Gravity’s Volkswagen

One

A screaming comes across the tarmac. It has happened before, often, many, many millions of times. It is the sound of an air-cooled, flat-four, horizontally opposed Volkswagen engine. It is the hammer of cylinders and exhaust gas, the whine and rattle of broad tolerances that expand and contract without the benefit of liquid coolant. It is not a pretty sound exactly, but it is ubiquitous (or was), a clattering across time and space, from 1930^s’ Germany to late-twentieth-century California to now, from factories in Wolfsburg, in Mexico and Brazil, from production lines in South Africa and Australia, in Thailand and Indonesia and Nigeria. Through deserts and swamps, across tundra and open water, it comes, solid, basic, reliable, mutable, capable of radical transformation while remaining itself, adept at absorbing punishment and meaning and grudging affection. The Love Bug. Yeah, right. World domination by any other name. The rest is rolling, moving, repeated history.