the licorice jellybean

The first time he remembered ever seeing a Karmann Ghia he pulled out three hundred fifty dollars and bought it. It was a 1960 hardtop. It was eleven years old and Volkswagen dealers still had parts for it back then. He had kept it for most of the seventies, and learned about brakes and bearings and kingpins and distributors and body work and valve adjustments and motor oil. His father had never been mechanically inclined—a school teacher who simply was not inspired by the puzzles and challenges of machinery. The Ghia taught his son what he had not. Its most treasured lesson was that he could solve virtually any mystery or problem it presented to him with a little patience, research, and attentiveness to detail. It was his first car. It would always, and perhaps irrationally, be his best car.

Now he was a quarter century older and once again driving a Ghia. It was probably some kind of mid-life thing and he knew it. That was ok. This Ghia was a ‘73. It was black, with original sky blue in the trunk and in all the hidden places. It was sort of a licorice jellybean with a lot of miles on it. The title and registration described it as a “special construction 1995 Karmann Ghia”. Two years ago he started its restoration by replacing the chassis. The California Highway Patrol had inspected it thoroughly and assigned a new serial number proving that it wasn’t a chop shop job. The state smog inspector had decreed that it must meet the 1973 smog criteria, and verified that it did. It still had no interior, and was a raucous echo chamber on the road. But it handled like a cat. It was much quicker than the ‘60 had been, but still a VW at heart.

He drove it often on the back roads that snaked through the scrub hills skirting the eastern slope of the Coast Range. His favorite was Uvas Road, a winding two lane blacktop trail through oaks and manzanita west of Morgan Hill. It was a road designed for 45 miles per hour, but the Ghia could handle most of it well above 60. What made Uvas Road so good for the Ghia was that in spite of its curves, it never climbed steeply enough to slow the little engine down. He could run hard and fast from one end of the road to the other. Most of the time he didn’t push car or road that hard —just often enough to know the limits of both, and to work off a little adrenaline from time to time.