kadmium

A couple of weeks ago, Katie and I came within a hair’s breadth of buying a camper. It all started with one of my “Oooooo! That would be cool!” moments.

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The discovery, and hope

Katie’s car was in the shop, so I drove her to work, and on the way we decided to stop for coffee. I stopped to look at the bulletin board and a flyer caught my eye.

Must Sell — Leaving State
1973 VW Westfalia Camper

$1600

“$1600?,” I thought to myself. “$1600? That’s nothing! It would be perfect!” (For those who don’t know, the Westfalia VWs are the ones with the popup tops and the fold-out beds. The full-on camper conversions.)

See, Katie and I have been trying to get better at car camping since we moved up here because, realistically, we&#8217re not going to be backpacking any time soon, but it would be crazy to live in Alaska and not go camping! Thus, the slippery slope. If we’re going to drive all the way into our campsite, we might as well take a nice, big tent, right? And if we’re going to have a nice, big tent, then we have room for a nice, big air mattress, right? And the big, roomy sleeping bags that zip together. And the two-burner Coleman stove. Hey! Why set up a tent at all? Let’s sleep in the truck! Oops! The truck is too small to sleep in, especially if we bring the dogs.

Our friends Brian and Theresa own a ’77 VW bus, and they and took a trip around the country in it. Brian has owned the bus for years and put a lot of time into it. Engine replacements, rust work, all the glory that comes with an air-cooled VW. He’s told me all about it. These old vans have pathetic heaters, they don’t have great traction, and it’s nearly impossible to get them through the emissions inspection up here, except for a three-month summer waiver. So I’m aware of the pitfalls of them. It’s not like I had visions of getting rid of the truck or anything. This would be a third vehicle, for summertime camping only.

Back to the flyer. I’m standing at the bulletin board and everything I just wrote above flashes through my mind in about three seconds. I walk back to the table going over in my head how I can convince Katie that this isn’t one of my hastily-cobbled-together, not-well-thought-out ideas. (I have a lot of those.) Fortunately, I didn’t have enough time to really think it through, so when I got to the table, I asked, “How would you feel about spending $1600 on a VW camper?”, fully expecting a roll of the eyes and an indulgent smile, followed by a clear “We don’t have money for something like that. If it’s only $1600 it must be a piece of garbage.”

Instead she said, “Well, if it’s in good shape, we couldn’t really do better for a camper, could we?”

I didn’t know what to say. Now I had to follow through, just to prove it wasn’t a hastily-cobbled-together, not-well-thought-out idea. Okay. That’s cool. I got really excited. I had to force myself not to babble at Katie about how cool it would be if the bus turned out to be nice and how fun it would be to have an old VW and we could caravan with Brian and Theresa and and and and … I had to be cool. Mature.

I dropped Katie at work and sped to the office. Of course, I immediately had to deal with a million things at work and it was an hour before I was able to call. I forced myself to be calm. If the bus was going to be mine, it would be mine. If it wasn’t, then so be it. I did cajole Brian into going to look at it with me, but I tried not to get all goofy and annoying about how cool it would be, etc.

About 9:30, I finally had a long enough break to make the call. I got out the little orange tab that I’d torn off the flyer and called. Ring. Ring. Ring. Answering machine. Okay, be brief but cheerful and enthusiastic. “Hi, my name is David. I’m calling about the camper. If you haven’t sold it yet, I’d like to come look at it. You can call me at 742-4600” click

“Memory full,” said the voice chip in the answering machine. No chance to leave my mobile or our home phone.

“Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Okay. Zen. One with the bus. If it is to be, it will be.” And I got back to work.

By lunch, no call back. Brian and I went to eat and ran a couple of errands that he needed to get done. We were gone a little longer than usual, maybe an hour-and-a-half. When we got back, there was a message on my voicemail.

First contact

The owner of the bus, a woman named Eileen, had called and said that she’d had a much bigger response to her flyers than she’d expected, and she wasn’t actually ready to show the bus to anyone. She was planning on having a garage sale on that Saturday and would be showing the bus then. She said she’d call on Saturday morning to give me directions to her house.

I did have one conversation with Eileen between that message and Saturday. I was all bubbly and happy and gushed about my friend and his cool VW and how my wife and I thought it would be so cool to have a camper, especially a funky old camper with a popup top and on and on. We talked about VWs and how she loved the bus, but she coudn’t take it with her back to New York, so she had to part with it. I left her my mobile number and told her that I was looking forward to meeting her and seeing my new bus. She laughed.

The waiting is the hardest part

Saturday morning was a beautiful morning and there was no reason not to have a really nice day. I figured on getting a phone call about 9:00, maybe 10:00, at which point I would go pick up Brian, buy him some coffee, and go look at the bus. I was pretty tense, though. I had gotten my mind pretty well set that if this bus was in halfway decent shape, I was going to put cash in her hand. And I was really concerned that somebody else was thinking exactly the same thing. So when Eileen hadn’t called by 11:00, I was getting cranky.

I called Brian and told him what was going on, and suggested that we go run the remains of his fence and deck stairs out to the dump. (That is an entirely other story. Just suffice it to say that Brian has had a very industrious summer, and I agreed to help him schlep trash in return for throwing a little stack of scrap wood on top of the pile.) I called Eileen’s and left my mobile on the answering machine, just in case she’d lost all my numbers, and went outside to wait for Brian.

We drove out to the dump, and I held my tongue about the van, not wanting to be irritating. After unloading the truck, we went to Costco so Brian could pick up some photos and look at miter saws (part of the fence project). As we were leaving the store and discussing lunch , my mobile finally rang. It was around 12:30.

“Hi, David. This is Eileen.”

“Well, hi, Eileen! How ya doin’?”

“Yeah, well, not so great. Look, I’m having some personal issues today, and I’m not going to show the bus. I need to get some stuff taken care of today and tomorrow, so I’m going to show the bus on Monday. Can you come look at it then?”

“Sure! How about 1:00 or so?”

“Yeah, well, I dunno. Can I call you back? I need to see how things go this weekend. I’ll call you later or tomorrow, okay?”

“Okey doke! That sounds great! Good luck!”

I hung up the phone and rolled my eyes at Brian. He laughed and said, “Is it worth it?”

“At this point, yes,” I said. “We’ll see how I feel tomorrow.”

And a veil was lifted from his eyes

Eileen finally called on Monday. She said that there was something wrong with the van’s engine and that she was in the process of getting it towed to one of the two shops in town that specialize in VWs. The particular shop she was using is close to where I work, so even though the sudden onset of engine trouble was a bit ominous, I chose to count it as a blessing, because I could just pop over to the shop with Brian and pay the mechanic to do an inspection while he was working on the engine.

When Brian and I got there, the mechanic already had the bus in the shop. I met and talked to Eileen for a little bit while Brian went on into the shop to talk to the mechanic and give the bus his own once-over. After Eileen and I had talked about her move and the history of the van’s shifter cable (it’s checkered – more later), I followed Brian into the shop.

It’s hard to describe the level of disappointment I felt when I first saw the bus. I knew we were looking an old bus, and I knew it was probably going to need some attention to the interior and body (VW busses have a real problem with rust on the rocker panels). I didn’t expect to find an immaculately restored Westfalia for $1600. Even my optimism has limits. But this was bad. Really bad.

The bus had clearly sat uncovered beneath a birch tree for a couple of seasons; the white pop-up was black with tree goop. I shuddered thinking what the interior, especially the canvas of the pop-up might look like if that roof leaked. The front was pocked with small dents, the sun visors had been painted with some sort of naive/folk-art looking rendition of mountains and clouds. There was a matching painting on the passenger side window in the back that had been partially scraped off. Every single light fixture needed some sort of work. Either the metal was dented or the lens was cracked or outright broken.

The interior was tattered. The back seat was covered with purple fake fur. The plastic molding on the cabinets was warped, cracked, and separating from the cabinets. The sink was clearly broken. The front seats were beat up and the after-market seat covers were not in much better shape. There was carpeting on the floor of the back. Old, mildewy, white shag carpet.

This bus wasn’t a fixer-upper, it was a restoration job. If this bus had been a house on “This Old House”, Norm and Tommy would have cried. Or laughed. And then cried. Tommy might have slugged someone. And I hadn’t even heard the mechanic’s opinion yet.

I walked out of the shop with very mixed emotions. I wanted a bus. Well, I wanted a camper and thought a bus would be kind of cool. And this one was cheap. I knew we would never find one cheaper in Alaska. That was the kicker. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on a restoration job. And I was pretty sure Katie wasn’t interested in that level of work at all. But, trying to stave off disappointment, I went ahead and asked the mechanic to do his inspection. I told Eileen that I would be in touch and she left.

Katie called about then and while I was talking to her and trying to be honest about the van’s condition but remain upbeat, Brian stood shaking his head and grinning. Katie was understanding and to my surprise, not ready to write the bus off. We agreed to come back over to the mechanic’s after she got off work so she could look at it herself. I got off the phone and Brian said something along the lines of, “You’re not actually still thinking about buying that thing are you? I guarantee you that thing has under-body rust that we can’t see and there’s no telling how bad the moving parts are.” I was holding out hope for the mechanic. If he told me that it was actually in pretty good shape, and the only serious work was going to be the interior, I thought I might still end up with a bus.

Brian and I headed back to work.

I finally talked to the mechanic at the end of the day. It was worse than I hoped but not as bad as I feared. The body did indeed have a lot of rust to be dealt with, but the engine and other mechanicals were in good shape. The bus would run and the mechanic estimated the cost of the rust repair to be about $1000. Okay, so now we’re looking at a $2600 bus, plus some time and energy on the interior. Still not too bad. I thanked him and made sure it would be okay for Katie and me to stop by to look at the bus after she got off. “Oh, sure,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Is Eileen leaving it there over night?”

“Well, the shifter cable snapped!” said the mechanic.

Eileen had told me about her shifter cable. Because the van’s engine and transmission are both in the back, there’s a long cable running through a tube under the chassis to the front where the shifter is. At some point, the original cable had broken and through a series of mishaps and errors, Eileen had finally gone to an airplane mechanic and had him manufacture a replacement rather than ordering one from a VW parts shop. She claimed that it had been working without any problems, but as soon as the mechanic had put the bus in reverse to back it out of his shop the cable had snapped again. Apparently Eileen was pretty sure she could fix it and planned on coming over that evening to do it.

I closed my eyes and counted to ten. Was it worth even taking Katie by? This was looking worse and worse by the minute. I was certainly going to have that cable replaced, probably another $200 for parts and labor, so now we’re up to $2800. Still, $2800 for a usable camper is pretty darn good. I went to get Katie.

When I laid it all out for Katie, she shrugged and said, “Well, let’s go look at it and if we want it we’ll offer her $1000.” Duh! In all of this, it hadn’t yet occurred to me to haggle. The bus was so cheap to begin with that I figured somebody would buy it, regardless of its condition, and if we wanted it, we’d have to pony up the asking price. So with my voice of reason (Katie) finally along for the ride, we headed back over to look at the bus. It was drizzling and gray.

The nail in the coffin floorboard

As we pulled up to the curb, we could see a pair of legs sticking out from under the bus. I knew it wasn’t the mechanic, so I assumed it was Eileen. She crawled out from under it at the same time that Katie and I were getting out of the truck. She had a length of cable in her hand.

She told us with great relief that the problem was just that the pin holding the cable to the shifter was the wrong size and it had fallen out. She knew she could get the right size pin tomorrow, then everything would be alright. I maintained my cheery attitude, hoping against hope that something would suddenly make this seem like the good idea I originally thought it might be.

As we talked, we walked over to the bus and started the first real inspection. I was happy that the exterior looked a little better from the outside. The black tree goop on the popup looked easier to deal with. The body was dented and banged up, but now that I knew the extent of the hidden rust, it actually didn’t seem that bad.

Unfortunately, as good as the exterior looked outside, the interior looked that much worse. Oh, it was really awful. The one bright spot was that the purple fuzzy seat cover was just that. A seat cover. That would be easy to replace. But the rest of the interior was just dingy and foul-looking. I have a pretty high tolerance for sleeping in less-than-pleasant surroundings, but even I didn’t want to sleep in there without a good scrubbing. The cabinets looked a little worse, but I had already decided those were going to require work, so that wasn’t a shock.

There were three unpleasant discoveries that made the final decision for me:

1. The sink was actually broken. The “kitchen” in a ’73 Westfalia is basically a cabinet holding an ice chest on its side and a three-gallon water reservoir with a hand-pump sink. The cabinet also has a little flip-down shelf to hold a Coleman-style two burner stove. The following year, a real stove was added to the set up. While we were looking at the sink, Eileen pointed at the vent tube that goes from the cabinet through van’s roof and said knowingly, “That’s for gathering rainwater! Cool, huh?” I stifled a laugh and thought to myself that if that tube was gathering rainwater, there’s actually a bigger problem than Eileen drinking it.
2. The canvas of the popup tent had been patched with duct tape. This was not a surprise. The canvas looked original, and canvas just doesn’t last thirty years without attention and real care, and I knew this bus hadn’t had that benefit. The surprise was Eileen’s insistence that there was nothing wrong with the canvas. I believe that she and I were actually looking at the same spot when she said it. A spot where a big silver strip could be seen peeking out from the folds of the canvas. My mind was pretty much made up at this point, but before I could say anything, Eileen grabbed a corner of that awful, mildewy carpet and yanked it up.
3. The carpet had been attached to the floorboard with ten-penny nails. The nails had begun rusting. Eileen chirped something like “Look how they put in the carpet!”, like it was quaint and funny. All it meant to me was that the floorboards were going to have to be ripped out and replaced.

I couldn’t believe it. I just could not believe what a wreck this bus was. At some point Katie and I made eye contact and decided to leave. We weren’t buying this bus, and we both knew it, but I still told Eileen that we were going to go home to talk about it and I would call her in the morning. As we pulled away from the curb, Katie and I confirmed for each other that this was not to be our bus. The concept was sound, but this bus was more work than either of us wanted to put into it.

Just for grins that evening, I searched around the web for the parts that I could remember off the top of my head that would need replacing. This informal survey revealed that the little orange bus would end up costing a minimum of $5,000 before we were done, and probably easily a thousand more, maybe two, depending on how meticulous we got.

At the same time, I looked at prices for post-’84 Vanagons. This was the first year that VW gave the bus a liquid-cooled engine instead of the old air-cooled ones. The importance of that for our purposes is that it means a real heater. It was also around the time that VW started to compete for the suburban family mini-van dollar, so the vans themselves started to have nicer amenities. These Vanagons range from $4,500 to $10,000, depending on the level of conversion and the state of the bus itself.

Reduced to tragi-comedy of errors

The next morning, before I called Eileen, I called the mechanic to arrange a time that I could drive over and pay him for the work. He said he’d be there all day and I could come by any time. Then he told me that Eileen had called him just minutes ago, very upset. It seems she had gotten about 10 minutes away from the shop and stopped at a grocery store and now the bus wasn’t starting again. I sighed.

“Huh. Well, we’ve already decided not to buy it. It needs more work than we feel like putting into it.” He agreed that seemed prudent.

Eileen called shortly after that, and she was sure that the mechanic’s work was to blame, and was indignant that he refused to pay for the towing back to his shop. I smiled indulgently to make myself sound sympathetic and agreed that that was too bad, opting not to ask if it was the cable or something else. Then I told her that we weren’t going to buy the bus. She sounded disappointed but not too surprised.

A couple of days later I returned to my office from lunch and there was a message waiting. Eileen had called to say that she had found the actual cable for the bus and was dropping her asking price to $1200 to cover the cost of having the mechanic install it. There was no direct mention of what had been the problem at the grocery store. I laughed out loud and told Brian about the message. He suggested maybe I should call her back and offer her $800. I didn’t.

Epilogue

Presumably, Eileen got off to New York. I wondered what happened to the bus, but figured either she had found someone dopey enough to believe it was worth $1200 or junked it. Then last Monday, there was a message on my work phone when I got there. It was some guy named Jason or Stu or something. He was an uptalker, so a lot of what he said sounded like a question.

“Hi, David? This is (someguy)? I still have that bus if you’re still interested? Anyway, yeah, you can call me at … ”

I hit the erase button and turned to check my email.

You would have discovered allergies you never thought you had if you had bought that van. But the idea sounds interesting.

Comment posted by Ruth | September 26, 2002 01:11 PM

That was certainly a concern. I was pretty sure before I saw the bus that if we bought it, this winter would involve a lot of cleaning on the interior. But that carpet was something else. It was past nasty.

Comment posted by mccreath | September 26, 2002 03:14 PM

The idea sounds interesting.

Comment posted by mccreath | May 12, 2003 01:38 PM