Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“Anyway”, John says, “this character here told us we were in for a letdown when we came here, and we still haven’t gotten over this ‘letdown.’”

I laugh. I hadn’t wanted to build him up to it. DeWeese smiles too. But then John turns to me and says, “Geez, you must have been really crazy, I mean really nuts to leave this place. I don’t care what the college is like.”

I see DeWeese look at him, shocked. Then angry. DeWeese looks at me and I wave it off. Some kind of impasse has developed but I don’t know how to get around it. “It’s a beautiful place”, I say weakly.

DeWeese says defensively, “If you were here for a while you’d see another side to it.” The instructor nods in agreement.

The impasse now produces its silence. It’s an impossible one to reconcile. What John said wasn’t unkind. He’s kinder than anyone. What he knows and I know but DeWeese doesn’t know is that the person they’re both referring to isn’t much these days. Just another middle-class, middle-aged person getting along. Worried mainly about Chris, but beyond that nothing special.

But what DeWeese and I know and the Sutherlands don’t know is that there was someone, a person who lived here once, who was creatively on fire with a set of ideas no one had ever heard of before, but then something unexplained and wrong happened and DeWeese doesn’t know how or why and neither do I. The reason for the impasse, the bad feeling, is that DeWeese thinks that person is here now. And there’s no way I can tell him otherwise.

For a brief moment, way up at the top of the ridge, the sun diffuses through the trees and a halation of the light comes down to us. The halo expands, capturing everything in a sudden flash, and suddenly it catches me too.

“He saw too much”, I say, still thinking about the impasse, but DeWeese looks puzzled and John doesn’t register at all, and I realize the non sequitur too late. In the distance a single bird cries plaintively.

Now suddenly the sun is gone behind the mountain and the whole canyon is in dull shadow.

To myself I think how uncalled for that was. You don’t make statements like that. You leave the hospital with the understanding that you don’t.

Gennie appears with Sylvia and suggests we unpack. We agree and she shows us to our rooms. I see that my bed has a heavy quilt on it against the cold of the night. Beautiful room.

In three trips to the cycle and back I have everything transferred. Then I go to Chris’s room to see what needs to be unpacked but he’s cheerful and being grown-up and doesn’t need help.

I look at him. “How do you like it here?”

He says, “Fine, but it isn’t anything like the way you told about it last night.”

“When?”

“Just before we went to sleep. In the cabin.”

I don’t know what he’s referring to.

He adds, “You said it was lonely here.”

“Why would I say that?”

“I don’t know.” My question frustrates him, so I leave it. He must have been dreaming.

When we come down to the living room I can smell the aroma from the frying trout in the kitchen. At one end of the room DeWeese is bent over the fireplace holding a match to some newspaper under the kindling. We watch him for a while.

“We use this fireplace all summer long”, he says.

I reply, “I’m surprised it’s this cold.”

Chris says he’s cold too. I send him back up for his sweater and mine as well.

“It’s the evening wind”, DeWeese says. “It sweeps down the canyon from up high where it’s really cold.”

The fire flares suddenly and then dies and then flares again from an uneven draft. It must be windy, I think, and look through the huge windows that line one wall of the living room. Across the canyon in the dusk I see the sharp movement of the trees.

“But that’s right”, DeWeese says. “You know how cold it is up there. You used to spend all your time up there.”

“It brings back memories”, I say.

A single fragment comes to mind now of night winds all around a campfire, smaller than this one before us now, sheltered in the rock against the high wind because there are no trees. Next to the fire are cooking gear and backpacks to help give wind shelter, and a canteen filled with water gathered from the melting snow. The water had to be collected early because above the timberline the snow stops melting when the sun goes down.

DeWeese says, “You’ve changed a lot.” He is looking at me searchingly. His expression seems to ask whether this is a forbidden topic or not, and he gathers from looking at me that it is. He adds, “I guess we all have.”

I reply, “I’m not the same person at all”, and this seems to put him a little more at ease. Were he aware of the literal truth of that, he’d be a lot less at ease. “A lot has happened”, I say, “and some things have come up that have made it important to try to untangle them a little, in my own mind at least, and that’s partly why I’m here.”

He looks at me, expecting something more, but the art instructor and his wife appear by the fireside and we drop it.

“The wind sounds like there’ll be a storm tonight”, the instructor says.

“I don’t think so”, DeWeese says.

Chris returns with the sweaters and asks if there are any ghosts up in the canyon.

DeWeese looks at him with amusement. “No, but there are wolves”, he says.

Chris thinks about this and asks, “What do they do?”

DeWeese says, “They make trouble for the ranchers.” He frowns. “They kill the young calves and lambs.”

“Do they chase people?”

“l’ve never heard of it”, DeWeese says and then, seeing that this disappoints Chris, adds, “but they could.”

At dinner the brook trout is accompanied by glasses of Bay county Chablis. We sit separately in chairs and sofas around the living room. One entire side of this room has the windows which would overlook the canyon, except that now it’s dark outside and the glass reflects the light from the fireplace. The glow of the fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish and we don’t say much except murmurs of appreciation.

Sylvia murmurs to John to notice the large pots and vases around the room.

“I was noticing those”, John says. “Fantastic.”

“Those were made by Peter Voulkas”, Sylvia says.

“Is that right?”

“He was a student of Mr. DeWeese.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake! I almost kicked one of those over.”

DeWeese laughs.

Later John mumbles something a few times, looks up and announces, “This does it — this just does the whole thing for us. Now we can go back for another eight years on Twenty-six-forty-nine Colfax Avenue.”

Sylvia says mournfully, “Let’s not talk about that.”

John looks at me for a moment. “I suppose anybody with friends who can provide an evening like this can’t be all bad.” He nods gravely. “I’m going to have to take back all those things I thought about you.”

“All of them?” I ask.

“Some, anyway.”

DeWeese and the instructor smile and some of the impasse goes away.

After dinner Jack and Wylla Barsness arrive. More living images. Jack is recorded in the tomb fragments as a good person who writes and teaches English at the college. Their arrival is followed by that of a sculptor from northern Montana who herds sheep for his income. I gather from the way DeWeese introduces him that I’m not supposed to have met him before.

DeWeese says he is trying to persuade the sculptor to join the faculty and I say, “I’ll try to talk him out of it”, and sit down next to him, but conversation is very sticky because the sculptor is extremely serious and suspicious, evidently because I’m not an artist. He acts like I’m a detective trying to get something on him, and it isn’t until he discovers I do a lot of welding that I become okay. Motorcycle maintenance opens strange doors. He says he welds for some of the same reasons I do. After you pick up skill, welding gives a tremendous feeling of power and control over the metal. You can do anything. He brings out some photographs of things he has welded and these show beautiful birds and animals with flowing metal surface textures that are not like anything else.