That shit’ll buff out…

It’s interesting how I found myself this morning: sitting in a thick pile of dust, coveralls on, dust mask on, a few drops of sweat on my forehead as I worked away at a patch of polyester filler on the diesel westy I’m restoring.

Its completely mindless work, without any romance whatsoever. I’m not building a boat out of wood, or making a hand-carved table. I’m using modern materials to disguise the inevitable dent that all of these vans seem to get on their sliding doors. I’m working with a long carbon chain petrochemical (which, come to think of it, is not all that different from wood (cellulose), which is made of linked glucose molecules, which themselves are ring-shaped carbon chains). But a bodyman doesn’t get the love and respect as that a carver of wood gets; he’s too utilitarian, too prosaic. And we only seek them out after something bad happens. They are the dentist of the craftsman world.

Still, I was enjoying myself. There is something fine about taking anything that is damaged and making it whole again, through careful, repetitive motions. First you have to flatten the metal as best you can with dolly and hammer. Then you mix up the plastic and spread it over the wounded metal before the filler hardens, trying to replicate the original body curve.

Once it kicks off you take a long sureform and shave away a layer to get it closer to the proper contour. Once it fully hardens you sand it using successively finer grits, each grit designed to remove the scratches left by it’s coarser kin. Usually I finish off with something around 600 grit, by which time the plastic is smooth as glass and once painted, undetectable from the surrounding body metal.

There are no shortcuts and only one right way. It takes (me) quite a long time. Often I have to add more layers of filler and start the process over again because I can still see a bit of a dip or hollow in just the right light.

It’s certainly humble work, and I guess that’s part of its charm for me. Ten years of advanced education and I’m sanding plastic. There’s utterly no pretence here, its just labour, but there’s a soothing quality to it, and it sure has taught me patience. There was a time not all that long ago when I could not have done this kind of work as I simply wasn’t patient enough. I didn’t like that aspect of my personality, but it was part of who I was. I would rush it and it would look like shit.

There’s a kind of penitent quality to the work as well. We all go through life full of ourselves, and I’ve been no different, but spending hours sanding the side of a van sure can put you in your place, can teach you that you aren’t all that special.

There’s also the reassuring part that after all this repetition is over and I shoot on a new coat of paint, it will go from a sad, ugly duckling to a lovely vehicle that people will enjoy camping with their families. Compared to what’s produced in the market now, these little campers themselves are humble little beasts.

And that’s the rub for me: what is on the market now is too big and too expensive to buy and to operate for a lot of people. And I’m a huge fan of repairing and reworking and reusing rather than tossing away and buying new. Unfortunately, this flies in the face of contemporary consumer habits, for all our talk of recycling. We are wary of making do with old, or god forbid, learning the skills to maintain things ourselves.

While getting some machine shop work done at a local shop, I talked with the machinist and he showed me what auto manufacturers are producing these days. What the consumer sees are very fancy, handy, and complex vehicles that do everything for the driver but gas themselves up. And some contemporary designs are visually stunning.

But what’s under the hood is appalling. The machinist showed me aluminium heads with castings as thin as cardboard and almost as fragile, intended to save on weight and materials. Much of what is coming out now is not designed to be repaired, unlike older designs. Time was if you overheated your engine, you milled the head and put in a new head gasket. Not cheap, but still a reasonable expense.

Not anymore. With many of these new, thin heads, they warp so badly they have to be tossed rather than repaired. A guy recently paid over $4,000.00 for a new head for a Mini because it couldn’t be repaired after overheating.

And manufacturers are no longer producing the parts needed to repair major engine components. A guy recently nicked a valve (likely through overrevving) in his newer Dodge Viper. The valve was bent and the valve guide was broken, which is a small repair. Sure the head has to come off and that’s not cheap, but pressing in a new guide and installing a new valve is only a few minutes of shop time. But Dodge won’t supply valves or guides or any of those typical head parts that have been around since cars first made it on the road, so the entire head has to be replaced. This is a V-10 engine so look to pay many thousands for a new head.

Older vehicles were simpler, had much fewer components, and could be repaired just about forever rather than sending to the crusher. I handed down my 91 Acura Integra to my son, and by the time he was done with it, it had 430,000 km on it, with only a few breakdowns over its life. He’s currently driving a ’76 Mercedes 300D that’s a total beater (I bought it for the veggie oil system and it cost me $300), but it starts every time and gets him where he needs to go.

Part of this complexity is due to the refinements needed to make an inherently simple but inefficient design (the internal combustion engine) more fuel efficient. But what I’ve noticed is that demands for power rather than efficiency is what’s really pushing things. Many, many models produced today offer over 200hp for fairly small cars, rather than getting by with with a fuel-sipping 3 cylinder with 90hp. The early 80′s VW Westfalias, at over 3500 lbs, had only 65hp!

It takes a lot of sophisticated technology to get massive power (and reasonable fuel mileage) out of today’s engines, but parts for that technology won’t be around in twenty years, and the high engineering and complexity means they simply won’t last. Today’s vehicles will never have the earlier kind of longevity or reparability, by professional tech or backyard mechanic.

There’s a lot of ugly hiding under those new, fantastic designs, and  I will never again buy a new car.

This last several months have been an incredible life experiment; that I already knew the outcome is beside the point.

A number of months ago, Tracy was fretting about our lifestyle: we were low on money and she was feeling hemmed in on our boat. At the time I was quite happy with my life, which was deeply creative, introspective and spiritual. I had started Buddhist training and it was having a profound impact on how I saw myself and my world.

But Tracy was unhappy and wished me to become more involved in day-to-day banal life, and to prioritise those things that she did, especially around money. I tried to convince her that happiness did not reside there, despite all the assertions of Madison Avenue; I had personally walked that path many times and the results were always the same: more stuff, more stress and the nothing really changes except you have lost more life that you will never have again. But Tracy had not walked down the same life path as I, and still believed that increased income would lead to her greater happiness and so I was obliged to change how I lived my life.

Several months ago I started a business of restoring old Volkswagen Westfalia camper vans called West Coast Westy. There are three of us now, and we have three Westfalia campers in the shop, an air-cooled Vanagon, a diesel, and a waterboxer.

We’ve restored and sold two so far, and these current three are almost completed. New interiors, rebuilt engines, new paint and repaired bodies. Ready to give joy to another generation.

In many ways it’s been a lot of fun, if a little “shallow” compared to my earlier life. The money comes in fits and starts as we sell our completed Westfalias, and it seems obvious to both us that the new money hasn’t improved much; in fact things have gone downhill quite a lot.

You see, restoring one of these vehicles takes an enormous amount of physical work, and by the end of the day I’m usually exhausted. 90% of my life’s energy is going into this, and that means very little is left over for me, for my wife and family, for my friends and community.  It’s not just me; one of us is 24 and the other is 36, and both of them are finding it a real grind.

With this work my direction has changed dramatically, and so much is suffering for it. We are becoming more socially isolated because we are so busy, we don’t make love all that much anymore, and we don’t feel very connected. And I’m simply not able to give Tracy the care and attention I was able to before. My focus has changed from a profoundly internal to an external one.

This isn’t a deliberate choice to snub her; starting and running a business in the beginning is a hell of a lot of work, especially if you hope to make money from the get-go. There’s no middle ground to be had here, and I’m not going to start something just to fail at it.

But now Tracy sees the consequences of this choice. In my previous lifestyle I focused mostly on my writing and picked up work here and there to take care of bills and help keep the wolf from the door. Money came in fits and starts, and it was enough for me. In giving to myself this way, I was able to nurture myself to give a lot to others: family, friends and society at large. And I was able to play an important role in nurturing and supporting my spouse.

It’s not like I’m ignoring her or punishing her, but we all have a finite amount of energy to give, and we all make choices where to give it. Not only am I giving so much to my business, I’m no longer giving to me, I’m no longer nurturing myself. No wonder I have so little in the way of emotional resources to give to others. I’ve stopped exercising, writing, blogging tweeting and networking. Work is all there pretty much is these days, that or recovering from it.

Tracy and I tried an experiment where I stopped living according to heart to living according to wallet and the results were just as I expected, having done this experiment many times in my life. After all, who doesn’t want the life promised by the ad agencies? All it takes is money. Tracy has indirectly experienced this with me at various times, but for whatever reason never integrated the experience; she never seemed to make the connection that life was all much the same regardless of how much money did or did not come in, though the choices we make around that sure did. She still believed that making more money would ease her heart.

Several months later she has seen the cost of making money a life’s focus, and the price we pay when we turn from what our heart needs.  She now wants me back to the husband that she knew before we started this.

One benefit of this experiment is that previously she didn’t really understand how much intangible giving I did in our relationship; she gave a lot materially and I gave a lot emotionally and spiritually. Now as my energy directs elsewhere, she realises what she is missing.

There is a truism here, I think. You can have your man make a lot of money, or you can have your man, and you will pay a price either way.

Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. I’m almost finished this diesel Westfalia, and then I’m taking a break. But it’s been my experience in life that you cannot go back. Tracy lobbed a grenade into our nest and we can’t go back to the way it was before. I think it was worth the destruction for the knowledge and insight she has gained, but now I’m not sure where to go. Ahead as always, but being a new path all we see is branches and thorns, and it will take real courage to continue to put one foot in front of the other.