for JAVA Magazine
January, 2011
All is not as it seems with Walter, billed with only a slight wink as "The World's Largest VW Bus". Already gaining local fame as a show-stopper at parades and festivals, the status of this four-wheeled colossus as a rolling entertainment venue, minor engineering marvel and art piece is immediately evident.
And yet, even when housed out of public sight and with his engine off, Walter is always busy. For a small but growing number of people, this road-worthy piece of heavy equipment is ardently at work as a metaphor, a social experiment and, unlikely as it may sound, a spiritual leader.
Yes, really.
No one from Walter's previous incarnation could have guessed he'd someday reach such an exalted place. Long before people around Walter began addressing him in personal terms, as they do now, the 1963 Walter CF model crash truck was a definite it. Essentially a 10-ton fire truck, it first served at Luke Air Force base, where it sat at the ready in case of a plane crash.
In time, the Air Force sold the truck to the New River Fire Department, who used it until it became unreliable and they could presumably afford a more modern fire truck. New River sold it, cheap, to a man named Don, who had a collection of old, cool, vehicles sitting overlooking the town of Jerome.
And for five years, Jerome is where the 1963 Walter CF model crash truck, with a broken fly wheel and numerous other decrepitudes, sat, waiting for time and the elements to bring eventual ruin. People who spied it and the other vehicles sitting on the hill above the Gold King mine were free to climb on and in it. Barring an earthquake, almost no one could imagine the truck actually moving again.
The fateful exception to this was Dr. Kirk Strawn, a Valley doctor and entrepreneur. Kirk and some friends had driven his own customized Volkswagen bus to the Jerome Jamboree, an annual event held by the Arizona Bus Club.
"We'd gone up the mountain to see some of the old relics, most of whom were just junk and would never move...and there was Walter sitting there...and we said, 'this is the biggest (bleep)ing Volkswagen bus', cause he had these huge tires, short wheel base, and he looked like a bus, basically, but on a 2-1 scale", recalls Strawn.
Kirk's vision for the vehicle didn't stop there. During his and his friends' time at the Jerome Jamboree, the group imagined not only Walter's new look, but also his next mission. "I'd just learned about Burning Man and how they have these mutant vehicles. I'd never been there, but I wanted to go. He was a fire truck, so we knew he had water tanks with him...and we got the idea that if we misted at Burning Man, maybe it would attract the naked people."
Ah sex, creator of life and ten ton mutant party vehicles.
Burning Man is a gathering of thousands of like-minded people on a dry lake bed in Nevada, held annually on the week leading up to Labor Day. During the event, participants party heartily, share and share alike (outright commerce is nearly non-existent) and learn to live with their fellow revelers. The tenets of the event are radical self-expression, radical self-reliance, communal effort and immediacy. The idea is to slough off the shackles of the outside world for a week, have fun and get along with as few rules as possible.
A fundamental part of the Burning Man experience is randomness. With no agenda, the party goes where the party goes.
Kirk eventually traded his VW camper for the crash truck, which was trailered and transported to the Valley. Over the next few years, he attracted a cadre of artists and technicians to the project and Walter as we now know him took shape. Those involved refer to themselves as members of "Tribe Walter."
In 2009, Kirk's original plan to take Walter to Burning Man was finally realized, to his own delight and that of the sweaty, dust-encrusted celebrants. Walter arrived with new water tanks hooked to an array of spray nozzles to mist the crowd below, a bamboo dance floor on his upper deck, a 15,000 watt sound system driving fifty speakers, a laser array, and over 50k led lights.
The least discerning of readers will doubtless have noticed that Walter has no real connection to the Volkswagen Company, and yet Kirk insists that Walter is truly a VW bus in every way except origin. "When the VW bus came to the U.S., what it stood for was freedom. For the first time, it was easy for people without a lot of money to be anywhere in the country they wanted...you could sleep wherever you wanted and be freaky. Walter has that same spirit."
Back in the Valley, Walter spends his down time at the Walter Dome. Located at the Ponderosa Lumber facility on Thomas Road in Scottsdale, the Walter Dome has space for Walter and a couple hundred of his closest friends, and features a zen garden, performance stage, and wet bar. Future plans may include renting the Dome out for special events, though for now it's for tribal use only.
As Walter was being transformed, so, too, was Kirk's understanding of who Walter was and what he could achieve. The creativity and enthusiasm brought to the project by the tribe of electricians, artists, mechanics, and fabricators demonstrated the power of a diverse community who shared a common goal. Although Kirk was essentially bankrolling the endeavor, he felt he wasn't the one in the driver's seat. "The inertia of creation has just not stopped since day one", he reflects, enthusiastically. "I have no idea how the ideas have come to get us where we are now... about 100 people have had some significant role in the creation of this vehicle and every single person who's been involved has directed it in some way. There's no question it's taken on a life of its own".
As James Vito Palazzolo, tribe member and spokesman puts it, "Randomness is a big generator of the energy around here, and we just focus it." Very Burning Man, man. Ken Lemoine, who is bringing his decades of down-to-Earth business prowess to the project lifts the conversation to a still higher plane when he explains, "Walter's really the one in charge. We go where Walter wants to go." Everyone agrees.
And Walter is a very ambitious fellow. In addition to his slate of appearances, which the past month alone has included the Electric Light Parade and the Fiesta Bowl Parade, Walter has directed his tribe of followers to run a machine shop, and convert another part of the Ponderosa facility into a co-op micro-brewery. Yet another endeavor, the Walter Oil Company, will involve the collection of vegetable oil and its conversion to bio-fuel.
The trajectory of the Walter project has echoed that of Burning man in that both have found the need to somewhat temper their respective exercises in randomness and collective will with some practicalities of the outside world. In the case of Burning Man, this has meant the formulation of a small bureaucracy to handle logistics and finances, as well as a growing list of rules and regulations for attendees. For Walter, who has expensive appetites, this has meant finding ways to manage liability issues and generate revenue - not exactly the warm fuzzy part of anyone's utopian pipe dream.
"We're actually developing more structure just to make sure it's sustainable. We formed Walter LLC", says Kirk. "We're following an atypical business model in that the idea is really a NOT-for-profit business. We need to generate revenue to make the things the Walter project wants to do possible. None of us want to get rich off of Walter, but we want to provide a good place to work, where people can earn a fair wage and do good things - that's the general idea."
Kirk dismisses the notion that Walter's cache as a marketable curiosity will ever wane. "I'm not ready to accept that," he says. "The novelty will wear off unless you go with the personification thing, and everybody who meets Walter refers to him as 'Walter.' He has the ability to reinvent himself and not to fall into that trap of being just an object...he is a living, breathing thing."
"That's very much been a theme of the entire project, too, taking something that seemed old and worn out and giving it a new life. Not only Walter himself, but also the Walter Dome, which was kind of in disrepair before we converted it… recycling vegetable oil for use as fuel…all of it."
As for the scope of Walter's future reinvention, there is no hedging Kirk's sense of enthusiasm and earnestness on the topic. Changing Walter's propulsion system to a virtually emissions-free hydrogen power-plant is being researched, and Tribe Walter (and Kirk Strawn) has no lack of other ideas.
"In Europe, the way they're transporting very large things these days isn't on the roads, but by using a really OLD technology - blimps."
"I fully expect Walter to fly one day."
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