Christopher Boucher - How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive

But don’t cloudy-day! We’ll find the heart eventually — I don’t care if we need to tear the engine down to every bolt and moment to do so.

RAP ON FUEL

You will hear a lot about what fuels your Volkswagen — what makes him or her go. I have heard people claim that their VWs run on everything from sunlight to wheatgrass to cheese to salad dressing. Your Volkswagen, though, operates on story — on what he sees and hears: the experience of meeting a column at the Castaway and staying up with it all night, telling secrets; the sound of the fiddles and mandolins as they tune; the sure pedaling down the Rail Trail at sunset. Your car wants to live, and it gains nourishment from experience as collected through his or her sensors. These moments are either burned (if the actions and changes are relatively simple), fed through a momentpumpto the expansion tankfor later burning (if the car has enough fuel for the moment) or storied in a muscle or limb (if the action is more complex, the heart of it harder to find).

The fuel system is efficient but it does take some getting used to, and I have received several letters from furious newbarrens who were stuck on the side of the road and confused as to why their VW’s engine wouldn’t start. Once you understand your vehicle, though, fuel is not usually an issue; as long as the sensors are working and you’re taking the car to healthy, wholesome places — parks, supermarkets, country roads — where he can see and hear new and interesting things, he’ll be exposed to more stories than he can possibly burn. Your Volkswagen is a natural recorder of information, and he’ll seek it out if need be by approaching anyone he thinks might have something interesting to say. Experience is everywhere ; every river, tree, farmhouse and skyscraper has a story to tell. How many times did I leave my son parked in a lot, only to come outside a few minutes later and find him hanging out across the street, sitting at the feet of a restaurant and listening to it speak about its life or, in one case, its career as a professional athlete? At first I used to get angry with the VW in these moments, but I soon realized that it was something he needed to do (One or two breakdowns — the VW sputtering to the side of the road, completely out of fuel — was all the convincing I needed!).

And even so, remember that not all moments will be burned — that the VW accepts some moments and rejects others. What are the criteria for such decisions? Whether the experience is burned or sent back depends in part on the personality of your car, but mostly the VW is searching the minutes for meaningof some sort — which I realize is hard to quantify and gauge. The VW usually rejects a story, though, because there’s nothing to be gained from it — no one to sympathize with or watch over, no insight or realization to be had.

No two Volkswagens are the same, though, and neither are their fuel systems. Mine acquired stories through the front and rear sensors, but I also customized him by adding a paper feed—a plastic one-sheet scanner which I took off of a photocopier that the Memory of My Father and I came across at the Longmeadow Dump, bolted into the saddle between the two front seats and hardwired into the dash. I could connect my book of power directly to a morning on the feed, or I could print out the story and feed it manually — in which case the VW scanned the page, digested the data and dropped the paper through a chute in the floor of the car.

The printed stories might help out in a noy, but in my experience they’re not nearly as efficient as primary experiences. This may change depending on how well you tell the story or how strong the engineheart beats, but even so you’re asking the VW to engage in a tale that’s much thinner to him than the stories he lives or hears told. In an emergency, remember that you can tell the VW a story as well — as long as it’s one he hasn’t heard before.

Listen for more phrasings on fuel in Chapter Seven. For now, it’s just important for you to know what fuels the Volkswagen — those bodies of go, laughing and skimming and shrill.

BREAKS IN THE ACTION

Finally, fearis an important force in the Volkswagen — fear of failure, fear of the past. Sometimes it can stop us in our tracks, cause splits in the text or drive the VW to rash behavior. But we can also make it work for us. Your Volkswagen comes factory-cabled to stop when he feels apprehensive and afraid — if he sees a field of hairbrushes, for example, or feels the shadow of mooseclouds overhead.

I don’t know if it’s possible to list in any comprehensive way all of the things that frightened my VW (and thus, caused him to stop), but here’s a start:

Anything made of cheese. Cheese made the VW very nervous — the smell of it, its skin, its high, rich voice.

People or things that hurt me! The VW was very protective, and he fought for me (usually, at least — see “Engine Stops or Won’t Start” for fuel based on a rare exception), clenched his fists and went to war with me inside him — battled toll booths, railroad crossings, other cars.

Wheat

CityDogs

Anyone touching him or looking too closely in his windows

Needles

Trees. The VW was born with a natural fear of trees. I don’t know exactly how this works — whether his memory coil was permanently coded that way because of what happened to his grandfather, or what. Your VW experiences fear through the same channels described above — through stories, first, and through their vision and sound sensors as well. When the VW comes across a moment that he or she finds frightening, that moment is supposed to send a signal to one of five cylindersand cause the cylinders to begin to bleed. It is the bleeding — the blood in the lines — that causes a clamp in the wheel called the caliperto close, the car to stop (and in extreme cases, the VW to instinctively lock his doors, put up his hands or cover his head). Supposedly, the cylinders are triggered by your fear as well. If they don’t react, you can trigger them manually with pedals four through eight(more on this in Chapter Four).

• • •

I know all of this sounds mysterious, and that there is much we still don’t know. But we will learn as we go. That’s part of the excitement, I think — the joy of discovery, it seems to me, is necessary at all times, in all person-to-persons, stories, roads. As your Volkswagen ages and yearns for repair, you will find his one-of-a-kind hills, valleys and streams, and learn how best to harvest, care for and repair them.

ONE MORE NIGHT

Let me turn around, go back a few miles, finish the tune of the Tree Attack.

That Sunday night, I tripped home from Atkin’s in the VeggieCar and saw, as I drove down Crescent Street, the Lady from the Land of the Beans pedaling her beanbike towards the house as fast as she could. I pulled over in front of the house and the Lady from the Land of the Beans dropped her bike and opened her beanarms and I fell into them. She wrapped me in the way that only she could, and I don’t even remember the next moments — walking up to my apartment, laying down on the futon. What I remember is her shielding me as my clothes wept, as my house — my father’s house — moaned low tunes and the rooms filled with cream. She told me stories — her memories, moments she’d shared with my Dad (She and I already had pages and pages at that point — we’d dated seriously for about a year and stayed tightly wired in the three or four years since we’d broken up.).

I don’t own everything about the night, but I do remember one story leading to another, and that each one created a bit more might, and that soon there was enough belief that we were holding each other differently, yessing slightly and hinting at faith. It sounds cashew to say it, given what had happened that morning, but at the time it seemed right — I was retreating, she was sheltering me, we were muting the loss with the natural, mindless making of something new.