Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

     At one stretch in the long desolate road we see an isolated grocery store. Inside, in back, we find a place to sit on some packing cases and drink canned beer.
     The fatigue and backache are getting to me now. I push the packing case over to a post and lean on that.
     Chris’s expression shows he is really settling into something bad. This has been a long hard day. I told Sylvia way back in Minnesota that we could expect a slump in spirits like this on the second or third day and now it’s here. Minnesota—when was that?
     A woman, badly drunk, is buying beer for some man she’s got outside in a car. She can’t make up her mind what brand to buy and the wife of the owner waiting on her is getting mad. She still can’t decide, but then sees us, and weaves over and asks if we own the motorcycles. We nod yes. Then she wants a ride on one. I move back and let John handle this.
     He puts her off graciously, but she comes back again and again, offering him a dollar for a ride. I make some jokes about it, but they’re not funny and just add to the depression. We get out and back into the brown hills and heat again.
     By the time we reach Lemmon we are really aching tired. At a bar we hear about a campground to the south. John wants to camp in a park in the middle of Lemmon, a comment that sounds strange and angers Chris greatly.
     I’m more tired now than I can remember having been in a long time. The others too. But we drag ourselves through a supermarket, pick up whatever groceries come to mind and with some difficulty pack them onto the cycles. The sun is so far down we’re running out of light. It’ll be dark in an hour. We can’t seem to get moving. I wonder, are we dawdling, or what?
     “C’mon, Chris, let’s go,” I say.
     “Don’t holler at me. I’m ready.”
     We drive down a country road from Lemmon, exhausted, for what seems a long, long time, but can’t be too long because the sun is still above the horizon. The campsite is deserted. Good. But there is less than a half-hour of sun and no energy left. This is the hardest now.
     I try to get unpacked as fast as possible but am so stupid with exhaustion I just set everything by the camp road without seeing what a bad spot it is. Then I see it is too windy. This is a High Plains wind. It is semidesert here, everything burned up and dry except for a lake, a large reservoir of some sort below us. The wind blows from the horizon across the lake and hits us with sharp gusts. It is already chilly. There are some scrubby pines back from the road about twenty yards and I ask Chris to move the stuff over there.
     He doesn’t do it. He wanders off down to the reservoir. I carry the gear over by myself.
     I see between trips that Sylvia is making a real effort at setting things up for cooking, but she’s as tired as I am.
     The sun goes down.
     John has gathered wood but it’s too big and the wind is so gusty it’s hard to start. It needs to be splintered into kindling. I go back over the scrub pines, hunt around through the twilight for the machete, but it’s already so dark in the pines I can’t find it. I need the flashlight. I look for it, but it’s too dark to find that either.
     I go back and start up the cycle and ride it back over to shine the headlight on the stuff so that I can find the flashlight. I look through all the stuff item by item to find the flashlight. It takes a long time to realize I don’t need the flashlight, I need the machete, which is in plain sight. By the time I get it back John has got the fire going. I use the machete to hack up some of the larger pieces of wood.
     Chris reappears. He’s got the flashlight!
     “When are we going to eat? he complains.
     “We’re getting it fixed as fast as possible,” I tell him. “Leave the flashlight here.”
     He disappears again, taking the flashlight with him.
     The wind blows the fire so hard it doesn’t reach up to cook the steaks. We try to fix up a shelter from the wind using large stones from the road, but it’s too dark to see what we’re doing. We bring both cycles over and catch the scene in a crossbeam of headlights. Peculiar light. Bits of ash blowing up from the fire suddenly glow bright white in it, then disappear in the wind.
     BANG! There’s a loud explosion behind us. Then I hear Chris giggling.
     Sylvia is upset.
     “I found some firecrackers,” Chris says.
     I catch my anger in time and say to him, coldly, “It’s time to eat now.”
     “I need some matches,” he says.
     “Sit down and eat.”
     “Give me some matches first.”
     “Sit down and eat.”
     He sits down and I try to eat the steak with my Army mess knife, but it is too tough, and so I get out a hunting knife and use it instead. The light from the motorcycle headlight is full upon me so that the knife, when it goes down into the mess gear, is in full shadow and I can’t see where it’s going.
     Chris says he can’t cut his either and I pass my knife to him. While reaching for it he dumps everything onto the tarp.
     No one says a word.
     I’m not angry that he spilled it. I’m angry that now the tarp’s going to be greasy the rest of the trip.
     “Is there any more?” he asks.
     “Eat that,” I say. “It just fell on the tarp.”
     “It’s too dirty,” he says.
     “Well, that’s all there is.”
     A wave of depression hits. I just want to go to sleep now. But he’s angry and I expect we’re going to have one of his little scenes. I wait for it and pretty soon it starts.
     “I don’t like the taste of this,” he says.
     “Yes, that’s rough, Chris.”
     “I don’t like any of this. I don’t like this camping at all.”
     “It was your idea,” Sylvia says. “You’re the one who wanted to go camping.”
     She shouldn’t say that, but there’s no way she can know. You take his bait and he’ll feed you another one, and then another, and another until you finally hit him, which is what he really wants.
     “I don’t care,” he says.
     “Well, you ought to,” she says.
     “Well, I don’t.”
     An explosion point is very near. Sylvia and John look at me but I remain deadpan. I’m sorry about this but there’s nothing I can do right now. Any argument will just worsen things.
     “I’m not hungry,” Chris says.
     No one answers.
     “My stomach hurts,” he says.
     The explosion is avoided when Chris turns and walks away in the darkness.
     We finish eating. I help Sylvia clean up, and then we sit around for a while. We turn the cycle lights off to conserve the batteries and because the light from them is ugly anyway. The wind has died down some and there is a little light from the fire. After a while my eyes become accustomed to it. The food and anger have taken off some of the sleepiness. Chris doesn’t return.
     “Do you suppose he’s just punishing?” Sylvia asks.
     “I suppose,” I say, “although it doesn’t sound quite right.” I think about it and add, “That’s a child-psychology term—a context I dislike. Let’s just say he’s being a complete bastard.”
     John laughs a little.
     “Anyway,” I say, “it was a good supper. I’m sorry he had to act up like this.”
     “Oh, that’s all right,” John says. “I’m just sorry he won’t get anything to eat.”
     “It won’t hurt him.”
     “You don’t suppose he’ll get lost out there.”
     “No, he’ll holler if he is.”
     Now that he has gone and we have nothing to do I become more aware of the space all around us. There is not a sound anywhere. Lone prairie.
     Sylvia says, “do you suppose he really has stomach pains?”
     “Yes,” I say, somewhat dogmatically. I’m sorry to see the subject continued but they deserve a better explanation than they’re getting. They probably sense that there’s more to it than they’ve heard. “I’m sure he does,” I finally say. “He’s been examined a half-dozen times for it. Once it was so bad we thought it was appendicitis…. I remember we were on a vacation up north. I’d just finished getting out an engineering proposal for a five-million-dollar contract that just about did me in. That’s a whole other world. No time and no patience and six hundred pages of information to get out the door in one week and I was about ready to kill three different people and we thought we’d better head for the woods for a while.
     “I can hardly remember what part of the woods we were in. Head just spinning with engineering data, and anyway Chris was just screaming. We couldn’t touch him, until I finally saw I was going to have to pick him up fast and get him to the hospital, and where that was I’ll never remember, but they found nothing.”
     “Nothing?”
     “No. But it happened again on other occasions too.”
     “Don’t they have any idea?” Sylvia asks.
     “This spring they diagnosed it as the beginning symptoms of mental illness.”
     “What?” John says.
     It’s too dark to see Sylvia or John now or even the outlines of the hills. I listen for sounds in the distance, but hear none. I don’t know what to answer and so say nothing.
     When I look hard I can make out stars overhead but the fire in front of us makes it hard to see them. The night all around is thick and obscure. My cigarette is down to my fingers and I put it out.
     “I didn’t know that,” Sylvia’s voice says. All traces of anger are gone. “We wondered why you brought him instead of your wife,” she says. “I’m glad you told us.”
     John shoves some of the unburned ends of the wood into the fire.
     Sylvia says, “What do you suppose the cause is?”
     John’s voice rasps, as if to cut it off, but I answer, “I don’t know. Causes and effects don’t seem to fit. Causes and effects are a result of thought. I would think mental illness comes before thought.” This doesn’t make sense to them, I’m sure. It doesn’t make much sense to me and I’m too tired to try to think it out and give it up.
     “What do the psychiatrists think?” John asks.
     “Nothing. I stopped it.”
     “Stopped it?”
     “Yes.”
     “Is that good?”
     “I don’t know. There’s no rational reason I can think of for saying it’s not good. Just a mental block of my own. I think about it and all the good reasons for it and make plans for an appointment and even look for the phone number and then the block hits, and it’s just like a door slammed shut.”
     “That doesn’t sound right.”
     “No one else thinks so either. I suppose I can’t hold out forever.”
     “But why?” Sylvia asks.
     “I don’t know why… it’s just that… I don’t know… they’re not kin“… Surprising word, I think to myself never used it before. Not of kin… sounds like hillbilly talk… not of a kind… same root… kindness, too… they can’t have real kindness toward him, they’re not his kin… That’s exactly the feeling.
     Old word, so ancient it’s almost drowned out. What a change through the centuries. Now anybody can be “kind.” And everybody’s supposed to be. Except that long ago it was something you were born into and couldn’t help. Now it’s just a faked-up attitude half the time, like teachers the first day of class. But what do they really know about kindness who are not kin?
     It goes over and over again through my thoughts… mein Kind—my child. There it is in another language Mein Kinder… “Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind.”
     Strange feeling from that.
     “What are you thinking about?” Sylvia asks.
     “An old poem, by Goethe. It must be two hundred years old. I had to learn it a long time ago. I don’t know why I should remember it now, except…” The strange feeling comes back.
     “How does it go?” Sylvia asks.
     I try to recall. “A man is riding along a beach at night, through the wind. It’s a father, with his son, whom he holds fast in his arm. He asks his son why he looks so pale, and the son replies, ‘Father, don’t you see the ghost?’ The father tried to reassure the boy it’s only a bank of fog along the beach that he sees and only the rustling of the leaves in the wind that he hears but the son keeps saying it is the ghost and the father rides harder and harder through the night.”
     “How does it end?”
     “In failure… death of the child. The ghost wins.”
     The wind blows light up from the coals and I see Sylvia look at me startled.
     “But that’s another land and another time,” I say. “Here life is the end and ghosts have no meaning. I believe that. I believe in all this too,” I say, looking out at the darkened prairie, “although I’m not sure of what it all means yet… I’m not sure of much of anything these days. Maybe that’s why I talk so much.”
     The coals die lower and lower. We smoke our cigarettes. Chris is off somewhere in the darkness but I’m not going to shag after him. John is carefully silent and Sylvia is silent and suddenly we are all separate, all alone in our private universes, and there is no communication among us. We douse the fire and go back to the sleeping bags in the pines.
     I discover that this one tiny refuge of scrub pines where I have put the sleeping bags is also the refuge from the wind of millions of mosquitoes up from the reservoir. The mosquito repellent doesn’t stop them at all. I crawl deep into the sleeping bag and make one little hole for breathing. I am almost asleep when Chris finally shows up.
     “There’s a great big sandpile over there,” he says, crunching around on the pine needles.
     “Yes,” I say. “Get to sleep.”
     “You should see it. Will you come and see it tomorrow?”
     “We won’t have time.”
     “Can I play over there tomorrow morning?”
     “Yes.”
     He makes interminable noises getting undressed and into the sleeping bag. He is in it. Then he rolls around. Then he is silent, and then rolls some more. Then he says, “Dad?”
     “What?”
     “What was it like when you were a kid?”
     “Go to sleep, Chris!” There are limits to what you can listen to.
     Later I hear a sharp inhaling of phlegm that tells me he has been crying, and though I’m exhausted, I don’t sleep. A few words of consolation might have helped there. He was trying to be friendly. But the words aren’t forthcoming for some reason. Consoling words are more for strangers, for hospitals, not kin. Little emotional Band-Aids like that aren’t what he needs or what’s sought… I don’t know what he needs, or what’s sought.
     A gibbous moon comes up from the horizon beyond the pines, and by its slow, patient arc across the sky I measure hour after hour of semisleep. Too much fatigue. The moon and strange dreams and sounds of mosquitoes and odd fragments of memory become jumbled and mixed in an unreal lost landscape in which the moon is shining and yet there is a bank of fog and I am riding a horse and Chris is with me and the horse jumps over a small stream that runs through the sand toward the ocean somewhere beyond. And then that is broken…. And then it reappears.
     And in the fog there appears an intimation of a figure. It disappears when I look at it directly, but then reappears in the corner of my vision when I turn my glance. I am about to say something, to call to it, to recognize it, but then do not, knowing that to recognize it by any gesture or action is to give it a reality which it must not have. But it is a figure I recognize even though I do not let on. It is Phaedrus.
     Evil spirit. Insane. from a world without life or death.
     The figure fades and I hold panic down… tight… not rushing it… just letting it sink in… not believing it, not disbelieving it… but the hair crawls slowly on the back of my skull… he is calling Chris, is that it?… Yes?…

Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

     The flatness of the prairie disappears and a deep undulation of the earth begins. Fences are rarer, and the greenness has become paler… all signs that we approach the High Plains.
     We stop for gas at Hague and ask if there is any way to get across the Missouri between Bismarck and and Mobridge. The attendant doesn’t know of any. It is hot now, and John and Sylvia go somewhere to get their long underwear off. The motorcycle gets a change of oil and chain lubrication. Chris watches everything I do but with some impatience. Not a good sign.
     “My eyes hurt,” he says.
     “From what?”
     “From the wind.”
     “We’ll look for some goggles.”
     All of us go in a shop for coffee and rolls. Everything is different except one another, so we look around rather than talk, catching fragments of conversation among people who seem to know each other and are glancing at us because we’re new. Afterward, down the street, I find a thermometer for storage in the saddlebags and some plastic goggles for Chris.
     The hardware man doesn’t know any short route across the Missouri either. John and I study the map. I had hoped we might find an unofficial ferryboat crossing or footbridge or something in the ninety-mile stretch, but evidently there isn’t any because there’s not much to get to on the other side. It’s all Indian reservation. We decide to head south to Mobridge and cross there.
     The road south is awful. Choppy, narrow, bumpy concrete with a bad head wind, going into the sun and big semis going the other way. These roller-coaster hills speed them up on the down side and slow them up on the up side and prevent our seeing very far ahead, making passing nervewracking. The first one gave me a scare because I wasn’t ready for it. Now I hold tight and brace for them. No danger. Just a shock wave that hits you. It is hotter and dryer.
     At Herreid John disappears for a drink while Sylvia and Chris and I find some shade in a park and try to rest. It isn’t restful. A change has taken place and I don’t know quite what it is. The streets of this town are broad, much broader than they need be, and there is a pallor of dust in the air. Empty lots here and there between the buildings have weeds growing in them. The sheet metal equipment sheds and water tower are like those of previous towns but more spread out. Everything is more run-down and mechanical-looking, sort of randomly located. Gradually I see what it is. Nobody is concerned anymore about tidily conserving space. The land isn’t valuable anymore. We are in a Western town.
     We have lunch of hamburgers and malts at an A & W place in Mobridge, cruise down a heavily trafficked main street and then there it is, at the bottom of the hill, the Missouri. All that moving water is strange, banked by grass hills that hardly get any water at all. I turn around and glance at Chris but he doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in it.
     We coast down the hill, clunk onto the bridge and across we go, watching the river through the girders moving by rhythmically, and then we are on the other side.
     We climb a long, long hill into another kind of country.
     The fences are really all gone now. No brush, no trees. The sweep of the hills is so great John’s motorcycle looks like an ant up ahead moving through the green slopes. Above the slopes outcroppings of rocks stand out overhead at the tops of the bluffs.
     It all has a natural tidiness. If it were abandoned land there would be a chewed-up, scruffy look, with chunks of old foundation concrete, scraps of painted sheet metal and wire, weeds that had gotten in where the sod was broken up for whatever little enterprise was attempted. None of that here. Not kept up, just never messed up in the first place. It’s just the way it always must have been. Reservation land.
     There’s no friendly motorcycle mechanic on the other side of those rocks and I’m wondering if we’re ready for this. If anything goes wrong now we’re in real trouble.
     I check the engine temperature with my hand. It’s reassuringly cool. I put in the clutch and let it coast for a second in order to hear it idling. Something sounds funny and I do it again. It takes me a while to figure out that it’s not the engine at all. There’s an echo from the bluff ahead that lingers after the throttle is closed. Funny. I do this two or three times. Chris wonders what’s wrong and I have him listen to the echo. No comment from him.
     This old engine has a nickels-and-dimes sound to it. As if there were a lot of loose change flying around inside. Sounds awful, but it’s just normal valve clatter. Once you get used to that sound and learn to expect it, you automatically hear any difference. If you don’t hear any, that’s good.
     I tried to get John interested in that sound once but it was hopeless. All he heard was noise and all he saw was the machine and me with greasy tools in my hands, nothing else. That didn’t work.
     He didn’t really see what was going on and was not interested enough to find out. He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are. That’s quite important, that he sees things this way. It took me a long time to see this difference and it’s important for the Chautauqua that I make this difference clear.
     I was so baffled by his refusal even to think about any mechanical subject I kept searching for ways to clue him to the whole thing but didn’t know where to start.
     I thought I would wait until something went wrong with his machine and then I would help him fix it and that way get him into it, but I goofed that one myself because I didn’t understand this difference in the way he looked at things.
     His handlebars had started flipping. Not badly, he said, just a little when you shoved hard on them. I warned him not to use his adjustable wrench on the tightening nuts. It was likely to damage the chrome and start small rust spots. He agreed to use my metric sockets and box-ends.
     When he brought his motorcycle over I got my wrenches out but then noticed that no amount of tightening would stop the slippage, because the ends of the collars were pinched shut.
     “You’re going to have to shim those out,” I said.
     “What’s shim?”
     “It’s a thin, flat strip of metal. You just slip it around the handlebar under the collar there and it will open up the collar to where you can tighten it again. You use shims like that to make adjustments in all kinds of machines.”
     “Oh,” he said. He was getting interested. “Good. Where do you buy them?”
     “I’ve got some right here,” I said gleefully, holding up a can of beer in my hand.
     He didn’t understand for a moment. Then he said, “What, the can?”
     “Sure,” I said, “best shim stock in the world.”
     I thought this was pretty clever myself. Save him a trip to God knows where to get shim stock. Save him time. Save him money.
     But to my surprise he didn’t see the cleverness of this at all. In fact he got noticeably haughty about the whole thing. Pretty soon he was dodging and filling with all kinds of excuses and, before I realized what his real attitude was, we had decided not to fix the handlebars after all.
     As far as I know those handlebars are still loose. And I believe now that he was actually offended at the time. I had had the nerve to propose repair of his new eighteen-hundred-dollar BMW, the pride of a half-century of German mechanical finesse, with a piece of old beer can!
     Ach, du lieber!
     Since then we have had very few conversations about motorcycle maintenance. None, now that I think of it.
     You push it any further and suddenly you are angry, without knowing why.
     I should say, to explain this, that beer-can aluminum is soft and sticky, as metals go. Perfect for the application. Aluminum doesn’t oxidize in wet weather—or, more precisely, it always has a thin layer of oxide that prevents any further oxidation. Also perfect.
     In other words, any true German mechanic, with a half-century of mechanical finesse behind him, would have concluded that this particular solution to this particular technical problem was perfect.
     For a while I thought what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck, it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it.
     That Krupp’s-private-shim fantasy gratified me for a while, but then it wore off and I saw it was just being vindictive. In its place grew that old feeling I’ve talked about before, a feeling that there’s something bigger involved than is apparent on the surface. You follow these little discrepancies long enough and they sometimes open up into huge revelations. There was just a feeling on my part that this was something a little bigger than I wanted to take on without thinking about it, and I turned instead to my usual habit of trying to extract causes and effects to see what was involved that could possibly lead to such an impasse between John’s view of that lovely shim and my own. This comes up all the time in mechanical work. A hang-up. You just sit and stare and think, and search randomly for new information, and go away and come back again, and after a while the unseen factors start to emerge.
     What emerged in vague form at first and then in sharper outline was the explanation that I had been seeing that shim in a kind of intellectual, rational, cerebral way in which the scientific properties of the metal were all that counted. John was going at it immediately and intuitively, grooving on it. I was going at it in terms of underlying form. He was going at it in terms of immediate appearance. I was seeing what the shim meant. He was seeing what the shim was. That’s how I arrived at that distinction. And when you see what the shim is, in this case, it’s depressing. Who likes to think of a beautiful precision machine fixed with an old hunk of junk?
     I guess I forgot to mention John is a musician, a drummer, who works with groups all over town and makes a pretty fair income from it. I suppose he just thinks about everything the way he thinks about drumming—which is to say he doesn’t really think about it at all. He just does it. Is with it. He just responded to fixing his motorcycle with a beer can the way he would respond to someone dragging the beat while he was playing. It just did a big thud with him and that was it. He didn’t want any part of it.
     At first this difference seemed fairly minor, but then it grew… and grew… and grew… until I began to see why I missed it. Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge. We were both looking at the same thing, seeing the same thing, talking about the same thing, thinking about the same thing, except he was looking, seeing, talking and thinking from a completely different dimension.
     He really does care about technology. It’s just that in this other dimension he gets all screwed up and is rebuffed by it. It just won’t swing for him. He tries to swing it without any rational premeditation and botches it and botches it and botches it and after so many botches gives up and just kind of puts a blanket curse on that whole nuts-and-bolts scene. He will not or cannot believe there is anything in this world for which grooving is not the way to go.
     That’s the dimension he’s in. The groovy dimension. I’m being awfully square talking about all this mechanical stuff all the time. It’s all just parts and relationships and analyses and syntheses and figuring things out and it isn’t really here. It’s somewhere else, which thinks it’s here, but’s a million miles away. This is what it’s all about. He’s on this dimensional difference which underlay much of the cultural changes of the sixties, I think, and is still in the process of reshaping our whole national outlook on things. The “generation gap” has been a result of it. The names “beat” and “hip” grew out of it. Now it’s become apparent that this dimension isn’t a fad that’s going to go away next year or the year after. It’s here to stay because it’s a very serious and important way of looking at things that looks incompatible with reason and order and responsibility but actually is not. Now we are down to the root of things.
     My legs have become so stiff they are aching. I hold them out one at a time and turn my foot as far to the left and to the right as it will go to stretch the leg. It helps, but then the other muscles get tired from holding the legs out.

What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. The world as you see it right here, right now, is reality, regardless of what the scientists say it might be. That’s the way John sees it. But the world as revealed by its scientific discoveries is also reality, regardless of how it may appear, and people in John’s dimension are going to have to do more than just ignore it if they want to hang on to their vision of reality. John will discover this if his points burn out.
     That’s really why he got upset that day when he couldn’t get his engine started. It was an intrusion on his reality. It just blew a hole right through his whole groovy way of looking at things and he would not face up to it because it seemed to threaten his whole life style. In a way he was experiencing the same sort of anger scientific people have sometimes about abstract art, or at least used to have. That didn’t fit their lifestyle either.
     What you’ve got here, really, are two realities, one of immediate artistic appearance and one of underlying scientific explanation, and they don’t match and they don’t fit and they don’t really have much of anything to do with one another. That’s quite a situation. You might say there’s a little problem here.

Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

     By the time we are out of the Red River Valley the storm clouds are everywhere and almost upon us.
     John and I have discussed the situation in Breckenridge and decided to keep going until we have to stop.
     That shouldn’t be long now. The sun is gone, the wind is blowing cold, and a wall of differing shades of grey looms around us.
     It seems huge, overpowering. The prairie here is huge but above it the hugeness of this ominous grey mass ready to descend is frightening. We are traveling at its mercy now. When and where it will come is nothing we can control. All we can do is watch it move in closer and closer.
     Where the darkest grey has come down to the ground, a town that was seen earlier, some small buildings and a water tower, has disappeared. It will be on us soon now. I don’t see any towns ahead and we are just going to have to run for it.
     I pull up alongside John and throw my hand ahead in a “Speed up!” gesture. He nods and opens up. I let him get ahead a little, then pick up to his speed. The engine responds beautifully—seventy… eighty… eight-five… we are really feeling the wind now and I drop my head to cut down the resistance… ninety. The speedometer needle swings back and forth but the tach reads a steady nine thousand… about ninety-five miles an hour… and we hold this speed… moving. Too fast to focus on the shoulder of the road now… I reach forward and flip the headlight switch just for safety. But it is needed anyway. It is getting very dark.
     We whizz through the flat open land, not a car anywhere, hardly a tree, but the road is smooth and clean and the engine now has a “packed,” high rpm sound that says it’s right on. It gets darker and darker.
     A flash and Ka-wham! of thunder, one right on top of the other. That shook me, and Chris has got his head against my back now. A few warning drops of rain… at this speed they are like needles. A second flash-WHAM and everything brilliant… and then in the brilliance of the next flash that farmhouse… that windmill… oh, my God, he’s been here!… throttle off… this is his road… a fence and trees… and the speed drops to seventy, then sixty, then fifty-five and I hold it there.
     “Why are we slowing down?” Chris shouts.
     “Too fast!”
     “No, it isn’t!”
     I nod yes.
     The house and water tower have gone by and then a small drainage ditch appears and a crossroad leading off to the horizon. Yes… that’s right, I think. That’s exactly right.
     “They’re way ahead of us!” Chris hollers. “Speed up!”
     I turn my head from side to side.
     “Why not?” he hollers.
     “Not safe!”
     “They’re gone!”
     “They’ll wait!”
     “Speed up!”
     “No.” I shake my head. It’s just a feeling. On a cycle you trust them and we stay at fifty-five.
     The first rain begins now but up ahead I see the lights of a town… I knew it would be there.

     When we arrive John and Sylvia are there under the first tree by the road, waiting for us.
     “What happened to you?”
     “Slowed down.”
     “Well, we know that. Something wrong?”
     “No. Let’s get out of this rain.”
     John says there is a motel at the other end of town, but I tell him there’s a better one if you turn right, at a row of cottonwoods a few blocks down.
     We turn at the cottonwoods and travel a few blocks, and a small motel appears. Inside the office John looks around and says, “This is a good place. When were you here before?”
     “I don’t remember,” I say.
     “Then how did you know about this?”
     “Intuition.”
     He looks at Sylvia and shakes his head.
     Sylvia has been watching me silently for some time. She notices my hands are unsteady as I sign in. “You look awfully pale,” she says. “Did that lightning shake you up?”
     “No.”
     “You look like you’d seen a ghost.”
     John and Chris look at me and I turn away from them to the door. It is still raining hard, but we make a run for it to the rooms. The gear on the cycles is protected and we wait until the storm passes over before removing it.
     After the rain stops, the sky lightens a little. But from the motel courtyard, I see past the cottonwoods that a second darkness, that of night, is about to come on. We walk into town, have supper, and by the time we get back, the fatigue of the day is really on me. We rest, almost motionless, in the metal armchairs of the motel courtyard, slowly working down a pint of whiskey that John brought with some mix from the motel cooler. It goes down slowly and agreeably. A cool night wind rattles the leaves of the cottonwoods along the road.
     Chris wonders what we should do next. Nothing tires this kid. The newness and strangeness of the motel surroundings excite him and he wants us to sing songs as they did at camp.
     “We’re not very good at songs,” John says.
     “Let’s tell stories then,” Chris says. He thinks for a while. “Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night.”
     “You tell us some,” John says.
     And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven’t heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can’t remember any.
     After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
     “No,” I say.
     “Why not?”
     “Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.”
     The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter,” I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.”
     The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course,” I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too.”
     “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chris says.
     “I’m being kind of facetious.”
     Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don’t think it hurts him.
     “One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts.”
     “He was just spoofing you.”
     “No, he wasn’t. He said that when people haven’t been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes that.”
     “He was just spoofing you,” I repeat.
     “What’s his name?” Sylvia says.
     “Tom White Bear.”
     John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing.
     “Ohhh, Indian!” he says.
     I laugh. “I guess I’m going to have to take that back a little,” I say. “I was thinking of European ghosts.”
     “What’s the difference?”
     John roars with laughter. “He’s got you,” he says.
     I think a little and say, “Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I’m not saying is completely wrong. Science isn’t part of the Indian tradition.”
     “Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”
     He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”
     Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.
     “It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”
     John nods affirmatively and I continue.
     “My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”
     “What?”
     “Oh, the laws of physics and of logic… the number system… the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.”
     “They seem real to me,” John says.
     “I don’t get it,” says Chris.
     So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”
     “Of course.”
     “So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”
     John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
     “What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”
     “Sure.”
     “Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere—this law of gravity still existed?”
     Now John seems not so sure.
     “If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still ‘common sense’ to believe that it existed.”
     John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”
     “Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
     “And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”
     “Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
     “Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as ‘education.'”
     “You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?”
     “Sure.”
     “That’s absurd.”
     “You’ve heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.”
     John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”
     I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.
     “But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were already there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.
     “The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”
     They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”
     John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. “Where do you get all these ideas?” she asks.
     I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.
     After a while John says, “It’ll be good to see the mountains again.”
     “Yes, it will,” I agree. “One last drink to that!”
     We finish it and are off to our rooms.
     I see that Chris brushes his teeth, and let him get by with a promise that he’ll shower in the morning. I pull seniority and take the bed by the window. After the lights are out he says, “Now, tell me a ghost story.”
     “I just did, out there.”
     “I mean a real ghost story.”
     “That was the realest ghost story you’ll ever hear.”
     “You know what I mean. The other kind.”
     I try to think of some conventional ones. “I used to know so many of them when I was a kid, Chris, but they’re all forgotten,” I say. “It’s time to go to sleep. We’ve all got to get up early tomorrow.”
     Except for the wind through the screens of the motel window it is quiet. The thought of all that wind sweeping toward us across the open fields of the prairie is a tranquil one and I feel lulled by it.
     The wind rises and the falls, then rises and sighs, and falls again… from so many miles away.
     “Did you ever know a ghost?” Chris asks.
     I am half asleep. “Chris,” I say, “I knew a fellow once who spent all his whole life doing nothing but hunting for a ghost, and it was just a waste of time. So go to sleep.”
     I realize my mistake too late.
     “Did he find him?”
     “Yes, he found him, Chris.”
     I keep wishing Chris would just listen to the wind and not ask questions.
     “What did he do then?”
     “He thrashed him good.”
     “Then what?”
     “Then he became a ghost himself.” Somehow I had the thought this was going to put Chris to sleep, but it’s not and it’s just waking me up.
     “What is his name?”
     “No one you know.”
     “But what is it?”
     “It doesn’t matter.”
     “Well, what is it anyway?”
     “His name, Chris, since it doesn’t matter, is Phaedrus. It’s not a name you know.”
     “Did you see him on the motorcycle in the storm?”
     “What makes you say that?”
     “Sylvia said she thought you saw a ghost.”
     “That’s just an expression.”
     “Dad?”
     “This had better be the last question, Chris, or I’m going to become angry.”
     “I was just trying to say you sure don’t talk like anyone else.”
     “Yes, Chris, I know that,” I say. “It’s a problem. Now go to sleep.”
     “Good night, Dad.”
     “Good night.”
     A half hour later he is breathing sleepfully, and the wind is still strong as ever and I am wide-awake. There, out the window in the dark—this cold wind crossing the road into the trees, the leaves shimmering flecks of moonlight—there is no question about it, Phaedrus saw all of this. What he was doing here I have no idea. Why he came this way I will probably never know. But he has been here, steered us onto this strange road, has been with us all along. There is no escape.
     I wish I could say that I don’t know why he is here, but I’m afraid I must now confess that I do. The ideas, the things I was saying about science and ghosts, and even the idea this afternoon about caring and technology—they are not my own. I haven’t really had a new idea in years. They are stolen from him. And he has been watching. And that is why he is here.
     With that confession, I hope he will now allow me some sleep.
     Poor Chris. “Do you know any ghost stories?” he asked. I could have told him one but even the thought of that is frightening.
     I really must go to sleep.

Excerpt from the novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Parsig

     The road winds on and on… we stop for rests and lunch, exchange small talk, and settle down to the long ride. The beginning fatigue of afternoon balances the excitement of the first day and we move steadily, not fast, not slow.
     We have picked up a southwest side wind, and the cycle cants into the gusts, seemingly by itself, to counter their effect. Lately there’s been a sense of something peculiar about this road, apprehension about something, as if we were being watched or followed. But there is not a car anywhere ahead, and in the mirror are only John and Sylvia way behind.
     We are not in the Dakotas yet, but the broad fields show we are getting nearer. Some of them are blue with flax blossoms moving in long waves like the surface of the ocean. The sweep of the hills is greater than before and they now dominate everything else, except the sky, which seems wider. Farmhouses in the distance are so small we can hardly see them. The land is beginning to open up.
     There is no one place or sharp line where the Central Plains end and the Great Plains begin. It’s a gradual change like this that catches you unawares, as if you were sailing out from a choppy coastal harbor, noticed that the waves had taken on a deep swell, and turned back to see that you were out of sight of land. There are fewer trees here and suddenly I am aware they are no longer native. They have been brought here and planted around houses and between fields in rows to break up the wind. But where they haven’t been planted there is no underbrush, no second-growth saplings—only grass, sometimes with wildflowers and weeds, but mostly grass. This is grassland now. We are on the prairie.
     I have a feeling none of us fully understands what four days on this prairie in July will be like. Memories of car trips across them are always of flatness and great emptiness as far as you can see, extreme monotony and boredom as you drive for hour after hour, getting nowhere, wondering how long this is going to last without a turn in the road, without a change in the land going on and on to the horizon.
     John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Silvia and I both talked him out of it. I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much. And when thinking about Sylvia’s moods and feelings, I couldn’t see her complaining.
     Also, to arrive in the Rocky Mountains by plane would be to see them in one kind of context, as pretty scenery. But to arrive after days of hard travel across the prairies would be to see them in another way, as a goal, a promised land. If John and I and Chris arrived with this feeling and Sylvia arrived seeing them as “nice” and “pretty,” there would be more disharmony among us than we would get from the heat and monotony of the Dakotas. Anyway, I like to talk to her and I’m thinking of myself too.
     In my mind, when I look at these fields, I say to her, “See?… See?” and I think she does. I hope later she will see and feel a think about these prairies I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe in this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted. It’s here, but I have no names for it.

Now on the horizon I see something else I don’t think the others see. Far off to the southwest—you can see it only from the top of this hill—the sky has a dark edge. Storm coming. That may be what has been bothering me. Deliberately shutting it out of mind, but knowing all along that with this humidity and wind it was more than likely. It’s too bad, on the first day, but as I said before, on a cycle you’re in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely part of it.
     If it’s just thunderheads or broken line squalls you can try to ride around them, but this one isn’t. That long dark streak without any preceding cirrus clouds is a cold front. Cold fronts are violent and when they are from the southwest, they are the most violent. Often they contain tornadoes. When they come it’s best to just hole up and let them pass over. They don’t last long and the cool air behind them makes good riding.
     Warm fronts are the worst. They can last for days. I remember Chris and I were on a trip to Canada a few years ago, got about 130 miles and were caught in a warm front of which we had plenty of warning but which we didn’t understand. The whole experience was kind of dumb and sad.
     We were on a little six-and-one-half-horsepower cycle, way overloaded with luggage and way under loaded with common sense. The machine could do only about forty-five miles per hour wide open against a moderate head wind. It was no touring bike. We reached a large lake in the North Woods the first night and tented amid rainstorms that lasted all night long. I forgot to dig a trench around the tent and at about two in the morning a stream of water came in and soaked both sleeping bags. The next morning we were soggy and depressed and hadn’t had much sleep, but I thought that if we just got riding the rain would let up after a while. No such luck. By ten o’clock the sky was so dark all the cars had their headlights on. And then it really came down.
     We were wearing the ponchos which had served as a tent the night before. Now they spread out like sails and slowed our speed to thirty miles an hour wide open. The water on the road became two inches deep. Lightning bolts came crashing down all around us. I remember a woman’s face looking astonished at us from the window of a passing car, wondering what in earth we were doing on a motorcycle in this weather. I’m sure I couldn’t have told her.
     The cycle slowed down to twenty-five, then twenty. Then it started missing, coughing and popping and sputtering until, barely moving at five or six miles an hour, we found an old run-down filling station by some cutover timberland and pulled in.
     At the time, like John, I hadn’t bothered to learn much about motorcycle maintenance. I remember holding my poncho over my head to keep the rain from the tank and rocking the cycle between my legs. Gas seemed to be sloshing around inside. I looked at the plugs, and looked at the points, and looked at the carburetor, and pumped the kick starter until I was exhausted.
     We went into the filling station, which was also a combination beer joint and restaurant, and had a meal of burned-up steak. Then I went back out and tried it again. Chris kept asking questions that started to anger me because he didn’t see how serious it was. Finally I saw it was no use, gave it up, and my anger at him disappeared. I explained to him as carefully as I could that it was all over. We weren’t going anywhere by cycle on this vacation. Chris suggested things to do like check the gas, which I had done, and find a mechanic. But there weren’t any mechanics. Just cutover pine trees and brush and rain.
     I sat in the grass with him at the shoulder of the road, defeated, staring into the trees and underbrush. I answered all of Chris’s questions patiently and in time they became fewer and fewer. And then Chris finally understood that our cycle trip was really over and began to cry. He was eight then, I think.
     We hitchhiked back to our own city and rented a trailer and put it on our car and came up and got the cycle, and hauled it back to our own city and then started out all over again by car. But it wasn’t the same. And we didn’t really enjoy ourselves much.
     Two weeks after the vacation was over, one evening after work, I removed the carburetor to see what was wrong but still couldn’t find anything. To clean off the grease before replacing it, I turned the stopcock on the tank for a little gas. Nothing came out. The tank was out of gas. I couldn’t believe it. I can still hardly believe it.
     I have kicked myself mentally a hundred times for that stupidity and don’t think I’ll ever really, finally get over it. Evidently what I saw sloshing around was gas in the reserve tank which I had never turned on. I didn’t check it carefully because I assumed the rain had caused the engine failure. I didn’t understand then how foolish quick assumptions like that are. Now we are on a twenty-eight-horse machine and I take the maintenance of it very seriously.
     All of a sudden John passes me, his palm down, signaling a stop. We slow down and look for a place to pull off the gravelly shoulder. The edge of the concrete is sharp and the gravel is loose and I’m not a bit fond of his maneuver.
     Chris asks, “What are we stopping for?”
     “I think we missed our turn back there,” John says.
     I look back and see nothing. “I didn’t see any sign,” I say.
     John shakes his head. “Big as a barn door.”
     “Really?”
     He and Sylvia both nod.
     He leans over, studies my map and points to where the turn was and then to a freeway overpass beyond it. “We’ve already crossed this freeway,” he says. I see he is right. Embarrassing. “Go back or go ahead?” I ask.
     He thinks about it. “Well, I guess there’s really no reason to go back. All right. Let’s just go ahead. We’ll get there one way or another.”
     And now tagging along behind them I think, Why should I do a thing like that? I hardly noticed the freeway. And just now I forgot to tell them about the storm. Things are getting a little unsettling.
     The storm cloud bank is larger now but it is not moving in as fast as I thought it would. That’s not so good. When they come in fast they leave fast. When they come in slow like this you can get stuck for quite a time.
     I remove a glove with my teeth, reach down and feel the aluminum side cove of the engine. The temperature is fine. Too warm to leave my hand there, not so hot I get a burn. Nothing wrong there.
     On an air-cooled engine like this, extreme overheating can cause a “seizure.” This machine has had one… in fact, three of them. I check it from time to time the same way I would check a patient who has had a heart attack, even though it seems cured.
     In a seizure, the pistons expand from too much heat, become too big for the walls of the cylinders, seize them, melt to them sometimes, and lock the engine and rear wheel and start the whole cycle into a skid. The first time this one seized, my head was pitched over the front wheel and my passenger was almost on top of me. At about thirty it freed up again and started to run but I pulled off the road and stopped to see what was wrong. All my passenger could think to say was “What did you do that for?”
     I shrugged and was as puzzled as he was, and stood there with the cars whizzing by, just staring. The engine was so hot the air around it shimmered and we could feel the heat radiate. When I put a wet finger on it, it sizzled like a hot iron and we rode home, slowly, with a new sound, a slap that meant the pistons no longer fit and an overhaul was needed.
     I took this machine into a shop because I thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into myself, having to learn all the complicated details and maybe having to order parts and special tools and all that time-dragging stuff when I could get someone else to do it in less time—sort of John’s attitude.
     The shop was a different scene from the ones I remembered. The mechanics, who had once all seemed like ancient veterans, now looked like children. A radio was going full blast and they were clowning around and talking and seemed not to notice me. When one of them finally came over he barely listened to the piston slap before saying, “Oh yeah. Tappets.”
     Tappets? I should have known then what was coming.
     Two weeks later I paid their bill for 140 dollars, rode the cycle carefully at varying low speeds to wear it in and then after one thousand miles opened it up. At about seventy-five it seized again and freed at thirty, the same as before. When I brought it back they accused me of not breaking it in properly, but after much argument agreed to look into it. They overhauled it again and this time took it out themselves for a high-speed road test.
     It seized on them this time.
     After the third overhaul two months later they replaced the cylinders, put in oversize main carburetor jets, retarded the timing to make it run as coolly as possible and told me, “Don’t run it fast.”
     It was covered with grease and did not start. I found the plugs were disconnected, connect them and started it, and now there really was a tappet noise. They hadn’t adjusted them. I pointed this out and the kid came with an open-end adjustable wrench, set wrong, and swiftly rounded both of the sheet-aluminum tappet covers, ruining both of them.
     “I hope we’ve got some more of those in stock,” he said.
     I nodded.
     He brought out a hammer and cold chisel and started to pound them loose. The chisel punched through the aluminum cover and I could see he was pounding the chisel right into the engine head. On the next blow he missed the chisel completely and struck the head with the hammer, breaking off a portion of two of the cooling fins.
     “Just stop,” I said politely, feeling this was a bad dream. “Just give me some new covers and I’ll take it the way it is.”
     I got out of there as fast as possible, noisy tappets, shot tappet covers, greasy machine, down the road, and then felt a bad vibration and speeds over twenty. At the curb I discovered two of the four engine-mounting bolts were missing and a nut was missing from the third. The whole engine was hanging on by only one bolt. The overhead-cam chain-tensioner bolt was also missing, meaning it would have been hopeless to try to adjust the tappets anyway. Nightmare.
     The thought of John putting his BMW into the hands of one of those people is something I have never brought up with him. Maybe I should.
     I found the cause of the seizures a few weeks later, waiting to happen again. It was a little twenty-five-cent pin in the internal oil-delivery system that had been sheared and was preventing oil from reaching the head at high speeds.
     The question why comes back again and again and has become a major reason for wanting to deliver this Chautauqua. Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology, like John and Sylvia. These were the technologists themselves. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. There was no obvious reason for it. And I tried to think back into that shop, that nightmare place, to try to remember anything that could have been the cause.
     The radio was a clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that’s more enjoyable.
     Their speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them. More money that way—if you don’t stop to think that it usually takes longer or comes out worse.
     But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing—and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, “I am a mechanic.” At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job. In their own way they were achieving the same thing John and Sylvia were, living with technology without really having anything to do with it. Or rather, they had something to do with it, but their own selves were outside of it, detached, removed. They were involved in it but not in such a way as to care.
     Not only did these mechanics not find that sheared pin, but it was clearly a mechanic who had sheared it in the first place, by assembling the side cover plate improperly. I remembered the previous owner had said a mechanic had told him the plate was hard to get on. That was why. The shop manual had warned about this, but like the others he was probably in too much of a hurry or he didn’t care.
     While at work I was thinking about this same lack of care in the digital computer manuals I was editing. Writing and editing technical manuals is what I do for a living the other eleven months of the year and I knew they were full of error, ambiguities, omissions and information so completely screwed up you had to read them six times to make any sense out of them. But what struck me for the first time was the agreement of these manuals with the spectator attitude I had seen in the shop. These were spectator manuals. It was built into the format of them. Implicit in every line is the idea that “Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error condition…” and so on. That’s it. The mechanics in their attitude toward the machine were really taking no different attitude from the manual’s toward the machine, or from the attitude I had when I brought it in there. We were all spectators. And it occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.
     On this trip I think we should notice it, explore it a little, to see if in that strange separation of what man is from what man does we may have some clues as to what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century. I don’t want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something ,that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.

I suddenly notice the land here has flattened into a Euclidean plane. Not a hill, not a bump anywhere. This means we have entered the Red River Valley. We will soon be into the Dakotas.