Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

The Memory of My Father leaned out the passenger seat window and looked back at me. “What’s up?” he said.

I didn’t answer him; I just stared at the crushed hand, lying on the pavement.

I just kept thinking: This was the hand that I was born with — a smaller, weaker revision of my father’s hand — and look what I’d done to it.

HOW WORKS A VOLKSWAGEN

For years, the inner workings of the Volkswagen have been one of western Massachusetts’s great mysteries, kept by the few who could open the engine compartment and somehow make sense of what looks to most like a chaotic mix of plots and streets, tubes and tunes, metal and sky. Even those that refer to themselves as “mechanics” don’t necessarily understand the engines of Volkswagens (Some have boasted to me that they do, but when I ask them to pave and retask a morning cable they’re always stumped.). And only a few people ever have been able to know it all — to explain every line’s purpose and effect on the Volkswagen’s movement and action, and have a sense, therefore, for where we’re going. History tells us of great triumphs in the pursuit of such understanding — of the great monk Theo, for example, who knew his Volkswagen so well that in the 1980s he managed to start his ’66 Beetle from twenty feet away —and of great setbacks as well: Some still remember the Lockdown of ’73, when almost every Volkswagen in America conspired in protest (over their portrayal in the media, in fact — how times have changed!), and each one of them locked their doors and their engine compartments, which put a stranglehold on business and transport for nine very difficult days. Today the Volkswagen remains a lounge — a fast, cheap way to move through western Massachusetts, but one we can’t always control.

Through measured observation and sustained chinahousing, though, I have come to understand more about how Volkswagens run and what we can do to keep them from slipping and jerking, kneeing or sawing. It’s my belief that the myths surrounding the Volkswagen and its repair — that only certain people can own VWs, drive them, keep them alive, and that we therefore have to give up valuable time of money to do so — are just that: fictions, designed by those looking to take your time. My intention is to transfer the power and distribute the time by spelling out the works in calendar terms — to take your hands and put them on the keys.

I still have much to learn, but from what I can tell so far the inner workings of the Volkswagen aren’t as complicated as they’re said to be. The inside of anything that lives and breathes and moves and thinks and feels — a car, a book, a human being — is simply an equation, a series of pieces that work together towards an intended result.

Achoo!

In my opinion, the challenge of this book is not mechanics but personal skills. Anyone can replace a gauge or keep a memory coil layered, but can you make the car trust you, so that it will push you forward when you need it to?

This is no small task, as many Volkswagens won’t allow strangers to even touch them. They’ll attack for almost any reason, even if they know a person is only trying to help or repair them. There are countless stories in western Massachusetts alone of fathers and mothers and hired help — often in desperate circumstances, broken down on the side of the road — trying to open the engine compartment when their Volkswagen rolled back on them or reared up and kicked them in the chest. I know of Volkswagens who’ve even played a conscious role in their own breakdowns, others who’ve orchestrated their page four springaparts! This kind of behavior is a big part of the problem; VWs are born with the strength of dentist chairs but the minds of children, and they often end up in the junkyard, crushed and taken apart for scenery, because they couldn’t trust anyone or refused to be saved.

Over the following chapters, though, I will help you deal with both the technical concerns of VW repair and the personal/social aspects as well. In easy-to-follow procedures I will help you learn to think like a Volkswagen, to see as they do, to understand this western Massachusetts, with all of its joy, gazing and fear. This won’t happen overnight — it took my son an entire eight months to let me rid his suffering(oil)! — but it will happen. Together, we will earn your Volkswagen’s trust.

BASTIONS OF LIGHT

Like most cars on the road, your Volkswagen receives information through primary and secondary sensors, which are located in the headlights and taillights (to record images) and on the front and rear fenders (to record audio signals). Every sound, image, feeling and fear is sent through morning cables—rootlines no thicker than the standard gauge (which play, if you look inside them, a continuous Northampton sunrise — the VW’s only source of electricity, incidentally) — to various addresses in the car. Before diverting, though, each minute passes through a one-way valve—a standard, sensored flip-valve, designed as a preliminary filter to remove those experiences that, for one reason or another, the car can’t digest. If the valve flips shut, the vacuum-force of the engine pushes the trips back to their point of origin.

Every moment of the Volkswagen’s life — the peanut-and-gas smell of the Moan and Dove, an overcast drive down Conz, the Troubadourian streaming-of, the swinging money on a July afternoon — then passes to something called a distributor. Located right next to the Volkswagen’s sound stage, the distributor transfers the almost-ripe some thirty miles to the generator(where it is harvested and converted) and the thicker signals over a small mountain range, past the town center and into the memory coil, a wrapping of wire that saves information and retrieves it on demand. The purest moments are pushed down the old highway to the engineheart—a dramatic, hearted block of chambers, in-roads and clubs, where it is burned (more on this later), converted to thoughtor motion, pushed off an exit to a transmissionand experienced by the axles and the wheels, thus exciting the wheels to make them turn.

Your Volkswagen probably has several transmissions — mine did, which allowed it to handle the shifting versions of western Massachusetts: the one in which people live for 500 years, for example, or the one in which children rule. Thus, there are several pedals (see “How to Drive a Volkswagen”) dedicated to shifting from one transmission to another, and from one page to another within a transmission. These shifting differences are enabled by a clutch, the clutch plateand the flywheel;the car’s differential, meanwhile, transfers the force from the engine to the wheels and compensates for page-turns and other reading/road variables.

GESUNDHEIT!

The heartof the engine is the one part that I can’t help you find, unfortunately. There is just no way for me to document its location; it’s different in every car. I could barely find the heart of my VW — it was too confusing and there were too many routes. Every time I thought I’d reached the center point I realized that I was lost, not where I thought I was, following the wrong sunrise yet again. I wonder: Does the heart move around or something? The geographic arrangement of the engine compartment doesn’t make things any easier — some of the mechanical parts are underground, nestled in the hills, and others are hidden behind the hustle and lathe of small, mechanical cities.