Patrick Watt owns a beige 1985 Volkswagen Vanagon, Wolfsburg edition, outfitted by Westfalia. I met him in the kitchen at his home in Saint John.
He has long black hair tied back in a ponytail, grey stubble and a blue T-shirt celebrating The Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary on it. He’s nearly as old as the Stones, but I’ve known him for a long time, and I don’t think his heyday is close to being over.
His dad sold Volkswagens in the early ‘70s and by the time he started going to Grateful Dead concerts in the ‘80s, the avid concertgoer found himself drawn into the vehicle’s orbit.
Watt finally bought his Westfalia in 2010. It’s a weekender, meaning it doesn’t have the cooking equipment but two extra seats. Its name is Golgi.
The Golgi apparatus (also the name of a Phish concert favourite) packages and labels proteins within a human cell.
Ultimately, it’s what tells a cell what type of cell it’s going to become.
“The van is Golgi. When you go into the van and you come out, you have a different perspective,” said Watt, who owns a business designing kitchens for institutions and restaurants. “When I drive my van, I’m a little looser. It makes me take time off.”
Running a business means he has to be “on” all the time.
“My van’s the place I kind of go for refuge.”
But besides “becoming,” are there any bonus practical uses?
“You can park on a residential street in a big city, take a snooze and nobody really notices you.”
Kind of like Daniel Norris, now with the Detroit Tigers, who spent his $2 million signing bonus from the Toronto Blue Jays, not on a Beemer or Mercedes but a 1978 Westfalia he calls Shaggy. The baseball press went all agog about how the 21 year old spent a month surfing and living in his van on the way to spring training in Florida this year, where he slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
But what’s the appeal of a vehicle that tends to spend as much time in the repair shop as on the road? I wanted to talk, not only to the people moved by them, but the people who keep them moving.
•••
As I walk through the door to the garage I’m met by a frown. It’s dimly lit, the radio plays classic rock in the background, tools line the walls. In front of me sits 82-year-old Gunther Luddeke, the mechanic – a guru for many in the New Brunswick branch of the Westfalia tribe.
He wears big double-bridge glasses, but beyond is a serious face. His tilted baseball hat and Misty Mountain jacket turn away from the door as he reluctantly acknowledges my existence and pushes me away in the same movement.
Volkswagen started producing vans in 1951 and contracted out the conversion of them into camper vans to Westfalia-Werk, another Germany company. It was returning American serviceman who first brought them to this side of the Atlantic. But it wasn’t until the ‘60s and ‘70s that the Volkswagen camper van became the counter-culture icon it is today, ubiquitous at music festivals and campsites.
If you go on blogs or Facebook sites dedicated to Westfalias, you start to appreciate the variety. Officially, they’re all Volkswagen Type 2s, but there are split-windshield and bay-window Kombis, Vanagons and Eurovans. There’re air-cooled and water-cooled; and the Westfalia conversions can mean roofs that pop open into a bed, small kitchens that can handle basic cooking, screened jalousie windows or curtains, awnings and side tents, map tables and even chemical toilets. All depending on how you want to customize your ride.
“That’s part of mystic of them,” Watt says. “Which one’s which, which model, and what modifications have been made. Is it kind of a funky? Does it have sports wheels or does it have the traditional wheels? Does it have the stove, does it not? Does it have the pop up [roof]? Whatever.”
They do have a certain style and grace to them, but Volkswagen stopped making Eurovans in 2003 and Westfalia-Werk filed for bankruptcy in 2010. (Although on April 19, the German automaker announced it’s working on plans to revive the camper van as an electric vehicle.) And if you drive the back roads of New Brunswick you might see one parked off to the side, maybe with a for sale sign or maybe with just a broken window.
Mother Nature seems to be administering last rites with her rust.
Gunther’s shop, tucked away in the woods on Fredericton’s north side, has repaired Westfalias since ’77, and Gunther himself has fixed them even longer. It’s one of the few garages in New Brunswick that still repairs these German relics.
There are three other mechanics: Melvin; Gunther’s son, Junior; and Madeleine Berrevoets, the newest member of the team. As Gunther leaves to do some work, I ask them about Westfalias.
“If you had to do an engine on one of those, it might take us two months to get the parts up for them now,” Junior said.
“And $5,000,” chimes in Madeleine.
“A lot of it’s got to come from the States,” says Junior. “It’s not like back before where you get them anywhere. You can’t even get them from the dealer anymore,”
This is brought up repeatedly. It costs more money to keep old cars going, and as the scrapyards get picked over year after year, parts become harder to find. Some companies in California have the monopoly on Westfalia parts and set the price, so if you own a van you’ll have to pay a little extra.
Soon Gunther returns. Sitting down on a chair with his brown shaggy rescue dog, Stella, he’s more willing to talk. He speaks with a thick accent. It is clear his outward seriousness is part of a front. His speech is littered with jokes.
Gunther came to New Brunswick in ‘52 and worked for Volkswagen before opening his shop here. He says Vietnam draft dodgers brought the VW buses with them to New Brunswick. Those were the glory days of Westfalias in Gunther’s mind.
“They lived in the vans, they ate in the vans,” he said.
He credits the vehicle’s longevity to hippies who have flashbacks and buy a Westfalia hoping to relive their heydays.
“You can find lots of them. They retire and they say, ‘maybe I would like one of those old vans. I had lots of fun in it,’” he said. “But most people can’t understand it’s an expensive item, it’s an antique.”
Patrick Watt understands his ’85 Vanagon is an antique. He bought it for $7,000, but he’s had to sink money into the mechanical systems. He says it averages out to $1,500 to $2,000 a year.
But he likens it to boat, something you put money in annually. It takes a bit to get it up and running each year, but over time he’s learn how to source parts himself.
“Once you know what you’ve done, and you know what needs to be done, it turns from this reaction thing to a more
proactive thing.”
Watt has two mechanics that work on his van, one of them Gunther. Now when he goes into the shop, they give him a strategy. They tell him what parts he needs and Watt orders them all together. It saves a lot of money on shipping.
“These things don’t lose value. I’m sure I can get my money back out of it now, that’s not even a question in my mind,” Watt says. “There seems to be a community to keep them alive.”
…
A few years ago Madeleine was driving her van back from Nova Scotia home to her home in Ontario when it broke down near St. Stephen. She asked around on Westfalia Facebook groups and was sent to Gunther.
She and her young daughter stayed at his place that night; and after a compression test, they realized the motor was toast.
“That’s when he said, ‘err, I don’t really want to fix it’ and I started looking up with my dad and finding parts and he said ‘Okay, we’ll do it if you can get those parts together.’”
“After I looked at the van there, I told her, pack up,” said Gunther. “She had a little girl there, I told her to go back home, call me in four weeks time, see how I’m making out. She said ‘No, I’m staying right here.’”
The next Monday morning Madeleine came riding up to the shop on her bike looking for something to do.
“I said ‘what are you gonna do?’” said Gunther. “Well can I hang round?” I said, ‘well you can hang round but I’m not going to work on your van today.’ ‘But can I hang round?’ ‘Yeah, you can hang round.’ And she’s been hanging round ever since. Couldn’t get rid of her, just like a flee on a dog. Hired herself.”
Madeleine lived on couches for two months and came to the shop every day to work with Gunther. She gave up her old life, including her modelling career and moved to New Brunswick.
“She was pretty proud when she put that key in the ignition,” Junior said.
“I still am,” Madeleine said.
Soon the boys in the garage discovered, as they call it, her secret life.
One of the last photo shoots Madeleine did before leaving was with her daughter, who wanted to show the magazine off to Gunther.
“She said, ‘Gunther I have a nice photo for you,’” said
Gunther. “I thought it was going to be a picture of a horse.”
Madeleine knew modelling wasn’t for her. The Green Party candidate in the last provincial election wants to have a farm one day. Part of the reason she decided to work for Gunther is so she can learn how to fix her own equipment. The 25 year old prefers this type of work to standing in front of a camera.
“It’s tangible. Your motor doesn’t work? Now it works. I felt the parts.”
…
Madeleine says if you own a Westfalia, you’ve got to love it.
“People keep them going. They don’t get a new car every year. They buy them, they keep them, they take care of them,” she says. “No one sends their Westfalia to the crusher.”
Watt tells me about how since the windshield is just above the headlights, driving the van gives him a different perspective on the road.
“Everyone can see you. You’re almost on show,” he said.
Whenever he goes anywhere – he only drives it in the summer – the van sticks out. He calls it a crowd magnet.
Many Westfalia owners come to the shop just for Gunther.
Like the vehicles, there’s just something quirky and classical about him. He has his own gravity.
He talks about wanting to stop working on these vans every year, but the 82 year old never does, says Madeleine. He just keeps going. Maybe that’s because for Westfalia lovers, there’s always another season.
“He’ll never lay anyone off. He just dips into his savings and then hopes we make up for it in the summer.”
This article was originally published in the Telegraph-Journal on June 12, 2015.
