The story of a brown VW Rabbit, which was sometimes loved and sometimes hated by its owners. Most of what happened, however, was not her fault.

It was not the brown Rabbit’s fault.

The timing belt blew coming down one of those killer hills on I-81, between Wilkes Barre and nowhere. The little beast was loaded with four people and luggage, my husband, me, and our two teenage boys. We were returning from some vaguely unpleasant visit to East Coast relatives. Matt was home from college in Nashville. The sixteen year old, the one who was impatiently awaiting his growth spurt—-he looked barely twelve—-was the one in the driver’s seat.

BANG! For a moment I thought someone with an Allegheny sense of humor, up there in the coal country, had shot at us.

“Put your foot on the clutch! Steer!” my husband bellowed, but it was already too late. We would learn later that the engine had blown.

Jay, white-faced, gripped the steering wheel and brought us in between a van and an eighteen wheeler, which had just begun its downhill charge. Like many drivers of small cars (and summer vacationers) we’d been going full tilt boogie, as if the hounds of hell were chasing us home. We swerved off the road and onto a crumbling, cratered PA break down and from there onto the grass. Fortunately, we’d arrived at the only straight place in the downhill mile. Teetering on the brink of Appalachian oblivion, we crunched to a halt.

Some of those early Rabbits, this one, a late seventies’ diesel, had their problems. Although my husband was always faithful to this car—named “Iris” when a faint rainbow shone across the road ahead on our maiden drive home—I had already taken against it.

This was, after all, the second time it had let us down in the middle of a long rattling, booming voyage home, following the cramped discomfort of a visit to relatives. The first time, the water pump had gone. We’d been about two hours from home, in the middle of another mountainous nowhere, on the PA Turnpike that time, during a steaming July. We’d had to await rescue, trapped between a wall of rock and the screaming summer traffic for a loooong time.

Hours of tinkering in a filthy garage trapped in that highway asylum for the vacationing insane, named, with an eye toward marketing, Breezewood—a gasoline impregnated tangle of roads, bloated RV’s and thin-sheeted motels—solved nothing. We’d have to be lugged over the rest of those damned mountains to a VW dealer who had the know-how and the parts. This dealership proved to have the parts all right, but came up short on the know-how. A timing belt, incorrectly installed along with the new water pump had now landed us here, beside yet another bellowing, chewed up interstate, and this time with a blown engine.

Maybe it wasn’t fair to the Rabbit. My husband, who drove it most of the time, remained loyal. He is like that. Once he’s given his heart, even though sometimes you wished like hell he’d just give it up, (or, in this case, SELL it,) love was forever.

After this breakdown, however, I never trusted it again on long trips, although I was forced several times to drive it out to Ohio on grim mother-in-the-nursing-home tours of duty.

Every time I watched my husband driving the damn thing to the body shop, I’d curse, begrudging it a penny more maintenance. Certainly not for the inevitable body rot, which had begun to nibble at the fenders and door panels, in the time-honored tradition of VW demise.

I took to calling it the “Poz” and not always under my breath. My husband translated this correctly as “Piece of S***.” He reacted angrily. An assault on a man’s car is an assault on his manhood—even if it is only a tan VW Diesel Rabbit of the most common curbside variety. “Poz” was, he declared, a cruel misnomer. It was, after all, “not the Rabbit’s fault.”

He had even gone to small claims court over the engine, in defense of his pocketbook and his car’s honor. After all, the engine wouldn’t have blown if the belt had been correctly installed. However, it was to be a small town power thing. The dealer’s lawyer and the Judge talked of golf and then shrugged off my husband’s claim. Tough luck passed for justice.

This further outrage only made my husband more devoted to his car. It was him and that tan Rabbit against “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

At 17 years, the car was a horror. It shook; it rattled. It started in a cloud of dense blue smoke, filling our alley. It handled like a brick on roller skates. Believe it or not, we finally sold the damn thing!

A friend from my husband’s work had a high school kid who needed a car to get to work and school. Her Dad’s pockets were as flat as ours, and he didn’t want her to get into trouble, zooming around town with her friends. The Rabbit, which zoomed nowhere, seemed the perfect solution. It was cheap, running, body shopped, and all it’s dealer checkups had been faithfully performed. The tall stack of paper in the "Rabbit" file documented this. To the buyer, it seemed a good solution. My husband stood in the driveway and watched the kid stall it twice and then finally manage to drive it off. I could feel his sorrow.

There was a time of mourning for him, letting the car-with-a-curse go. He kept up with our old Rabbit. He took to driving through the back streets so he could see his old “Thunder Bunny.” It looked fine, now decorated with a few rock group decals, parked on a street of red brick factory houses.

It was some two years later when the final brown Rabbit story came to us. My husband began with a funereal air. His workmate had gone on vacation to the Jersey shore, taking an elderly van and his daughter’s even more elderly Rabbit, to carry a host of teenagers and the mountains of stuff with which this kind of vacationing armada moves.

The day they had to leave their beach rental, the van totally died. The Rabbit’s starter motor had been in the process of going, too, but once they got it fired with a neighbor’s push, they figured they’d give it a try. Work and other obligations were clamoring at home.

With five people and whatever else could be stuffed under foot, filling the hatch to the roof, they started home, across sweltering summer ‘Jersey. What’s more, by never turning the engine off, they got there, too.

However, the next day, the old Rabbit was dead as a stone, frozen solid. It would have cost more than what they’d paid us to get it fixed. The 19-year-old VW was consigned to our trustworthy dealer over in Lebanon. He’s a guy who takes good care of us, even if we are po’ folks and not buying a Toureg. He bought the remains of our faithful car for parts.

It was all too much like those stories of the horse which carries you safely through hostile Indian Territory, then, having given his all, drops dead, like Little Black in that tear-jerking John Wayne flick. On the day I listened to the Brown Rabbit’s elegy, I felt I'd judged the poor car harshly.

That old brown Rabbit had--after all--been a good servant. Now that she's gone, her memory has a kind of golden glow around it, like that of some WW2 trusty, ever-ready jeep.
    Thunder Bunny lives!