We woke up on that foggy morning, seagulls caterwauling, filled with anxiety: would we get the Bus fixed? What would Kelly the retired VW mechanic be like? How far up the road would we make it? After getting lost in Pacific Grove yet again, for, as I have said, our sense of direction malfunctions there, or we were in a wormhole, we finally found a bank to get money to pay for the repair, and then we drove to Jim’s V-dub place, Get Hot Bug Shop, which has no website that I can find, so see article linked at the end for more information. Jim was a lovely man who seemed touched if bewildered by me giving him a watercolor of our Bus, and his gorgeous shop is in an old Quonset hut right by the ocean. I know auto shops from my friend Bob, the muffler man of Broadway Mufflers in Walnut Creek, and Jim’s shop would have made Big Bob chuckle with joy—so clean, organized, and so many historic vehicles! But we were in a hurry, so we grabbed our clutch kit and left for Kelly’s in Seaside.
It was a stressful ride, worrying about the Bus on the freeway, driving through Seaside, but we knew we were in the right place when we saw an old VW Bus, a VW Thing (very rare), and a VW notchback. Robert had warned me that based on his phone conversations with Kelly we were likely to be meeting a character, so I wasn’t surprised to see a man with a sort of hippie Santa look unloading tools from an old white Bus that seemed to be a storage container. We got our Bus in the gate of a very narrow driveway, met Hailey, his awesome Blue Heeler dog, and then after intros were accomplished, Robert and Kelly started pulling off the bumper. I liked Kelly’s yard, which was an eclectic mix of found objects and bird feeders, so I settled on the porch to write postcards and to read Kathleen Hanna’s book, Riot Girl. Robert said the whole process would take a couple of hours, and I hoped he was right and that we might even make it pretty far north because it was only 11 am, and while I knew it would be pushing it to get to our reserved campsite in Fort Bragg on the Mendocino Coast, I hoped we could at least leave by 2 pm.
As I wrote my postcards, “Hey, we are broken down in Pacific Grove! Robert and this guy named Kelly are pulling the engine out of the Bus!” I listened to Kelly talk. How to explain Kelly? I would say he is some kind of hippie non-conformist with sort of Trumpy vibes but also a gleeful, childlike wonder at the world. I learned long ago with Larry in Oregon that a VW mechanic’s politics have nothing to do with their ability to fix your Van, and I needed to get North for Dad’s memorial. I was also impressed when Kelly shared his back garden with us, showing us all his solar lights and his impressive collection of beach glass, partly because it reminded me so much of my own yard. However, I did hear mixed into the long stories about camping trips, busses stuck in the river, government regulations, specifics about working on a Bus, preferences for a Bay window over a split window, well, there were some weird remarks about Native Americans that normally I would think “Well, I should say something!” but it’s a delicate balance when you don’t want to admonish a man doing you a favor, a man with his hands on the literal beating heart of your Bus.
If some of Kelly’s remarks concerned me, I also noticed that Kelly greeted his neighbor, and older Black man, with affection, saying he would be over to help him out later. But all this aside, the main thing about Kelly was the man could talk! He talked about intricacies of VW mechanics, the camping he’d done and where, with detailed descriptions of how to get to a good free place, and Bus stories. He took Robert through every step of removing the engine and replacing the clutch plate in a patient way, asking Robert to help, making jokes, and educating us all the way.
One story I loved was about Jim’s shop. “Jim’s a good guy, great mechanic, church every Sunday,” Kelly said, a twinkle in his eye. “But I’m a little weirder, and then there’s Bob.” While were thankful to Bob for helping us out the previous day, I was much, much happier to be listening to Kelly chortle on than I would have been listening to Bob’s dour tone. I told Kelly I admired Jim’s shop, and Kelly said, “Oh, that’s the old mechanics shop from the Row,” meaning Cannery Row, and then Kelly explained that it had been a VW shop in the 60’s and the original owner had trained Jim, Kelly, and Bob back in the day, and then there was a story about a backpacking trip and some weed that may have included these three folks or not—it was a little unclear—and I felt like I had Mack from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row working on my van.
Kelly made a lot of jokes, none of which I remember now, sadly, but I do remember his laugh, filled with warmth and humor, a goofy little giggle that seemed to punctuate every other sentence. At some point his partner Robin showed up with a gorgeous toddler in a stroller, and I liked her immediately. Her sunkissed face showed her love of the outdoors, and she had on a tie-dyed T-shirt and seemed to enjoy meeting me and having me pick up the toddler’s bottle or snacks when he threw them to the ground in the manner of toddler’s everywhere, just as Hailey the awesome Blue Heeler had enjoyed my tossing the ball, a mutual game of fetch.
All this time Robert and Kelly were rolling with the running tutorial, the fixing of the Bus, and I was worrying about time. Kelly had told Robert he would check the Bus “soup to nuts,” and he did, topping the oil, changing fuel lines, checking the brakes and the transmission, and of course the clutch. Finally, it was done, and time to pay and say goodbye. Kelly had quoted us 300 dollars for the driveway emergency repair, but that seemed too cheap for us, so we brought 500$. When Kelly saw the money he grinned and quipped, “If I’d known you were gonna tip like this, I would’ve dressed up!” showing off his stained mechanic’s jumpsuit with the wrong name on the tag and his battered sandals. We gave Kelly his watercolor of the Bus Robert had painted at Borg’s that awful night, and Kelly gave me a sparkly pen, which he explained could be easily refilled by buying cheap pens at the dollar store and harvesting the innards, and then he brought me a tiny Bus Christmas ornament, which will live in the Bus with the pen, and then it was time to go.After thanking Kelly—and I still plan to send him some weird gifts, like solar lights for his garden and a dingly-dobbly mobile beach thing and a Bus rock—we were finally headed North once again at 4 PM, to Gilroy, San Jose, and beyond.
I have hated driving in San Jose ever since I took The Road Trip From Hell with my mother in the late 80’s, a trip that started at the Scotia Inn near Eureka with an epic fight about how ungrateful I was and which ended in San Jose. We drove south on Highway 1, me and my Mom, both of us pissed off, and she declined to stop in any town as “it isn’t nice enough,” planning to stay in Fort Ross, an actual historic fort, and then she eschewed Marin, and San Francisco, and finally decided we would stay in Salinas, but there was a rodeo in town and no motels, so we drove back to San Jose, where we circled endlessly in subdivisions looking for a place to stay when finally at 3 am we found a Hilton near the airport. So, not a fan of San Jose.
This trip it was HOT as we rolled in, and I was worried we’d hit traffic, but it was clear and easier once we got on the 280, and then we were watching the Golden Gate in the fog,
then racing through Marin with the sun setting over the vineyards as we made it to Sonoma County. I had my eyes on Cloverdale as a destination, while Robert favored Ukiah, but Cloverdale is where the 128, the road to Mendocino, lands, and Mendocino was where we were supposed to be. I remembered the sleepy town of Cloverdale as having old, motor court inns and Pick’s Drive-In, but as we rolled in at sunset, all the motor courts had “No Vacancy” signs lit up. Grasping for anything that night, so tired, hungry, and also resurrected, we say a sign on a street post saying “Camping,” for Cloverdale has many cute signs at street junctions directing you, and this camping sign had the KOA logo pointing in a direction, so we drove over the bumpy road out of town.
Soon we were on a narrow road crossing the Russian River, the sun in our eyes, driving into vineyards past glorious farmhouses, with one KOA sign at a sharp turn suggesting we were on the right route. We drove…and drove…and drove. I remembered seeing a Super * sign on the highway and on the same street sign, so we retraced our steps and followed that sign back to the Super 8. It was oddly located in a shopping plaza, “Ray’s Sentry Market, Employee Owned, “and as I sat in the car and talked to yet another Bus dude who had walked out of the office, I despaired at the thought of no room at the inn, but then Robert returned with keys, triumphant.
The place reeked of air freshener and weed in the hallways—someone was clipping or packing in the Emerald Triangle—but the room was clean and even a little cool. Robert went to Ray’s to buy me the composition notebook most of this blog is written in, for the computer was now NOT WORKING, and we had one of the many picnic dinners of the trip, and then we fell asleep, so happy to have least made it to Mendocino county, happy to have the Bus running again, and also sacred about what was to come, and Squishy enjoyed the place.
This Bus Could Be Our Life 