Courtesy of Ultra VW Magazine (CHPublications)
By John Plow

Gone Fishin’

I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression. Published in 1939, Steinbeck’s fictional chronicle of the Dust Bowl migration during the 1930s highlighted the hardships endured by American farming families displaced from their homesteads, forced west to California in search of the promise land.

I’ve always admired resourcefulness and independence, something that Depression-era people had in spades. Relative to out ancestors, our lives are generally marked by comfort and convenience, and the skills and mindset necessitated by abject poverty have faded in successive generations. Steinbeck paints a picture of families (and what’s left of their belongings) loaded into beat-up old jalopies – cars barely adequate for making it down the driveway – trundling across country, requiring constant maintenance. What happens when you begin to lose a crankshaft bearing in the middle of the Nevada desert? You tear the engine down and make a temporary replacement bearing with a piece of your leather belt. Got another flat tire? Remove the inner tube and place the 25th patch on it in hopes that it will last a few more miles. Has your engine boiled off most of the water again? Be prepared to walk for miles in hopes of finding a stream in order to haul water by the bucket.

There is a romantic notion that vintage VW owners posses – and indeed, embrace – the ideals of resourcefulness and independence. There definitely is a grain of truth to this perception, at least in my experience years ago working on cars at an air-cooled VW shop while paying my way through university. I regularly encountered varying degrees of resourcefulness as owners attempted to maintain their cars. Whether driven by frugalness, ignorance or incompetence – something we can all relate to during different stages in our lives – I was continually amazed at the work some owners did to keep their cars on the road. One was often both impressed by the ingenuity, and frightened by the lack of forethought (and its potential impact to things like safety).

One of my favourite stories, however, occurred when a customer brought his mid ‘70s-era Beetle in for a new accelerator cable. He explained that he and his buddy had taken the Beetle for a drive to their favourite fishing ‘hole’. The day could not have gone better; a lazy day spent in the shade of an old oak tree on the banks of a flowing river. And they even caught some fish. During the hour long drive home, while regaling in stories about the ‘one that got away’, the accelerator pedal suddenly dropped to the floor. They quickly determined that the accelerator pedal had broken, and unfortunately, did not have a spare. In the middle of a country road with no houses near by – this was pre-cell phone days – they were stranded. Sitting in the grass deciding what they were going to do, the car’s owner noticed his fishing pole leaning out of the passenger side window, and had an idea.

With the fishing pole still leaning outside the window, he untied the fishing hook from the end of the line and ran the line towards the rear of the car. Reaching between the front of the fan shroud and the firewall and wiggling the throttle cable tube, he was able to thread the fishing line through the tube towards the carburetor. Retying the fishing hook onto the end, he attached the fishing line to the throttle arm. Hopping back into the wounded Beetle – and with some practice – they were able to drive the Beetle home. How? The driver depressed the clutch and placed it into first gear. The passenger, holding onto his fishing rod – and bringing in the line as if he had caught a Mako shark – was able to accelerate the engine. The driver then released the clutch and they were on the way. When it came time to shift up to the next gear, the passenger pressed the release button on his fishing rod, which causes the accelerator to go back to idle. The driver then depressed the clutch, and the passenger once again reeled in the line to accelerate the car.

They apparently attracted quite a bit of attention as they drove down the highway. They found that it worked surprisingly well, as long as they were smooth enough to drive with the deck lid open (rough starts would cause the deck lid to slam shut, pinching the fishing line against the body).

As he told me this story at the shop, my eyes wide open and my jaw dropped, he was as amazed by my reaction as I was of his ingenuity. With dead pan eyes and an expressionless face, he responded, “Well what the heck did you expect me to do? We had to get home to cook our fish!”