That VW Bus That Miraculously Survived The LA Fires Is A Worthy Symbol Of Hope, But How Did It Happen?

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you everyone has been sending me the amazing picture you see above. People have sent it to me because they know my obsession with air-cooled Volkswagens, and of course it’s just a powerful image no matter what. Amidst a sea of charred remains from the Palisades Fire, the gray and blackened detritus of people’s lives sits an impossibly bright and cheery icon: a 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 bus, somehow unscathed by the conflagration, sitting there vivid and defiant, a shockingly apt mascot for what will be Southern California’s inevitable rebirth.

The whole thing is so wildly improbable and perfect that I’ll admit the jaded and cynical bits of my mind wondered if it was somehow staged. How could this bus have managed to survive so incredibly intact when literally every single thing around it is burned to cinders? And the fact that it’s not just any classic car, it’s a VW Microbus, arguably the vehicle most associated with at least one very well-known concept of Malibu, it all just seemed too on-the-nose.

But, the story seems to check out! The Bus’ owner, Megan Weinraub (who is, in an also wildly on-the-nose way, a surfboard designer) parked the bus on a flat part of the street by her apartment, because she’s still new to driving stick, and wanted to avoid starting on a hill, it seems. When the evacuation order came, she left in her more modern, daily-driver car with her dog, leaving the bus parked on the street.

(screencap: NBC 4)

While Weinraub, along with all the other residents who had to evacuate, has not been permitted back in the area, various media has been allowed back, and footage of the side of the bus facing the fires has been recorded, a still from which you can see above. The bus didn’t exactly escape unscathed, with damage to paint and glass and some melted turn indicator and side marker lamp lenses. Other reports showed that the heat did blow out the rear window, and the interior is pretty full of ash. I suspect that a lot of the plastic and other non-metal parts of the engine – battery, distributor cap, heater hoses, and so on – are likely ruined, but all that stuff is pretty easily replaced.

Overall, though, it fared incredibly well!

I don’t really understand how it escaped with such light damage, but I’m not a fire, and I don’t really understand their motives or how they work. Perhaps the fact that it was parked on asphalt without much in the way of fuel around it contributed? I’m not sure anyone really can say for sure.

(screencap: Inside Edition)

It hardly matters, though. This old Bus’ stubborn refusal to become a charred cinder is something that Los Angeles needs right now. It defiantly held onto its color (I’m pretty sure it started life as a Reef Blue/Pastel White Bus, which VW referred to as a “Station Wagon”) when every force around it sought to desaturate it into gray misery like everything around it.

It’s not going to put anyone back in their home or re-constitute their old family pictures or keep landlords from rent-gouging or insurance companies from jacking up premiums to absurd levels, but this bus’s survival does do some good for the soul of Los Angeles, and that has value, too.

I lived in LA almost 20 years, and while we absolutely had so many wildfires that you just expected them every year – including at least one I could see from my old neighborhood – I’ve never seen or heard of anything like the scale of these fires before. This is something new and terrible and has the potential to change LA irrevocably.

But Los Angeles is, and will always be, Los Angeles. That means that the grim truths of reality don’t ever entirely affect it. Was it a good idea to build a city of that scale in the desert in the first place? To have to carefully cultivate every living non-desert-scrubby plant, to have to get water from the Colorado River, to deal with all the earthquakes and invading aliens and self-important assholes that are everywhere?

Of course not! But does Los Angeles do it anyway, and somehow manage to be a city of fascinating and wonderful people, places, and things, the whole spectrum of nouns? Of course it does. LA will be back, as fantastic and improbable as ever, and this lightly-toasted little Bus is a fantastic and improbable reminder of that.

(top image: AP Photo, Mark J. Terrill)