The Love Bus

The Volkswagen bus is a symbol of a bygone era. The passenger train is too. The abandoned building with its windows broken out looks like it's haunted and that's because it is haunted. Anything that was once occupied by people possesses a vestige of those people. You know that people sat inside them and thought inside them and lived and worked inside them. They were designed by people and built by their hands. The mark of people is on them. A hand screwed on that old black license plate when it was once shiny and new. A hand hammered in all those rusty nails. Everything you see here but the grass was made by hands that have long since decayed beyond recognition while those objects they have fashioned from steel and glass still retain their essential shape. We know it's an automobile. We know it's a train. We know that structure is a building. But we don't see the hands anymore. All we can see are the remnants of handy-work. Somebody fitted each pane of glass into those window frames and somebody installed those windshield wipers. A hand painted the words SKUNKMOBILE and a mind thought them up. The front of the bus looks like a bright 1970's smiley face and that's because humans anthropomorphize what they see and what they create. We make things that reflect us and when we abandon them the latent image of ourselves still remains. Even the old building feels somehow like an old man. Maybe the reason why decaying objects are so compelling is because we are looking at our dead and dying selves and maybe facing our own mortality. Like road kill we cannot look away because we need to understand that we, too, will die. We don't get death so we veer toward it and poke at it like a child poking at a dead bird with a stick to see if it's really true. The bright yellow VW bus is especially disturbing because it is a symbol of peace, and love and joy that will never again spread that sense of hope in the future. That's what the love bus used to be - a symbol of freedom and optimism in the potential of people. The love bus was a vehicle of escape designed just prior to a terrible era of upheaval and violence. Its popularity grew as the tension grew, as JFK and Vietnam gave way to MLK and Woodstock. Tin soldier's and Nixon's coming, we're finally on our own. But hey, tune in and drop out. Take the love bus to San Francisco, see the Dead and escape death. Cast the die. Wear a dye.  Do anything but actually die like all those kids over in Nam or Bobby Kennedy or Medgar Evers and Emitt Till. But there is no escaping death. There's only the vain desire to stave it off for as long as possible. We'll deal with death and all our other problems later, when the gas runs out and the tranny drops and the old love bus coasts to its final resting place back of the trainyard where it sits and fades in the grass like some daffodil plucked from the ground. And every once in awhile somebody will come along with a camera or maybe just a memory and say far out, I once toured in a van just like that one right there. And he, or she, will only remember the joy.

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