Westward Bound Part Two: Small Roads in a Big Country
Posted by Sloan Schang
But most days on the road in this 1977 VW Bus, we feel very alone. We’re a slow-moving novelty that’s mostly in everyone else’s way on modern highways. On the first part of this journey from Florida to Oregon, we were traveling mainly on the congested freeways of the South. There were plenty of small back roads there and maybe two decades ago we could have made good time on them. But with the rapid pace of development in the eastern United States, finding a clear lane or a stretch of back country road without stoplights at hundred-yard intervals is becoming harder and harder. So we mostly stuck to the Interstates.
Driving a 30-year-old Volkswagen camper on the Interstate is not a job for the faint of heart, especially in winter weather. The VW Bus may be the least aerodynamically vehicle ever produced, and driving in windy conditions gives a great sense of what it must be like to be a box kite in a hurricane. This is how those big rigs, passing at 10 to 20 miles per hour faster than us, can literally push the VW into the rumble strip. Once they’ve passed, the turbulence behind them shakes us violently from side to side. One really doesn’t realize just how many trucks are on the Interstate until they start passing you like this, maybe a hundred times each hour.
And even though we’re running a respectable 65 miles per hour, the drivers of small passenger cars trapped behind us in the slow lane will tailgate furiously, pounding their steering wheel in disgust. Apart from the occasional kid waving from the backseat of a passing minivan, there’s little encouragement for us on the Interstate, little that makes us feel like we belong. That’s why it was a great relief to make it safely to Austin, Texas, where the sky starts to get bigger and the roads get less crowded.
It was west of Austin, on the small back roads of West Texas, that we first started passing other old Volkswagens. The first one was garishly painted with a red, white and blue mural, an enormous pair of steer horns affixed to the roof. The second was bright canary yellow, with the name “Yellow Submarine” stenciled on the rear. We exchanged excited waves and started feeling a little less lonely. And then a great thing starts to happen on these small roads. We start to slow down, only driving five hours a day unless it’s absolutely necessary. We start making more stops in quirky, out-of-the-way burgs like Pie Town, New Mexico, justly famous for its daily variety of fresh pie. Or we visit the creaky general stores and trading posts that demarcate back highway crossroads, pumping a little gas or shopping for the next day’s breakfast.
The longer we linger in these places, the more curious people become. It doesn’t take long before we’re swapping road stories with people who once owned or borrowed a Volkswagen bus. A man named Bill stops me outside of a grocery store in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and hands me the business card of a huge VW parts yard in Albuquerque. Says they have anything I need, and I start dreaming of finding the odd handles, knobs and light assemblies I’ve been searching for. I start to feel like everyone once drove one of these things and even if they eventually walked away from it believing that it was a slow, oil leaking, expensive mess, they still have a raft of fond memories. And that’s why we endure the escalating repair bills and weekends under the hood, because we feel like we’re a part of something bigger. A community. Something that’s rarely shared by the driver of a Toyota Corolla or all those Ford Tauruses that are forever riding our tail.
For now, our little piece of that community is humming across the Southwest. The air-cooled engine really sings in the crisp, dry winter air of the desert. In the humid states of the Southeast, the engine was sluggish. It took forever just to get out of third gear and I dreaded every stoplight. We seem to be burning less oil now too — only a half a quart every thousand miles, rather than a full quart. This is good news, because it’s been surprisingly difficult to find heavyweight 2050 oil at gas stations and truck stops. So I’ve stocked up, more than enough to propel us through the incredible national parks of New Mexico and Arizona; the “Big Room” of Carlsbad Caverns, the blinding gypsum dunes of White Sands, the gasping heights of the Guadalupe Mountains, the mysterious Gila Cliff Dwellings and of course, the Grand Canyon. We’ve already managed a couple of 8,000-foot mountain passes, but I expect at least a half dozen more before the trip is through. I suppose if we run into trouble, all we need do is pull over and wait. Wait for someone else driving a VW, someone who used to drive one or someone who has a brother who drives one. There are a lot more of us than you might think.
–Sloan Schang
