Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

We stop at an abandoned school yard and under a huge cottonwood tree I change the oil in the cycle. Chris is irritable and wonders why we stop for so long, not knowing perhaps that it’s just the time of day that makes him irritable; but I give him the map to study while I change the oil, and when the oil is changed we look at the map together and decide to have supper at the next good restaurant we find and camp at the first good camping place. That cheers him up.

At a town called Cambridge we have supper and when we are finished, it’s dark out. We follow the headlight beam down a secondary road toward Oregon to a little sign saying “BROWNLEE CAMPGROUND”, which appears to be in a draw of the mountains. In the dark it’s hard to tell what sort of country we’re in. We follow a dirt road under trees and past underbrush to some camper’s pull-ins. No one else seems to be here. When I shut the motor off and we unpack I can hear a small stream nearby. Except for that and the chirping of some little bird there’s no sound.

“I like it here”, Chris says.

“It’s very quiet”, I say.

“Where will we be going tomorrow?”

“Into Oregon.” I give him the flashlight and have him shine it where I’m unpacking.

“Have I been there before?”

“Maybe, I’m not sure.”

I spread out the sleeping bags, and put his on top of the picnic table. The novelty of this appeals to him. This night there’ll be no trouble sleeping. Soon I hear deep breathing that tells me he’s already asleep.

I wish I knew what to say to him. Or what to ask. He seems so close at times, and yet the closeness has nothing to do with what is asked or said. Then at other times he seems very far away and sort of watching me from some vantage point I don’t see. And then sometimes he’s just childish and there’s no relation at all.

Sometimes, when thinking about this, I thought that the idea that one person’s mind is accessible to another’s is just a conversational illusion, just a figure of speech, an assumption that makes some kind of exchange between basically alien creatures seem plausible, and that really the relationship of one person to another is ultimately unknowable. The effort of fathoming what is in another’s mind creates a distortion of what is seen. I’m trying, I suppose, for some situation in which whatever it is emerges undistorted. The way he asks all those questions, I don’t know.

A sensation of cold wakes me up. I see out of the top of the sleeping bag that the sky is dark grey. I pull my head down and close my eyes again.

Later I see the grey of the sky is lighter, and it’s still cold. I can see the vapor of my breath. An alarmed thought that the grey is from rain clouds overhead wakes me up, but after looking carefully I see that this is just grey dawn. It seems too cold and early to start riding yet, so I don’t get out of the bag. But sleep is gone.

Through the spokes of the motorcycle wheel I see Chris’s sleeping bag on the picnic table, twisted all around him. He isn’t stirring.

The cycle looms silently over me, ready to start, as if it has waited all night like some silent guardian.

Silver-grey and chrome and black… and dusty. Dirt from Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas and Minnesota. From the ground up it looks very impressive. No frills. Everything with a purpose.

I don’t think I’ll ever sell it. No reason to, really. They’re not like cars, with a body that rusts out in a few years. Keep them tuned and overhauled and they’ll last as long as you do. Probably longer. Quality. It’s carried us so far without trouble.

The sunlight just touches the top of the bluff high above the draw we’re in. A wisp of fog has appeared above the creek. That means it’ll warm up.

I get out of the sleeping bag, put shoes on, pack everything I can without waking Chris, and then go over to the picnic table and give him a shake to wake him up.

He doesn’t respond. I look around and see that there are no jobs left to do but wake him up, and hesitate, but feeling manic and jumpy from the brisk morning air holler, “WAKE!” and he sits up suddenly, eyes wide open.

I do my best to follow this with the opening Quatrain of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It looks like some desert cliff in Persia above us. But Chris doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about. He looks up at the top of the bluff and then just sits there squinting at me. You have to be in a certain mood to accept bad recitations of poetry. Particularly that one.

Soon we’re on the road again, which twists and turns. We stem down into an enormous canyon with high white bluffs on either side. The wind freezes. The road comes into some sunlight which seems to warm me right through the jacket and sweater, but soon we ride into the shade of the canyon wall again where again the wind freezes. This dry desert air doesn’t hold heat. My lips, with the wind blowing into them, feel dry and cracked.

Farther on we cross a dam and leave the canyon into some high semidesert country. This is Oregon now. The road winds through a landscape that reminds me of northern Rajasthan, in India, where it’s not quite desert, much pinon, junipers and grass, but not agricultural either, except where a draw or valley provides a little extra water.

Those crazy Rubaiyat Quatrains keep rumbling through my head.

– something, something along some Strip of

Herbage strown,

That just divides the desert from the sown,

Where name of Slave and Sultan scarce is known,

And pity Sultan Mahmud on his Throne. —

That conjures up a glimpse of the ruins of an ancient

Mogul palace near the desert where out of the corner of his eye he saw a wild rosebush.

– And this first summer Month that brings the Rose — How did that go? I don’t know. I don’t even like the poem. I’ve noticed since this trip has started and particularly since Bozeman that these fragments seem less and less a part of his memory and more and more a part of mine. I’m not sure what that means — I think — I just don’t know.

I think there’s a name for this kind of semidesert, but I can’t think of what it is. No one can be seen anywhere on the road but us.

Chris hollers that he has diarrhea again. We ride until I see a stream below and pull off the road and stop. His face is full of embarrassment again but I tell him we’re in no hurry and get out a change of underwear and roll of toilet paper and bar of soap and tell him to wash his hands thoroughly and carefully after he’s done.

I sit on an Omar Khayyam rock contemplating the semidesert and feel not bad.

– And this first Summer month that brings the Rose — oh — now it comes back. —

Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say ,

Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?

And this first Summer month that brings the Rose ,

Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away.

– And so on and so forth —

Let’s get off Omar and onto the Chautauqua. Omar’s solution is just to sit around and guzzle the wine and feel so bad that time is passing and the Chautauqua looks good to me by comparison. Particularly today’s Chautauqua, which is about gumption.

I see Chris coming back up the hill now. His expression looks happy.

I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin”, seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm”, which means literally “filled with theos”, or God, or Quality. See how that fits?