Are We Rolling?

I was standing outside a bar on Wilton Drive the other evening, when like a ghost out of my past, an ancient Volkswagen Microbus clattered by. In 1969 when I was nineteen years old and a budding hippie, I purchased the de rigueur vehicle for all hippies, a Volkswagen Microbus. I hippied it up with a little paint and some curtains, and voilà, I had a rolling pot den. The problem was that I should have known better than to get a Volkswagen with all the bad luck I had with them in the past.

My first bit of bad luck came some years before, while I accompanied my older brother on a trip up to Great Lakes Naval Base in his 1954 VW Beetle. While tearing down the Illinois Tollway at the Beetles top speed, about sixty miles per hour, I noticed a tire and wheel rolling along side our car. Seconds later a horrible scraping sound filled the car and the source of the rogue wheel became apparent. We screeched along the pavement for hundreds of feet, sparks flying as the brake drum gouged a groove in the road. With a grassy ditch and bridge quickly approaching, I screamed like a little girl while my brother fought to control the car. Luckily my brother did manage to guide us to a safe stop a few feet before we would have plunged off the bridge to the highway below. I think my mom had to use extra bleach on my underwear that week.

My second bit of bad luck came while cruising around and smoking pot with my cousin in his Volkswagen Beetle. We drove out into the countryside so that our pot smoking wouldn't be noticed by anyone. As we puttered along the country roads, the little car filled with a cloud of marijuana smoke, and in his altered state my cousin misjudged a ninety degree turn. The car slid off the pavement, into the gravel, and started a slow roll down the embankment while I, in my pot stupor, watched the world turning over and over through the windshield. Far out, I thought, until I noticed the blood running down my arm. We survived that wreck, but I still didn't learn my lesson.

For my final bit of bad Volkswagen luck, I managed to blow up the engine in my hippie microbus twice and ended up stranded in Pennsylvania. That was a pain in the ass, yet when I saw that beat-up old Volkswagen Microbus rattle past the other evening, a twinge of nostalgia came over me. The nostalgia soon passed when I remembered that the VW had no air conditioning and very poor heat. Also, the thought of a head on collision bothers me.