Harthager's Ghost

A Volkswagen Vanagon, blue and white, model year 1976 paused at a stop light next to me while I was out on a jog. Now, you may be considering why this of any other seemingly ordinary events might bear such significance as to be recorded here today.

Let me begin with a conversation I had with my brother about this very same vehicle not too long ago. No, let me begin even before that, with the origin of this automobile in my life:

This car, see, is the vehicle that bore me any location that was more than walkable or bike-able distance from my home for the better part of my childhood. To Seattle, Portland, even occasionally on long hot summer days to California, all five kids packed in, parents too, with water bottles pressed against red cheeks in the rising heat of summer driving through Redding and Yreka, through the produce checkpoint, holding out to rest stops for water fights and finally on to Sacramento.

Most importantly of all though, this Vanagon took us to perhaps the most enchanting place I have yet encountered on this earthly coil. Priest lake. Our dog Biscuit knew, instinctively, where we were bound when that sliding door opened for her in early august. With four feet of liftoff, she bounded in, only halting when colliding with the brown pleather bench seat, her tail flailing so enthusiastically the whole time it echoed off the dull metal of the floor boards.

My life has felt pretty fragmented since I came back from Peru. Even after securing an apartment and garnering some employment, my life is still in many boxes, most of which reside in my childhood home just outside Spokane, Washington. To add insult to injury, my parents have just closed on a new residence, and the Benton drive place, with my 24 years of life history, will be empty by May 22nd. Its been on the market for months, surely, with the economy the way it is, I thought, the universe would see fit to keep it in my life for at least a little while longer. Until I could pack up and reconcile the things of my youth. The yearbooks, trinkets, notes from my fourth grade soccer buddy Toby, and on and on. The treasures of us from a time we ourselves have a hard time recalling.

But back to Priest lake for a moment, I can't go back there. To Kalispel island, suspended like an inky emerald thumb print in the glossy surface of the deep deliberate lake. It is a place defiant of description, for its both its beauty and its sorrow. Silent and swift in the early morning, the Sleepy Jeanne, our sailboat, carried us there. Its the place I first experienced death as a child, the place I spent summers in the earth, learning it, becoming it. Biscuit had dragged a half-decomposed deer carcass out of the steep hilly interior of the island, down to the beach she tugged it, triumphant. I was horrified.

My brothers and I would snorkel around the entire thing one day, rafting on a windsurfing board, perplexed and humbled by the things we discovered; water snakes, minnows, strange dark swirling things in the pooling shadows of the wake. I know these things as vividly as if it had been a day ago, and yet, the distance between my persons would make it seem a lifetime. Its almost uncomfortable, Kalispel, the way it nestles down inside of you, haunting and ethereal. Like the things you confront with it are beyond your understanding. As a human, I think I have a deep seated desire to understand, and so I often surround myself in the illusions of things I think I understand. This place though, it will never let you. It is a place defiant of time. I can't go back there.

There came a day in our household when the the Sweigert family and the VW Vanagon would part ways. My Dad assured us more sentimentally attached members of the family that it had gone to a good home. Whether they would appreciate the way the heating system smelled of maple syrup, as we had, I could not help but wonder. A new car appeared in our lives, and it was thrilling for a while, but I think we all miss the VW, just a little.

Rumor surfaced several years after that the new owners of the VW had moved to Oregon. My brother, he swears he's seen it grunting around the streets of Southeast Portland. He can tell it by the dents in the bumper we each of us knows all too well.