How Josie Saved Me

Josie is likely older than half the trees planted along the two-lane backroads she patrols. Forty-plus years of wind, ice, and heat have scrubbed her Assuan Brown paint to the faint color of river mud after a drought; her Samos Beige roof leans toward bone-white, like an aging mare’s muzzle. She is slow out of the gate on cold mornings, coughs a little gray when the throttle sticks, and purrs only when she’s certain you’re paying attention. I have learned to love all of it—the quivering dash vents, the small cauliflower rust blooming at side panel, the woolly rattle of the rear suspension—because you cannot love a creature halfway and hope it stays with you on hard roads.

People ask if it’s practical to pilot a 1982 Vanagon on a journey measured in thousands of two-lane miles. I shrug. Practicality and romance rarely keep the same address. Anyway, Josie is no machine in the sterile sense of pistons obeying commands. She is a traveling companion with opinions, mood swings, and the occasional need to shout for help in whatever language old machinery speaks. Learn that tongue, and she will carry you farther than common sense allows.

1 · The First Sign

It happened on a sun-soaked Wednesday somewhere in the soft belly of southern Ohio, fallow fields fanned out like brown quilts under an October sky. No storm in sight. No hint of weather of any kind. I came up to a crossroads, pressed the clutch, slipped the van into neutral, and rolled to a lazy stop behind a John Deere pulling a hay rake. In that moment of standstill I heard the unmistakable swack-swack of windshield wipers. Rubber blades hissed across dry glass, leaving ghost arcs of dust. Twice. Three times.

I stared at the wiper stalk, untouched. Switched off. Swack-swack. They stopped mid-stroke, paused, then resumed as if to say, We’re not done, pal. The farmer’s tractor pulled away; I eased back onto the blacktop with Josie’s eyebrows still flapping. Bump, rattle, another bump—swack-swack-swack—this time a marathon of motion, wipers thrashing at invisible rain for the next thirteen miles. They ignored the kill switch. They ignored my curses. They would have ignored a court order.

Machines as old as Josie do this. They don’t malfunction; they perform omens.

2 · Dial-a-Vanagon

I did what any sensible man would do: I called Steve, my personal Vanagon chaplain back in Marietta, Georgia, keeper of a battle-scarred ’82 Vanagon with a color scheme that made his van and Josie look like twins. He picked up on the second ring, breathless, probably elbow-deep in grease.

“Talk to me.”

“Wipers,” I said. “They’ve found religion.”

He chuckled. “Check the ground under the dash—brown wire near the clutch pivot. Could be chafed and shorting.”

“Right, OK,” I said, though I had only the vaguest picture of where clutch levers and wiring harnesses mingle. But in the fraternity of vintage-VW pilgrims, you never dismiss a hunch. Especially when delivered in Steve’s soothing low country, north of Atlanta drawl.

3 · Yoga Under a Glove Box

I pulled onto the apron of an abandoned filling station—retro SOHIO sign still creaking, weeds waist-high where gasoline once pooled—and commenced a series of contortions no doctor would recommend. Picture a middle-aged man on his back, shoulders wedged against brake pedal, feet dangling out the driver’s door like forgotten socks, halogen flashlight clamped in teeth. From that absurd perspective, the under-dash world looked like a copper rain forest: loom of wires, dangling bullet connectors, and dust bunnies hardened to fossils.

Steve’s brown ground wire appeared intact. My vertebrae did not. I groaned, flexed, and the flashlight beam skittered past the fuse box to the bottom of the steering column. Something there glistened. I blinked, angled light again. The rubber collar at the wheel’s base was wet—sticky, not rainwater. Brake fluid.

Brake fluid belongs nowhere near the bottom of a steering wheel. It should sit inside a reservoir two feet higher, piped to distant drums and calipers and the hydraulic clutch. Instinct throttled the heart. I wriggled free, popped the dash-top service hatch, and found the culprit: a plastic fluid reservoir drained to the MIN line. One more commute and I’d have been piloting 4,000 pounds of German nostalgia with the stopping power of a sled on black ice.

“Wipers my foot,” I muttered. “You clever, cranky girl.”

I fetched a dusty bottle of DOT4 from the emergency crate—thank God for over-packing—topped off the reservoir, and pumped the brakes and worked the clutch. Josie burped a sigh. The wipers, suddenly satisfied, folded themselves dutifully at the base of the windshield and never moved again unless properly beckoned.

4 · Coincidence, Providence, or Something Between

A rational man calls it coincidence. A wire short halfway across Ohio. An unrelated leak a foot away. But I’ve counted too many so-called coincidences that saved my hide: a sudden fuel-pump squeal thirty seconds before the engine starved on a mountain grade, revealing a pinched fuel line; an at-speed encounter with a massive pothole at dusk, forcing a roadside inspection that uncovered loose CV bolts that needed retorquing. Patterns emerge. Either the van is haunted by benevolent spirits of departed VW mechanics, or these old machines develop a sense of self-preservation that includes preserving the idiot behind the wheel.

Steinbeck wrote of his Rocinante that “a man on a trip soon comes to feel that his car is something more than a machine; it is an extension of himself. But in this case, Rocinante took on personality and the aura of a companion.” I agree with the intimacy. Machines at this age speak—a language of squeaks, flickers, and phantom wipers. Ignore it and pay the scrapyard.

5 · Anatomy of a Leak

Later, parked by a cornfield striped gold in late afternoon, I traced the leak. The reservoir perches behind the instrument cluster, feeding two metal lines that vanish through the floor to the brake master cylinder and the clutch master cylinder, the latter perched directly parallel to the rubber boot at the base of the steering wheel. Age hardens the rubber grommets; vibration cracks them. Brake fluid, thin as guilt, spits out and onto that rubber boot. An eventuality that nearly every Vanagon owner meets at some point. Josie wasn’t throwing a tantrum; she was ringing the fire bell with the only lever available—a phantom short in the wiper circuit that shared a ground path with the failing switch beneath the brake fluid float. Symphony of wiring harness and hydraulics, conducted by entropy.

She had my attention now. Replacing the clutch master cylinder was no roadside project, it would have to wait until the journey was over. I promised Josie I’d attend to the job first thing once safely back in the warmth of her garage. Meanwhile, I would watch the brake fluid level like an expectant parent and top it off when needed and pray the clutch master cylinder would hold up that long.

6 · What Machines Teach

That night in the bunk, I revised my private creed of mechanical companionship:

1. Machines remember—every patch, every shortcut—and they will call you to account.
   
   
2. Machines warn—rarely in plain speech. Learn the grammar of groans.
   
   
3. Machines forgive—if met with patience and a 13mm socket.
   
   
4. Machines conspire—to keep you humble, alive, and occasionally mystified.
   
   

Josie’s wiper prophecy bought me time and maybe my neck. For that I rested a hand on the steering wheel hub, sticky with cleaned brake fluid, and whispered thanks. Silly, perhaps, to thank steel and plastic. Yet gratitude, like oil, loses nothing for being poured on what cannot speak.

7 · Rolling Faith

In the days that followed, the van behaved—no random blade thrashing, no new leaks. But I found myself listening harder to every warp and woof of her engine. I carried that vigilance into human encounters too—leaning close when a farmer complained about drought, noticing the tremor in a waitress’s smile. Machines had schooled me again in the art of subtle signals.

We rolled west across the Indiana line, soy giving way to corn, corn to wheat, wheat to low brown prairie where sky attends church all day long. Every few days I unscrewed the brake-fluid cap, peered inside, and filled, as needed. Josie purred approval. Sometimes, to test my luck, I flicked the wiper stalk on an empty road—one gentle swish, then off—like checking in with an oracle whose message I’d finally heeded.

8 · Final Miles to the Sunset

Sunset painted the horizon bruise-purple as I climbed the last hill before camp near Lake Carlyle. Josie’s high beams cut twin cones through bug-spattered glass. She hummed at fifty-five, the herbal cadence of an air-cooled heart that knows exactly how much it can give and no more.

And I, hands loose on the wheel, felt the curious peace that follows averted disaster: awareness of mortality sharpened to beauty. Roadside shrines of Queen Anne’s lace glowed ghost-white in the headlights; the scent of a hay field drifted through half-open wing windows. Below the dash the leaky cylinder seals held up, waiting for full repair at a later date, a treaty that would hold until the next act of mechanical prophecy.

Because there will be a next act. Old vans, like old men, do not surrender the stage quietly. They cough to get your attention, tap your shoulder at midnight, or drag windshield wipers across a bone-dry windshield under an unblemished sky. When that happens I’ll mutter, reach for tools, and thank the gods of grease and grit that Josie still bothers to speak.

Machines can’t save a soul, but they might extend its lease long enough to see another county fair, another sunrise through a buggy windshield, another stranger waving because they recognize kinship in imperfection. That’s romance enough for any road, old or new.

I killed the engine, coasted into camp, and let the headlights die last—two small moons blinking out so the real sky could take over. In the silence before sleep, I thought I heard windshield wipers whisper once. Just once. A lullaby of rubber on glass, reminding me to listen, always listen, to the stories a machine tells when words are not enough.