While there is nothing novel about a driver becoming emotionally attached to their vehicle, those feelings of affection are rarely shared by others.
A blue Volkswagen camper van that improbably survived the Pacific Palisades fire, inexplicably remaining unscathed amid the charred remains of burned-out homes, is the exception that proves the rule.
The survival of the retro van has been widely hailed as a miracle and a symbol of hope since a picture emerged of it sitting defiantly on a road in the affluent Los Angeles neighbourhood, seemingly oblivious to the surrounding devastation.
‘There is magic in that van,’ said Preston Martin, a 24-year-old surfboard maker who owned the vehicle until last summer and slept in it for a year while at college.
‘It makes no sense why this happened. It should have been toasted, but here we are. It’s so cool that it’s become this, like, beacon of hope.
‘Everything around it was toasted, just destroyed. And then here’s this bright blue shiny van, sitting right there.’
With the area’s twisting roads and hollowed out homes closed to the public, neither Martin nor Megan Krystle Weinraub, the 29-year-old friend and business associate to whom he sold the van last summer, were initially able to get near the vehicle.
On Thursday, however, a CNN news crew gained access to take a closer look at the van – images of which went viral in the aftermath of the fires – for the first time.
In an extraordinary picture that rapidly went viral, a blue Volkswagen camper van sits among burned out homes in the beach city of Malibu, in Los Angeles county
Preston Martin, a 24-year-old surfboard maker, the van’s previous owner, purchased the vehicle while at college and slept in it in his senior year. ‘There is magic in that van,’ he said
Last summer, Megan Krystle Weinraub, 29, purchased the van from Martin, who is a friend and business associate. The pair used it for a surfing trip just two days before the fire broke out
Aside from a sprinkling of soot and ash, and some scorch marks along the side, the vintage vehicle was in remarkably good condition, with its tyres and bodywork intact.
‘I just can’t believe that my bus is the only thing that survived on the street that I walk by with my dog every single day,’ said Weinraub, who parked the van on the hill two days before a sea of flames enveloped the area.
‘When I got [the original photograph] sent to me, I just freaked out.’
When Martin purchased the 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 on an impulse in his junior year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied mechanical engineering, his mother, Tracey, was not happy.
But while she felt he had wasted his money, Martin countered that it would save him the cost of rent in his senior year, when he planned to live in it.
He was true to his word and in time Tracey, too, fell under the vehicle’s spell, even making curtains for the windows.
The retro Volkswagen bus remains parked in the Pacific Palisades area for now
When Martin contacted her to say the van had survived, she was reduced to tears. ‘I’ve never cried for a car before,’ she told her son.
‘Whenever I would drive this bus, it was always a good day,’ Martin told CNN’s Erin Burnett. ‘I got to live this and surf and go to class.
‘We thought it was gone, we really didn’t think we’d ever see this thing again… It’s amazing.’
Weinraub, whose nearby home also survived the devastation, nicknamed the van Azul – Spanish for ‘blue’ – after purchasing it.
It remains just that and, once the paint has been restored and the engine checked, Martin said he hopes to help Weinraub get it back on the road.
