Memories of the Red Bus
Some of my fondest memories from early childhood involve an old red hippie van that my parents used to drive. My dad kept the thing together with string and bailing wire. It couldn't make it up a hill without shaking. No amount of car polish would ever have made it shine. And when I was a kid it was a constant source of embarrassment. I didn't want to be seen in it then. Now that old hippie van is ingrained in my memory - and in an unbelievably good way.
It's a mystery why my dad bought it and why they drove it for so many years. They weren't anything like hippies. Although a college professor and a groundbreaking thinker, my dad was as conservative as a shotgun shell, and although my mom possesses an imposing intellect it sways in the direction of Billy Graham, not Michel Foucault. Still, there it was, the ultimate vehicular symbol of the peace movement, shuttling us around the whole time I was growing up.The van never worked right, despite how hard my dad worked to fix it. It was always making funny sounds, and the sliding door would fall off at the most inopportune moments you could think of, smacking whomever was opening it in the head. Once after baseball practice in the roaring, cold wind, it came off in my mom's hands and almost knocked her out cold.Those vans were also severely underpowered, and whenever we took the drive to Seattle it would shake and rattle on the hills between Sequim and the Hood Canal Bridge. Going up every hill it would slow down and slow down and slow down until it was barely moving and there was a long line of angry motorists behind us ferociously blowing their horns. I remember sitting hunkered in the back seat with my brother, mortified that we were making the drivers behind us mad.The van was also a mess. That was the time when people bought cars in order to keep them for years and years. It was before leasing became popular and when a lot of people still preferred to pay cash for a cheap car than to borrow money for a more expensive car. So there were at least 150,000 miles on the car when we got it. It had rust on the metal. The paint was scratched.But it ran. It went up hills slowly, and sometimes it backfired. It looked like a pile of junk. The door fell off more times than we could count. But it got us from Point A to Point B - and even far beyond that. We used that van to take road trips all across the country. By the time we sold it there were probably close to 300,000 miles on it, and it was still going strong.Many great memories were created there. That was the van I rode in away from the ball field the day I hit a home run. It was the van I took my date out in for the first school dance after I learned how to drive. It's the van I remember from my childhood, when it felt as though the world was wonderful and full of possibility.My dad fixed that van again and again. We tied the door on with chicken wire and didn't open it for a year at one point to keep it from hitting anybody. We washed it and coated it with car polish time and time again. It never looked good, and it never ran good, but there was something about it that, in memory at least, was essentially good.I'm a vehicle hobbyist with a special interest in car detailing supplies. Cenano car care products