blew up our noses, we pried open her frozen doors and crawled inside. I was amazed to see clean, unscratched, original upholstery, original dials, gauges and vintage radio. I figured that if the owners had taken as good care of this van mechanically, then maybe she could be revived to fly South with all the other Quebec snowbirds.
In March I had it towed to a VW mechanic in Waltham, N.Y. whom I am now loathe to name. Several weeks later, he had installed new cylinder heads and a new 1600 engine. On the day it was ready, Peg started it up to take it on what should have been only a test run around the block. Only she didn't stop. She was a stick shift pro, having driven one since the day she'd cranked up a 1935 Plymouth coupe with a rumble seat But shifting the stick of this 15-foot long bus was like stirring a soup pot with a twelve foot long spoon. It seemed easier for her to just keep on driving rather than stop, start, backup. So toward the Canadian border she headed, with me driving her car tailing behind.
Arriving late at night at Cannon's Corners, Quebec, in the days when importing a vehicle from the US to Canada was simple, the border officials took one look at the scuffed up old white camper and charged me only $12 in duty for bringing it onto Canadian soil. But then the fun began...
"That heap o’ rust’ll never pass Quebec inspection, Jamais ! The first mechanic chortled when I asked him to re-attach the fallen bumpers. “Regardez, madame, zere’s nuzzing to attach zem to." I took him for one of those imbeciles who can’t distinguish between OLD cars - maudit bazoos - and ANTIQUE cars, collectibles. But he was right. If the Quebec inspectors just looked at the new engine and cute refrigerator and bed, all would be fine. But like dogs trained to sniff out dope, they had a nose for rust. And this old van was probably 40% metal and 60% rust.
While the van stayed still, with no inspection and no plates, I turned in circles until I uncovered Quebec’s cult of Volksie fanatics. I was amazed to discover this phenomenon so far north, but cold climates breed radical solutions for winter escapes. Quebec hippies, true gitanes - gypsies - at heart, never gave up their camper vans when they got married and had kids. They travelled around the province in their old vans from May to October, then drove south for the winter. In summer they gathered at monster VW rallys like the June, 1999 one in Drummondville, Quebec made the Guinness Book of Records for the largest number of VW campers to gather in one spot - 489.
Through Quebec's VW network, I met Luc. If I hadn't, my white van would be a white elephant on the rustheap now. Luc was a long-haired, bearded Québécois neo-hippie vegetarian mechanic with an Indian guru and a messianic passion for rescuing old VW’s and restoring them in his delapidated barn. When he saw mine, it was love at first sight. He got under her, looked at the transaxle rod or beam or whatever it is and screamed “Do it, Nancy!!!!”
“She’s worth it,” Luc hollered like a man in love. Only this man in love took his time to commit. At first, he said it would be ready, bodywork and buttercup yellow paint job, by July. Then August, then September. Then late October. Restoration projects are unpredictably long, he said—and costly, he hinted. "Tapaysa " Luc muttered over and again like a mantra, waving his beer bottle. Patience. Humble forebearance. Waiting. The Hindu spiritual austerity I was loathe to practice.
So I didn’t have wheels that summer. But I travelled anyway, back to the 1970’s. Luc lives in a Québécois time warp. The generous loving social context of the early 70’s has tumbled. We live in a world run by conglomerates and rich techno-nerds. Flowers in your hair are now rings in your nose. And yet!
Walk into Luc’s funky old house and you’ll find Peter, Paul and Mary, sandalwood incense, Indian bedspreads, Jimi Hendrix, rubber plants, posters of Krishna and Krishnamurti, candles dripped over wine bottles, bell-bottoms and brocade shirts - San Francisco Dreamin’ in a little village in Quebec. I don’t get it. But somehow it all has to do with Volkswagens...
Is it possible to become a vintage Volkswagen owner without joining a cult, without provoking nostalgic sighs and moans from aging hippies and baby boomers wherever you go? Not any more than you can buy a pet llama and not get oogled when you take this wild ancestor of the camel out for a walk in the middle of Manhattan traffic. (Don’t laugh; I saw it.) Not any more than you can avoid learning all about its 4,500 year-old Andean, Incan history, its fluffy long-haired wool, its three-chambered stomach, its padded feet and toes which must be clipped regularly, and its nasty long-distance spitting habits. Gentle, slow, historic and reliable. Come to think of it, Volkswagens and llamas have a lot in common...
Je Me Souviens
The morning after the van which I christened Dame Gitane —Gypsy Lady in French—finally passed inspection and got her blue-and-white Quebec license plates with the Je me souviens ( "I Remember") independence motto, she was covered in humiliating snow. An October 4th snowstorm! And so after ten months of obsessing over the care and feeding of this exotic pet, as in John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, and after a harrowing stick-shift lesson on a quiet Sunday autumnal morning in Montreal, I took her south, at least as far south as Ithaca, New York.
I should not have travelled on Halloween, the day of the year when the curtain between the two worlds of the living and the dead draws thin. And I should have taken the quieter back roads, but I didn’t have Google maps to guide me back then. So I made it onto Highway 15 south from Montreal in one piece, then got on 87 South—touted as America’s most scenic highway back in 1970-something.
I kept driving, in fourth gear I think, but U.S. 87 through the Adirondacks is hilly and slow for an old VW van. And so I hit the freeway spaghetti outside Albany, New York's State capital at rush hour in the dark. Ghastly timing for one still learning to maneuver a 15-foot, 4-cylinder, air-cooled, 1970 Volkswagen Westfalia camper with a wobbly gear shift—on a road with mean truckin’ 18-wheelers, fast Jags and all those other heavier metal, water-cooled, front-wheel drive, automatic transmission vehicles.
Where is the promised Fahrvergnig....? “enjoyment from driving” Where is f.......ing third gear? Where is the Kuplung (clutch), you Klutz! I’m in the wrong lane, heading back to Montreal instead of South, away from the threat of snow. Two virgins out on their maiden voyage: YOU, the stick-shift dummy, and SHE the fetching yellow Dame Gitane, as you are wont to call her. “The Gypsy lady” from Quebec, back on the road after three years condemned to rust. A $4,000 facelift and some reconstructive surgery and a heart transplant, et voila ! But Nancy you ain’t seen nothin’ of nerves, yet.
Halloween Hell
Wait till tomorrow morning, after you’ve spent this Halloween Eve sleeping on your van seat kinked into your sleeping bag under the cheery reassuring neon of the New York State Thruway. Before your first dose of coffee served by a Thruway employee in a skeleton costumes kicks in, you’ll swerve to miss an old lady standing right in the middle of the highway, looking the other direction as you loudly H-O-N-K (And you think nobody can miss something as big and yellow as...) Then you put Dame Gitane into first gear at a red light on a small hill, and struggle to find the “friction point” so you’ll lurch forward instead of ramming into the 23 cars behind you. And it only takes you two red lights to figure it out.
Get ready to roll, Dame Gitane!
And then after being buffeted for hours in very heavy winds along scenic highway U.S. 17, wondering if any second you’ll become airborn like the cows in the movie Twister, you hit the traffic loop that Ithaca locals call "The Octopus." And after burning rubber driving down Ithaca's "ski slope" with your foot jammed onto the brake, you arrive at your friend Maureen’s house in stutters and tears.
“What have I done? Spending all my money on this van! I can’t even drive it!”
The next morning I was heading out on foot for a bagel, when a man driving by saw the bright yellow thing parked in Maureen’s driveway, screeched to a halt, and ran up to me yelping, “Is this yours? It’s gorgeous ! 1970? 1600 engine?
“Mind if I get under her? ... Oh my God!!! Oh my God ! OH MY GOD !!! Your transaxle! Oh, oh, oh your mechanic loves you. Look at how much grease he put on this sliding door - a full cup!” The man named Ernest said, pulling out a finger covered in bright pink gunk that looked like it came from a sex shop.
I was embarrassed by his orgasmic exclamations in such a public place. I tried to recall if any man had ever responded to me in that way. But Ernest’s ecstasy was ernest. And so I took it as a sign. Get ready to roll, Dame Gitane.
