Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I ignore this and pull up by the building. Chris jumps off and we pull the machine back up on the stand. The heat rises from the engine as if it were on fire, throwing off waves that distort everything around it. Out of the corner of my eye I see the other cycle come back. When they arrive they are both glaring at me.

Sylvia says, “We’re just — angry!”

I shrug my shoulders and walk to the drinking fountain.

John says, “Where’s all that stamina you were telling us about?”

I look at him for a second and see he really is angry. “I was afraid you took that too seriously”, I say, and then turn away. I drink the water and it’s alkaline, like soapy water. I drink it anyway.

John goes into the building to soak his shirt with water. I check the oil level. The oil filler cap is so hot it burns my fingers right through the gloves. The engine hasn’t lost much oil. The back tire tread is down a little more but still serviceable. The chain is tight enough but a little dry so I oil it again to be safe. The critical bolts are all tight enough.

John comes over dripping with water and says, “You go ahead this time, we’ll stay behind.”

“I won’t go fast”, I say.

“That’s all right”, he says. “We’ll get there.”

So I go ahead and we take it slowly. The road through the canyon doesn’t straighten out into more of what we’ve been through, as I expected it would, but starts to wind upward. Surprise.

Now the road meanders a little, now it cuts back away from the direction in which we should be going, then returns. Soon it rises a little and then rises some more. We are moving in angular directions into narrow devil’s gaps, then upward again higher and a little higher each time.

Some shrubs appear. Then small trees. The road goes higher still into grass, and then fenced meadows.

Overhead a small cloud appears. Rain perhaps? Perhaps. Meadows must have rain. And these now have flowers in them. Strange how all this has changed. Nothing to show it on the map. And the consciousness of memory has disappeared too. Phædrus must not have come this way. But there was no other road. Strange. It keeps rising upward.

The sun angles toward the cloud, which now has grown downward to touch the horizon above us, in which there are trees, pines, and a cold wind comes down with pine smells from the trees. The flowers in the meadow blow in the wind and the cycle leans a little and we are suddenly cool.

I look at Chris and he is smiling. I am smiling too.

Then the rain comes hard on the road with a gust of earth-smell from the dust that has waited for too long and the dust beside the road is pocked with the first raindrops.

This is all so new. And we are so in need of it, a new rain. My clothes become wet, and goggles are spattered, and chills start and feel delicious. The cloud passes from beneath the sun and the forest of pines and small meadows gleams again, sparkling where the sunlight catches small drops from the rain.

We reach the top of the climb dry again but cool now and stop, overlooking a huge valley and river below.

“I think we have arrived”, John says.

Sylvia and Chris have walked into the meadow among the flowers under pines through which I can see the far side of the valley, away and below.

I am a pioneer now, looking onto a promised land.

It’s about ten o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting alongside the machine on a cool, shady curbstone back of a hotel we have found in Miles City, Montana. Sylvia is with Chris at a Laundromat doing the laundry for all of us. John is off looking for a duckbill to put on his helmet. He thought he saw one at a cycle shop when we came into town yesterday. And I’m about to sharpen up the engine a little.

Feeling good now. We got in here in the afternoon and made up for a lot of sleep. It was a good thing we stopped. We were so stupid with exhaustion we didn’t know how tired we were. When John tried to register rooms he couldn’t even remember my name. The desk girl asked us if we owned those “groovy, dreamy motorcycles” outside the window and we both laughed so hard she wondered what she had said wrong. It was just numbskull laughter from too much fatigue. We’ve been more than glad to leave them parked and walk for a change.

And baths. In a beautiful old enameled cast-iron bathtub that crouched on lion’s paws in the middle of a marble floor, just waiting for us. The water was so soft it felt as if I would never get the soap off. Afterward we walked up and down the main streets and felt like a family.

On this machine I’ve done the tuning so many times it’s become a ritual. I don’t have to think much about how to do it anymore. Just mainly look for anything unusual. The engine has picked up a noise that sounds like a loose tappet but could be something worse, so I’m going to tune it now and see if it goes away. Tappet adjustment has to be done with the engine cold, which means wherever you park it for the night is where you work on it the next morning, which is why I’m on a shady curbstone back of a hotel in Miles City, Montana. Right now the air is cool in the shade and will be for an hour or so until the sun gets around the tree branches, which is good for working on cycles. It’s important not to tune these machines in the direct sun or late in the day when your brain gets muddy because even if you’ve been through it a hundred times you should be alert and looking for things.

Not everyone understands what a completely rational process this is, this maintenance of a motorcycle. They think it’s some kind of a “knack” or some kind of “affinity for machines” in operation. They are right, but the knack is almost purely a process of reason, and most of the troubles are caused by what old time radio men called a “short between the earphones”, failures to use the head properly. A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. I said yesterday that the ghost of rationality was what Phædrus pursued and what led to his insanity, but to get into that it’s vital to stay with down-to-earth examples of rationality, so as not to get lost in generalities no one else can understand. Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.

We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately… and this is an important way of seeing it… and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form… and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example… this wrench… has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It’s designed to change the underlying form of the machine.

The porcelain inside this first plug is very dark. That is classically as well as romantically ugly because it means the cylinder is getting too much gas and not enough air. The carbon molecules in the gasoline aren’t finding enough oxygen to combine with and they’re just sitting here loading up the plug. Coming into town yesterday the idle was loping a little, which is a symptom of the same thing.

Just to see if it’s just the one cylinder that’s rich I check the other one. They’re both the same. I get out a pocket knife, grab a stick lying in the gutter and whittle down the end to clean out the plugs, wondering what could be the cause of the richness. That wouldn’t have anything to do with rods or valves. And carbs rarely go out of adjustment. The main jets are oversized, which causes richness at high speeds but the plugs were a lot cleaner than this before with the same jets. Mystery. You’re always surrounded by them. But if you tried to solve them all, you’d never get the machine fixed. There’s no immediate answer so I just leave it as a hanging question.