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The End Of Two Automative Eras
Nicolas Stecher
My experience with the Bus came after college, when my recently graduated buddy Mike Gary asked to park it in the backyard of my house for a couple months while he got his sh*t together. Mike lived back there happily, cooking in the tiny kitchen, hanging out in the pop-up canopy, bumping DJ Krush from the modified Bose soundsystem, living the life of a '90s Venice Beach bum. I may have looked the role, but he was living it.
Mike would intermittently take the Sunkissed Pumpkin on long road trips all over the states, disappearing for weeks or months and then popping back up unannounced. "She could get hot, grumpily grunting and throwing tantrums when driving long, level straight shots on those hot summer days," Mike remembered. "Serendipitously, I found her mimicking my own mental and emotional states and situations; we were somehow intertwined in spirit, beyond driver and machine."
The key to owning a Bus, according to Mike, was to own "two of everything". He grew adept at roadside repairs, quickly diagnosing broken gaskets and missing couplers. But as difficult and temperamental as the Pumpkin could be, it was also amazingly consistent at getting him home — even if that meant surviving unlawful police searches, tornadoes and, literally, hurricanes. He can't count how many times he was approached by people smiling, telling him they were conceived in a Bus.
But as in Brazil, Mike's time with the bus had to come to an end. When the nonprofit organization he worked for was over 2 months behind in salary, he was forced to sell her to a local tattoo artist. "He first had to pass my rigorous buyer application process, and later I saw that he really did treat her well, giving her a new interior and paint job," he told me, wistfully recounting the end of an era. "I was still sad to let her go and always regret it when I see another bus out on the road; she'll always live in my memories. Sure she was a bit outdated and temperamental, but she was a beautiful classic and, most importantly, she could always be willed to the finish line. That was more than I could say for my girlfriend at that time, who I coincidentally dumped shortly after the sale of my VW bus."
It's the end of an era, both for one of history's most successful supercars and the world's preferred low-budget people-mover. Rest in peace, brothers.
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