By Lauren McKeon

This is the way we heard it from a friend of a friend: If you go to Hay River, and take a left way out near the outer edges, you’ll reach the place VWs go to die, giving their parts up for other, still putt-putting busses. If your bus can make it without becoming its own tin tombstone, their graveyard is yours to pillage.

This was especially intriguing for Andrew and I (proud owners of a still-yet-to be-named green VW bus), as we’d lost our gas cap about 300 km earlier, and because we were hoping to pillage for other parts the bus had lost 30 years earlier. By the time we got to the Hay River Visitor’s Centre, the bus was roasting and the front end was splattered a rust-red with dead bugs. But the two kids working there gave us hope: Yes we know where it is. Yes, you were told right. Andrew and I – plus two friends visiting from Toronto – followed a Corvette down the road to the graveyard and there they were: glorious VWs, of age indiscriminate, sky-blue, yellow and ... OK.

Really there were only about two-and-a-half busses. The half could have been anything, really, but I think maybe it was a bus. And they were on someone’s front yard. Not for us. Not even with gas caps. Andrew knocked on the door anyway – a dull, quiet sound compared to the “we’re here” announcement the bus’s backfiring engine makes – but no one came. Andrew left a note. Something like: Dear fellow V-dub owners. We’ll gladly take these dead busses off your hands. P.S. there are more of us in Yellowknife. (It’s true. New to town are a yellow one and orange one, called “Orange Crush”, about as old as ours.)

We bought the gas cap at Canadian Tire.