Part I

1

I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the
cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty
miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it's this hot and muggy at
eight-thirty, I'm wondering what it's going to be like in the afternoon.

In the wind are pungent odors from the marshes by the road. We are in an
area of the Central Plains filled with thousands of duck hunting sloughs,
heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an
old concrete two-laner that hasn't had much traffic since a four-laner went
in parallel to it several years ago. When we pass a marsh the air suddenly
becomes cooler. Then, when we are past, it suddenly warms up again.

I'm happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere,
famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that. Tensions
disappear along old roads like this. We bump along the beat-up concrete
between the cattails and stretches of meadow and then more cattails and
marsh grass. Here and there is a stretch of open water and if you look
closely you can see wild ducks at the edge of the cattails. And turtles. --
There's a red-winged blackbird.

I whack Chris's knee and point to it.

``What!'' he hollers.

``Blackbird!''

He says something I don't hear.``What?'' I holler back.

He grabs the back of my helmet and hollers up, ``I've seen lots of those,
Dad!''

``Oh!'' I holler back. Then I nod. At age eleven you don't get very
impressed with red-winged blackbirds.

You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that
he doesn't have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned
brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell
then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in
position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters
when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice
and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead
things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they're
back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is
humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of
millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign
continuum.

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely
different from any other. In a car you're always in a compartment, and
because you're used to it you don't realize that through that car window
everything you see is just more TV. You're a passive observer and it is all
moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle the frame is gone. You're completely in contact with it all.
You're in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of
presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your
foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it's right there, so
blurred you can't focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it
anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from
immediate consciousness.

Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and
maybe headed farther than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to
travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads
are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next.
Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is
measured with emphasis on ``good'' rather than ``time'' and when you make
that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are
long in terms of seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you
bank into turns and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment.
Roads with little traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free
of drive-ins and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and
orchards and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when
you ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where
when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be
longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you're from
and how long you've been riding.

It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to
catch on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a
shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and
we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this
time after time before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads
are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and
personality of the people who live along them are different. They're not
going anywhere. They're not too busy to be courteous. The hereness and
nowness of things is something they know all about. It's the others, the
ones who moved to the cities years ago and their lost offspring, who have
all but forgotten it. The discovery was a real find.

I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we
didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps,
into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just
boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door
and you say, ``Go away, I'm looking for the truth,'' and so it goes away.
Puzzling.

But once we caught on, of course, nothing could keep us off these roads,
weekends, evenings, vacations. We have become real secondary-road
motorcycle buffs and found there are things you learn as you go.

We have learned how to spot the good ones on a map, for example. If the
line wiggles, that's good. That means hills. If it appears to be the main
route from a town to a city, that's bad. The best ones always connect
nowhere with nowhere and have an alternate that gets you there quicker. If
you are going northeast from a large town you never go straight out of town
for any long distance. You go out and then start jogging north, then east,
then north again, and soon you are on a secondary route that only the local
people use.

The main skill is to keep from getting lost. Since the roads are used only
by local people who know them by sight nobody complains if the junctions
aren't posted. And often they aren't. When they are it's usually a small
sign hiding unobtrusively in the weeds and that's all. County-road-sign
makers seldom tell you twice. If you miss that sign in the weeds that's
your problem, not theirs. Moreover, you discover that the highway maps are
often inaccurate about county roads. And from time to time you find your
``county road'' takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and
then into a pasture and stops, or else it takes you into some farmer's
backyard.

So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we
find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't
show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the
gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know
what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to ``get
somewhere'' it works out fine and we just about have America all to
ourselves.

On Labor Day and Memorial Day weekends we travel for miles on these roads
without seeing another vehicle, then cross a federal highway and look at
cars strung bumper to bumper to the horizon. Scowling faces inside. Kids
crying in the back seat. I keep wishing there were some way to tell them
something but they scowl and appear to be in a hurry, and there isn't -- .

I have seen these marshes a thousand times, yet each time they're new. It's
wrong to call them benign. You could just as well call them cruel and
senseless, they are all of those things, but the reality of them overwhelms
halfway conceptions. There! A huge flock of red-winged blackbirds ascends
from nests in the cattails, startled by our sound. I swat Chris's knee a
second time -- then I remember he has seen them before.

``What?'' he hollers again.

``Nothing.''

``Well, what?''

``Just checking to see if you're still there,'' I holler, and nothing more
is said.

Unless you're fond of hollering you don't make great conversations on a
running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and
meditating on them. On sights and sounds, on the mood of the weather and
things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you're in, thinking
about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without
feeling you're losing time.

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about
some things that have come to mind. We're in such a hurry most of the time
we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless
day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years
later where all the time went and sorry that it's all gone. Now that we do
have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some
depth about things that seem important.

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think
of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move
across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time
series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind
and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer.
The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and
it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because
of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and
is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain
it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and
destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any
new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have
become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too
often repeated. ``What's new?'' is an interesting and broadening eternal
question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless
parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead,
to be concerned with the question ``What is best?,'' a question which cuts
deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt
downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of
thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing
new ever happened, and ``best'' was a matter of dogma, but that is not the
situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be
obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose,
flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no
particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal
momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

Up ahead the other riders, John Sutherland and his wife, Sylvia, have
pulled into a roadside picnic area. It's time to stretch. As I pull my
machine beside them Sylvia is taking her helmet off and shaking her hair
loose, while John puts his BMW up on the stand. Nothing is said. We have
been on so many trips together we know from a glance how one another feels.
Right now we are just quiet and looking around.

The picnic benches are abandoned at this hour of the morning. We have the
whole place to ourselves. John goes across the grass to a cast-iron pump
and starts pumping water to drink. Chris wanders down through some trees
beyond a grassy knoll to a small stream. I am just staring around.

After a while Sylvia sits down on the wooden picnic bench and straightens
out her legs, lifting one at a time slowly without looking up. Long
silences mean gloom for her, and I comment on it. She looks up and then
looks down again.

``It was all those people in the cars coming the other way,'' she says.
``The first one looked so sad. And then the next one looked exactly the
same way, and then the next one and the next one, they were all the same.''

``They were just commuting to work.''

She perceives well but there was nothing unnatural about it. ``Well, you
know, work,'' I repeat. ``Monday morning. Half asleep. Who goes to work
Monday morning with a grin?''

``It's just that they looked so lost,'' she says. ``Like they were all
dead. Like a funeral procession.'' Then she puts both feet down and leaves
them there.

I see what she is saying, but logically it doesn't go anywhere. You work to
live and that's what they are doing. ``I was watching swamps,'' I say.

After a while she looks up and says, ``What did you see?''

``There was a whole flock of red-winged blackbirds. They rose up suddenly
when we went by.''

``Oh.''

``I was happy to see them again. They tie things together, thoughts and
such. You know?''

She thinks for a while and then, with the trees behind her a deep green,
she smiles. She understands a peculiar language which has nothing to do
with what you are saying. A daughter.

``Yes,'' she says. ``They're beautiful.''

``Watch for them,'' I say.

``All right.''

John appears and checks the gear on the cycle. He adjusts some of the ropes
and then opens the saddlebag and starts rummaging through. He sets some
things on the ground. ``If you ever need any rope, don't hesitate,'' he
says. ``God, I think I've got about five times what I need here.''

``Not yet,'' I answer.

``Matches?'' he says, still rummaging. ``Sunburn lotion, combs, shoelaces
-- shoelaces? What do we need shoelaces for?''

``Let's not start that,'' Sylvia says. They look at each other deadpan and
then both look over at me.

``Shoelaces can break anytime,'' I say solemnly. They smile, but not at
each other.

Chris soon appears and it is time to go. While he gets ready and climbs on,
they pull out and Sylvia waves. We are on the highway again, and I watch
them gain distance up ahead.

The Chautauqua that is in mind for this trip was inspired by these two many
months ago and perhaps, although I don't know, is related to a certain
undercurrent of disharmony between them.

Disharmony I suppose is common enough in any marriage, but in their case it
seems more tragic. To me, anyway.

It's not a personality clash between them; it's something else, for which
neither is to blame, but for which neither has any solution, and for which
I'm not sure I have any solution either, just ideas.

The ideas began with what seemed to be a minor difference of opinion
between John and me on a matter of small importance: how much one should
maintain one's own motorcycle. It seems natural and normal to me to make
use of the small tool kits and instruction booklets supplied with each
machine, and keep it tuned and adjusted myself. John demurs. He prefers to
let a competent mechanic take care of these things so that they are done
right. Neither viewpoint is unusual, and this minor difference would never
have become magnified if we didn't spend so much time riding together and
sitting in country roadhouses drinking beer and talking about whatever
comes to mind. What comes to mind, usually, is whatever we've been thinking
about in the half hour or forty-five minutes since we last talked to each
other. When it's roads or weather or people or old memories or what's in
the newspapers, the conversation just naturally builds pleasantly. But
whenever the performance of the machine has been on my mind and gets into
the conversation, the building stops. The conversation no longer moves
forward. There is a silence and a break in the continuity. It is as though
two old friends, a Catholic and Protestant, were sitting drinking beer,
enjoying life, and the subject of birth control somehow came up. Big
freeze-out.

And, of course, when you discover something like that it's like discovering
a tooth with a missing filling. You can never leave it alone. You have to
probe it, work around it, push on it, think about it, not because it's
enjoyable but because it's on your mind and it won't get off your mind. And
the more I probe and push on this subject of cycle maintenance the more
irritated he gets, and of course that makes me want to probe and push all
the more. Not deliberately to irritate him but because the irritation seems
symptomatic of something deeper, something under the surface that isn't
immediately apparent.

When you're talking birth control, what blocks it and freezes it out is
that it's not a matter of more or fewer babies being argued. That's just on
the surface. What's underneath is a conflict of faith, of faith in
empirical social planning versus faith in the authority of God as revealed
by the teachings of the Catholic Church. You can prove the practicality of
planned parenthood till you get tired of listening to yourself and it's
going to go nowhere because your antagonist isn't buying the assumption
that anything socially practical is good per se. Goodness for him has other
sources which he values as much as or more than social practicality.

So it is with John. I could preach the practical value and worth of
motorcycle maintenance till I'm hoarse and it would make not a dent in him.
After two sentences on the subject his eyes go completely glassy and he
changes the conversation or just looks away. He doesn't want to hear about
it.

Sylvia is completely with him on this one. In fact she is even more
emphatic. ``It's just a whole other thing,'' she says, when in a thoughtful
mood. ``Like garbage,'' she says, when not. They want not to understand it.
Not to hear about it. And the more I try to fathom what makes me enjoy
mechanical work and them hate it so, the more elusive it becomes. The
ultimate cause of this originally minor difference of opinion appears to
run way, way deep.

Inability on their part is ruled out immediately. They are both plenty
bright enough. Either one of them could learn to tune a motorcycle in an
hour and a half if they put their minds and energy to it, and the saving in
money and worry and delay would repay them over and over again for their
effort. And they know that. Or maybe they don't. I don't know. I never
confront them with the question. It's better to just get along.

But I remember once, outside a bar in Savage, Minnesota, on a really
scorching day when I just about let loose. We'd been in the bar for about
an hour and we came out and the machines were so hot you could hardly get
on them. I'm started and ready to go and there's John pumping away on the
kick starter. I smell gas like we're next to a refinery and tell him so,
thinking this is enough to let him know his engine's flooded.

``Yeah, I smell it too,'' he says and keeps on pumping. And he pumps and
pumps and jumps and pumps and I don't know what more to say. Finally, he's
really winded and sweat's running down all over his face and he can't pump
anymore, and so I suggest taking out the plugs to dry them off and air out
the cylinders while we go back for another beer.

Oh my God no! He doesn't want to get into all that stuff.

``All what stuff?''

``Oh, getting out the tools and all that stuff. There's no reason why it
shouldn't start. It's a brand-new machine and I'm following the
instructions perfectly. See, it's right on full choke like they say.''

``Full choke!''

``That's what the instructions say.''

``That's for when it's cold!''

``Well, we've been in there for a half an hour at least,'' he says.

It kind of shakes me up. ``This is a hot day, John,'' I say. ``And they
take longer than that to cool off even on a freezing day.''

He scratches his head. ``Well, why don't they tell you that in the
instructions?'' He opens the choke and on the second kick it starts. ``I
guess that was it,'' he says cheerfully.

And the very next day we were out near the same area and it happened again.
This time I was determined not to say a word, and when my wife urged me to
go over and help him I shook my head. I told her that until he had a real
felt need he was just going to resent help, so we went over and sat in the
shade and waited.

I noticed he was being superpolite to Sylvia while he pumped away, meaning
he was furious, and she was looking over with a kind of ``Ye gods!'' look.
If he had asked any single question I would have been over in a second to
diagnose it, but he wouldn't. It must have been fifteen minutes before he
got it started.

Later we were drinking beer again over at Lake Minnetonka and everybody was
talking around the table, but he was silent and I could see he was really
tied up in knots inside. After all that time. Probably to get them untied
he finally said, ``You know -- when it doesn't start like that it just --
really turns me into a monster inside. I just get paranoic about it.'' This
seemed to loosen him up, and he added, ``They just had this one motorcycle,
see? This lemon.And they didn't know what to do with it, whether to send it
back to the factory or sell it for scrap or what -- and then at the last
moment they saw me coming. With eighteen hundred bucks in my pocket. And
they knew their problems were over.''

In a kind of singsong voice I repeated the plea for tuning and he tried
hard to listen. He really tries hard sometimes. But then the block came
again and he was off to the bar for another round for all of us and the
subject was closed.

He is not stubborn, not narrow-minded, not lazy, not stupid. There was just
no easy explanation. So it was left up in the air, a kind of mystery that
one gives up on because there is no sense in just going round and round and
round looking for an answer that's not there.

It occurred to me that maybe I was the odd one on the subject, but that was
disposed of too. Most touring cyclists know how to keep their machines
tuned. Car owners usually won't touch the engine, but every town of any
size at all has a garage with expensive lifts, special tools and diagnostic
equipment that the average owner can't afford. And a car engine is more
complex and inaccessible than a cycle engine so there's more sense to this.
But for John's cycle, a BMW R60, I'll bet there's not a mechanic between
here and Salt Lake City. If his points or plugs burn out, he's done for. I
know he doesn't have a set of spare points with him. He doesn't know what
points are. If it quits on him in western South Dakota or Montana I don't
know what he's going to do. Sell it to the Indians maybe. Right now I know
what he's doing. He's carefully avoiding giving any thought whatsoever to
the subject. The BMW is famous for not giving mechanical problems on the
road and that's what he's counting on.

I might have thought this was just a peculiar attitude of theirs about
motorcycles but discovered later that it extended to other things --
.Waiting for them to get going one morning in their kitchen I noticed the
sink faucet was dripping and remembered that it was dripping the last time
I was there before and that in fact it had been dripping as long as I could
remember. I commented on it and John said he had tried to fix it with a new
faucet washer but it hadn't worked. That was all he said. The presumption
left was that that was the end of the matter. If you try to fix a faucet
and your fixing doesn't work then it's just your lot to live with a
dripping faucet.

This made me wonder to myself if it got on their nerves, this
drip-drip-drip, week in, week out, year in, year out, but I could not
notice any irritation or concern about it on their part, and so concluded
they just aren't bothered by things like dripping faucets. Some people
aren't.

What it was that changed this conclusion, I don't remember -- some
intuition, some insight one day, perhaps it was a subtle change in Sylvia's
mood whenever the dripping was particularly loud and she was trying to
talk. She has a very soft voice. And one day when she was trying to talk
above the dripping and the kids came in and interrupted her she lost her
temper at them. It seemed that her anger at the kids would not have been
nearly as great if the faucet hadn't also been dripping when she was trying
to talk. It was the combined dripping and loud kids that blew her up. What
struck me hard then was that she was not blaming the faucet, and that she
was deliberately not blaming the faucet. She wasn't ignoring that faucet at
all! She was suppressing anger at that faucet and that goddamned dripping
faucet was just about killing her! But she could not admit the importance
of this for some reason.

Why suppress anger at a dripping faucet? I wondered.

Then that patched in with the motorcycle maintenance and one of those light
bulbs went on over my head and I thought, Ahhhhhhhh!

It's not the motorcycle maintenance, not the faucet. It's all of technology
they can't take. And then all sorts of things started tumbling into place
and I knew that was it. Sylvia's irritation at a friend who thought
computer programming was ``creative.'' All their drawings and paintings and
photographs without a technological thing in them. Of course she's not
going to get mad at that faucet, I thought. You always suppress momentary
anger at something you deeply and permanently hate. Of course John signs
off every time the subject of cycle repair comes up, even when it is
obvious he is suffering for it. That's technology. And sure, of course,
obviously. It's so simple when you see it. To get away from technology out
into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the
motorcycle in the first place. For me to bring it back to them just at the
point and place where they think they have finally escaped it just frosts
both of them, tremendously. That's why the conversation always breaks and
freezes when the subject comes up.

Other things fit in too. They talk once in a while in as few pained words
as possible about ``it'' or ``it all'' as in the sentence, ``There is just
no escape from it.'' And if I asked, ``From what?'' the answer might be
``The whole thing,'' or ``The whole organized bit,'' or even ``The
system.'' Sylvia once said defensively, ``Well, you know how to cope with
it,'' which puffed me up so much at the time I was embarrassed to ask what
``it'' was and so remained somewhat puzzled. I thought it was something
more mysterious than technology. But now I see that the ``it'' was mainly,
if not entirely, technology. But, that doesn't sound right either. The
``it'' is a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something
undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death
force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never
escape. I'm putting it way too heavily here but in a less emphatic and less
defined way this is what it is. Somewhere there are people who understand
it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman
language when describing what they do. It's all parts and relationships of
unheard-of things that never make any sense no matter how often you hear
about them. And their things, their monster keeps eating up land and
polluting their air and lakes, and there is no way to strike back at it,
and hardly any way to escape it.

That attitude is not hard to come to. You go through a heavy industrial
area of a large city and there it all is, the technology. In front of it
are high barbed-wire fences, locked gates, signs saying NO TRESPASSING, and
beyond, through sooty air, you see ugly strange shapes of metal and brick
whose purpose is unknown, and whose masters you will never see. What it's
for you don't know, and why it's there, there's no one to tell, and so all
you can feel is alienated, estranged, as though you didn't belong there.
Who owns and understands this doesn't want you around. All this technology
has somehow made you a stranger in your own land. Its very shape and
appearance and mysteriousness say, ``Get out.'' You know there's an
explanation for all this somewhere and what it's doing undoubtedly serves
mankind in some indirect way but that isn't what you see. What you see is
the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but
little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes.
And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a
stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes. So the final
feeling is hostile, and I think that's ultimately what's involved with this
otherwise unexplainable attitude of John and Sylvia. Anything to do with
valves and shafts and wrenches is a part of that dehumanized world, and
they would rather not think about it. They don't want to get into it.

If this is so, they are not alone. There is no question that they have been
following their natural feelings in this and not trying to imitate anyone.
But many others are also following their natural feelings and not trying to
imitate anyone and the natural feelings of very many people are similar on
this matter; so that when you look at them collectively, as journalists do,
you get the illusion of a mass movement, an antitechnological mass
movement, an entire political antitechnological left emerging, looming up
from apparently nowhere, saying, ``Stop the technology. Have it somewhere
else. Don't have it here.'' It is still restrained by a thin web of logic
that points out that without the factories there are no jobs or standard of
living. But there are human forces stronger than logic. There always have
been, and if they become strong enough in their hatred of technology that
web can break.

ClichΘs and stereotypes such as ``beatnik'' or ``hippie'' have been
invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will
continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with
the simple coining of a mass term. John and Sylvia are not mass people and
neither are most of the others going their way. It is against being a mass
person that they seem to be revolting. And they feel that technology has
got a lot to do with the forces that are trying to turn them into mass
people and they don't like it. So far it's still mostly a passive
resistance, flights into the rural areas when they are possible and things
like that, but it doesn't always have to be this passive.

I disagree with them about cycle maintenance, but not because I am out of
sympathy with their feelings about technology. I just think that their
flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha, the
Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer
or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or
in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the
Buddha...which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in
this Chautauqua.

We're out of the marshes now, but the air is still so humid you can look
straight up directly at the yellow circle of the sun as if there were smoke
or smog in the sky. But we're in the green countryside now. The farmhouses
are clean and white and fresh. And there's no smoke or smog.

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2

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 Sylvia 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 thing 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 underloaded 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 on the gravelly shoulder. The edge of
the concrete is sharp and the gravel is loose and I'm not a bit fond of
this 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 cover
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, connected 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 at 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 errors, 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 conditions -- '' 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 Euclidian plane. Not a
hill, not a bump anywhere. This means we have entered the Red River Valley.
We will soon be into the Dakotas.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

3

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 --
eighty-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 in 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 a 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
always 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 then 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 Phædrus. 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 going 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, Phædrus 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 that 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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

4

Every Chautauqua should have a list somewhere of valuable things to
remember that can be kept in some safe place for times of future need and
inspiration. Details. And now, while the others are still snoring away
wasting this beautiful morning sunlight -- well -- to sort of fill time --

What I have here is my list of valuable things to take on your next
motorcycle trip across the Dakotas.

I've been awake since dawn. Chris is still sound asleep in the other bed. I
started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then
became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping. I can
hear John right through the motel partition sawing wood in there -- unless
it's Sylvia -- no, that's too loud. Damned chain saw, it sounds like -- .

I got so tired of forgetting things on trips like this, I made this up and
store it in a file at home to check off when I am ready to go.

Most of the items are commonplace and need no comment. Some of them are
peculiar to motorcycling and need some comment. Some of them are just plain
peculiar and need a lot of comment. The list is divided into four parts:
Clothing, Personal Stuff, Cooking and Camping Gear, and Motorcycle Stuff.

The first part, Clothing, is simple:

  1. Two changes of underwear.
  2. Long underwear.
  3. One change of shirt and pants for each of us. I use Army-surplus
     fatigues. They're cheap, tough and don't show dirt. I had an item
     called ``dress clothes'' at first but John penciled ``Tux'' after this
     item. I was just thinking of something you might want to wear outside
     a filling station.
  4. One sweater and jacket each.
  5. Gloves. Unlined leather gloves are best because they prevent sunburn,
     absorb sweat and keep your hands cool. When you're going for an hour
     or two little things like this aren't important, but when you're going
     all day long day after day they become plenty important.
  6. Cycle boots.
  7. Rain gear.
  8. Helmet and sunshade.
  9. Bubble. This gives me claustrophobia, so I use it only in the rain,
     which otherwise at high speed stings your face like needles.
 10. Goggles. I don't like windshields because they also close you in.
     These are some British laminated plate-glass goggles that work fine.
     The wind getsbehind sunglasses. Plastic goggles get scratched upand
     distort vision.

The next list is Personal Stuff:

Combs. Billfold. Pocketknife. Memoranda booklet. Pen. Cigarettes and
matches. Flashlight. Soap and plastic soap container. Toothbrushes and
toothpaste. Scissors. APCs for headaches. Insect repellent. Deodorant
(after a hot day on a cycle, your best friends don't need to tell you).
Sunburn lotion. (On a cycle you don't notice sunburn until you stop, and
then it's too late. Put it on early.) Band-Aids. Toilet paper. Washcloth
(this can go into a plastic box to keep other stuff from getting damp).
Towel.

Books. I don't know of any other cyclist who takes books with him. They
take a lot of space, but I have three of them here anyway, with some loose
sheets of paper in them for writing. These are:

  1. The shop manual for this cycle.
  2. A general troubleshooting guide containing all the technical
     information I can never keep in my head. This is Chilton's Motorcycle
     Troubleshooting Guide written by Ocee Rich and sold by Sears, Roebuck.
  3. A copy of Thoreau's Walden -- which Chris has never heard and which
     can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a
     book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and
     answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two,
     wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer
     them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way.
     They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening
     reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three
     pages. It's a form of reading done a century ago -- when Chautauquas
     were popular. Unless you've tried it you can't imagine how pleasant it
     is to do it this way.

I see Chris is sleeping over there completely relaxed, none of his normal
tension. I guess I won't wake him up yet.

Camping Equipment includes:

  1. Two sleeping bags.
  2. Two ponchos and one ground cloth. These convert into a tent and also
     protect the luggage from rain while you are traveling.
  3. Rope.
  4. U. S. Geodetic Survey maps of an area where we hope to do some hiking.
  5. Machete.
  6. Compass.
  7. Canteen. I couldn't find this anywhere when we left. I think the kids
     must have lost it somewhere.
  8. Two Army-surplus mess kits with knife, fork and spoon.
  9. A collapsible Sterno stove with one medium-sized can of Sterno. This
     is an experimental purchase. I haven't used it yet. When it rains or
     when you're above the timberline firewood is a problem.
 10. Some aluminum screw-top tins. For lard, salt, butter, flour, sugar. A
     mountaineering supply house sold us these years ago.
 11. Brillo, for cleaning.
 12. Two aluminum-frame backpacks.

Motorcycle Stuff. A standard tool kit comes with the cycle and is stored
under the seat. This is supplemented with the following:

A large, adjustable open-end wrench. A machinist's hammer. A cold chisel. A
taper punch. A pair of tire irons. A tire-patching kit. A bicycle pump. A
can of molybdenum disulfide spray for the chain. (This has tremendous
penetrating ability into the inside of each roller where it really counts,
and the lubricating superiority of molybdenum disulfide is well known. Once
it has dried off, however, it ought to be supplemented with good old SAE-30
engine oil.) Impact driver. A point file. Feeler gauge. Test lamp.

Spare parts include:

Plugs. Throttle, clutch and brake cables. Points, fuses, headlight and
taillight bulbs, chain-coupling link with keeper, cotter pins, baling wire.
Spare chain (this is just an old one that was about shot when I replaced
it, enough to get to a cycle shop if the present one goes).

And that's about it. No shoelaces.

It would probably be normal about this time to wonder what sort of U-Haul
trailer all this is in. But it's not as bulky, really, as it sounds.

I'm afraid these other characters will sleep all day if I let them. The sky
outside is sparkling and clear, it's a shame to waste it like this.

I go over finally and give Chris a shake. His eyes pop open, then he sits
bolt upright uncomprehending.

``Shower time,'' I say.

I go outside. The air is invigorating. In fact...Christ!...it is cold out.
I pound on the Sutherlands' door.

``Yahp,'' comes John's sleepy voice through the door. ``Umhmmmm. Yahp.''

It feels like autumn. The cycles are wet with dew. No rain today. But cold!
It must be in the forties.

While waiting I check the engine oil level and tires, and bolts, and chain
tension. A little slack there, and I get out the tool kit and tighten it
up. I'm really getting anxious to get going.

I see that Chris dresses warmly and we are packed and on the road, and it
is definitely cold. Within minutes all the heat of the warm clothing is
drained out by the wind and I am shivering with big shivers. Bracing.

It ought to warm up as soon as the sun gets higher in the sky. About half
an hour of this and we'll be in Ellendale for breakfast. We should cover a
lot of miles today on these straight roads.

If it weren't so damn cold this would be just gorgeous riding. Low-angled
dawn sun striking what looks almost like frost covering those fields, but I
guess it's just dew, sparkling and kind of misty. Dawn shadows everywhere
make it look less flat than yesterday. All to ourselves. Nobody's even up
yet, it looks like. My watch says six-thirty. The old glove above it looks
like it's got frost on it, but I guess it's just residues from the soaking
last night. Good old beat-up gloves. They are so stiff now from the cold I
can hardly straighten my hand out.

I talked yesterday about caring, I care about these moldy old riding
gloves. I smile at them flying through the breeze beside me because they
have been there for so many years and are so old and so tired and so rotten
there is something kind of humorous about them. They have become filled
with oil and sweat and dirt and spattered bugs and now when I set them down
flat on a table, even when they are not cold, they won't stay flat. They've
got a memory of their own. They cost only three dollars and have been
restitched so many times it is getting impossible to repair them, yet I
take a lot of time and pains to do it anyway because I can't imagine any
new pair taking their place. That is impractical, but practicality isn't
the whole thing with gloves or with anything else.

The machine itself receives some of the same feelings. With over 27,000 on
it it's getting to be something of a high-miler, an old-timer, although
there are plenty of older ones running. But over the miles, and I think
most cyclists will agree with this, you pick up certain feelings about an
individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no
other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year
brought it over for repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard
to believe it had come from the same factory years ago. You could see that
long ago it had settled into its own kind of feel and ride and sound,
completely different from mine. No worse, but different.

I suppose you could call that a personality. Each machine has its own,
unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum
total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly
changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better,
and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle
maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers and,
depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting
grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured,
long-lasting friends. This one, despite the murderous treatment it got at
the hands of those alleged mechanics, seems to have recovered and has been
requiring fewer and fewer repairs as time goes on.

There it is! Ellendale!

A water tower, groves of trees and buildings among them in the morning
sunlight. I've just given in to the shivering which has been almost
continuous the whole trip. The watch says seven-fifteen.

A few minutes later we park by some old brick buildings. I turn to John and
Sylvia who have pulled up behind us. ``That was cold!'' I say.

They just stare at me fish-eyed.

``Bracing, what?'' I say. No answer.

I wait until they are completely off, then see that John is trying to untie
all their luggage. He is having trouble with the knot. He gives up and we
all move toward the restaurant.

I try again. I'm walking backward in front of them toward the restaurant,
feeling a little manic from the ride, wringing my hands and laughing.
``Sylvia! Speak to me!'' Not a smile.

I guess they really were cold.

They order breakfast without looking up.

Breakfast ends, and I say finally, ``What next?''

John says slowly and deliberately, ``We're not leaving here until it warms
up.'' He has a sheriff-at-sundown tone in his voice, which I suppose makes
it final.

So John and Sylvia and Chris sit and stay warm in the lobby of the hotel
adjoining the restaurant, while I go out for a walk.

I guess they're kind of mad at me for getting them up so early to ride
through that kind of stuff. When you're stuck together like this, I figure
small differences in temperament are bound to show up. I remember, now that
I think of it, I've never been cycling with them before one or two o'clock
in the afternoon, although for me dawn and early morning is always the
greatest time for riding.

The town is clean and fresh and unlike the one we woke up in this morning.
Some people are on the street and are opening stores and saying, ``Good
morning'' and talking and commenting about how cold it is. Two thermometers
on the shady side of the street read 42 and 46 degrees. One in the sun
reads 65 degrees.

After a few blocks the main street goes onto two hard, muddy tracks into a
field, past a quonset hut full of farm machinery and repair tools, and then
ends in a field. A man standing in the field is looking at me suspiciously,
wondering what I am doing, probably, as I look into the quonset hut. I
return down the street, find a chilly bench and stare at the motorcycle.
Nothing to do.

It was cold all right, but not that cold. How do John and Sylvia ever get
through Minnesota winters? I wonder. There's kind of a glaring
inconsistency here, that's almost too obvious to dwell on. If they can't
stand physical discomfort and they can't stand technology, they've got a
little compromising to do. They depend on technology and condemn it at the
same time. I'm sure they know that and that just contributes to their
dislike of the whole situation. They're not presenting a logical thesis,
they're just reporting how it is. But three farmers are coming into town
now, rounding the corner in that brand-new pickup truck. I'll bet with them
it's just the other way around. They're going to show off that truck and
their tractor and that new washing machine and they'll have the tools to
fix them if they go wrong, and know how to use the tools. They value
technology. And they're the ones who need it the least. If all technology
stopped, tomorrow, these people would know how to make out. It would be
rough, but they'd survive. John and Sylvia and Chris and I would be dead in
a week. This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is.

Blind alley, though. If somone's ungrateful and you tell him he's
ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

A half hour later the thermometer by the hotel door reads 53 degrees.
Inside the empty main dining room of the hotel I find them, looking
restless. They seem, by their expressions, to be in a better mood though,
and John says optimistically, ``I'm going to put on everything I own, and
then we'll make it all right.''

He goes out to the cycles, and when he comes back says, ``I sure hate to
unpack all that stuff, but I don't want another ride like that last one.''
He says it is freezing in the men's room, and since there is no one else in
the dining room, he crosses behind a table back from where we are sitting,
and I am sitting at the table, talking to Sylvia, and then I look over and
there is John, all decked out in a full-length set of pale-blue long
underwear. He is smirking from ear to ear at how silly he looks. I stare at
his glasses lying on the table for a moment and then say to Sylvia:

``You know, just a moment ago we were sitting here talking to Clark Kent --
see, there's his glasses -- and now all of a sudden -- Lois, do you
suppose? -- ''

John howls. ``CHICKENMAN!''

He glides over the varnished lobby floor like a skater, does a handspring,
then glides back. He raises one arm over his head and then crouches as if
starting for the sky. ``I'm ready, here I go!'' He shakes his head sadly.
``Jeez, I hate to bust through that nice ceiling, but my X-ray vision tells
me somebody's in trouble.'' Chris is giggling.

``We'll all be in trouble if you don't get some clothes on,'' Sylvia says.

John laughs. ``An exposer, hey? `The Ellendale revealer!' '' He struts
around some more, then begins to put his clothes on over the underwear. He
says, ``Oh no, oh no, they wouldn't do that. Chickenman and the police have
an understanding. They know who's on the side of law and order and justice
and decency and fair play for everyone.''

When we hit the highway again it is still chilly, but not like it was. We
pass through a number of towns and gradually, almost imperceptibly, the sun
warms us up, and my feelings warm up with it. The tired feeling wears off
completely and the wind and sun feel good now, making it real. It's
happening, just from the warming of the sun, the road and green prairie
farmland and buffeting wind coming together. And soon it is nothing but
beautiful warmth and wind and speed and sun down the empty road. The last
chills of the morning are thawed by the warm air. Wind and more sun and
more smooth road.

So green this summer and so fresh.

There are white and gold daisies among the grass in front of an old wire
fence, a meadow with some cows and far in the distance a low rising of the
land with something golden on it. Hard to know what it is. No need to know.

Where there is a slight rise in the road the drone of the motor becomes
heavier. We top the rise, see a new spread of land before us, the road
descends and the drone of the engine falls away again. Prairie. Tranquil
and detached.

Later, when we stop, Sylvia has tears in her eyes from the wind, and she
stretches out her arms and says, ``It's so beautiful. It's so empty.''

I show Chris how to spread his jacket on the ground and use an extra shirt
for a pillow. He is not at all sleepy but I tell him to lie down anyway,
he'll need the rest. I open up my own jacket to soak up more heat. John
gets his camera out.

After a while he says, ``This is the hardest stuff in the world to
photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty degree lens, or something.
You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and it's just
nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, it's gone.''

I say, ``That's what you don't see in a car, I suppose.''

Sylvia says, ``Once when I was about ten we stopped like this by the road
and I used half a roll of film taking pictures. And when the pictures came
back I cried. There wasn't anything there.''

``When are we going to get going?'' Chris says.

``What's your hurry?'' I ask.

``I just want to get going.''

``There's nothing up ahead that's any better than it is right here.''

He looks down silently with a frown. ``Are we going to go camping
tonight?'' he asks. The Sutherlands look at me apprehensively.

``Are we?'' he repeats.

``We'll see later,'' I say.

``Why later?''

``Because I don't know now.''

``Why don't you know now?''

``Well, I just don't know now why I just don't know.''

John shrugs that it's okay.

``This isn't the best camping country,'' I say. ``There's no cover and no
water.'' But suddenly I add, ``All right, tonight we'll camp out.'' We had
talked about it before.

So we move down the empty road. I don't want to own these prairies, or
photograph them, or change them, or even stop or even keep going. We are
just moving down the empty road.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

5

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 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, and 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 malteds 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 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 slipping. 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 life style
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.

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 county 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 to 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 spΣt 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 last 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 mosquitos 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 weren'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 mosquitos 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 Phædrus.

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? --

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

6

My watch says nine o'clock. And it's already too hot to sleep. Outside the
sleeping bag, the sun is already high into the sky. The air around is clear
and dry.

I get up puffy-eyed and arthritic from the ground.

My mouth is already dry and cracked and my face and hands are covered with
mosquito bites. Some sunburn from yesterday morning is hurting.

Beyond the pines are burned grass and clumps of earth and sand so bright
they are hard to look at. The heat, silence, and barren hills and blank sky
give a feeling of great, intense space.

Not a bit of moisture in the sky. Today's going to be a scorcher.

I walk out of the pines onto a stretch of barren sand between some grass
and watch for a long time, meditatively -- .

I've decided today's Chautauqua will begin to explore Phædrus' world. It
was intended earlier simply to restate some of his ideas that relate to
technology and human values and make no reference to him personally, but
the pattern of thought and memory that occurred last night has indicated
this is not the way to go. To omit him now would be to run from something
that should not be run from.

In the first grey of the morning what Chris said about his Indian friend's
grandmother came back to me, clearing something up. She said ghosts appear
when someone has not been buried right. That's true. He never was buried
right, and that's exactly the source of the trouble.

Later I turn and see John is up and looking at me uncomprehendingly. He is
still not really awake, and now walks aimlessly in circles to clear his
head. Soon Sylvia is up too and her left eye is all puffed up. I ask her
what happened. She says it is from mosquito bites. I begin to collect gear
to repack the cycle. John does the same.

When this is done we get a fire started while Sylvia opens up packages of
bacon and eggs and bread for breakfast.

When the food is ready, I go over and wake Chris. He doesn't want to get
up. I tell him again. He says no. I grab the bottom of the sleeping bag,
give it a mighty tablecloth jerk, and he is out of it, blinking in the pine
needles. It takes him a while to figure out what has happened, while I roll
up the sleeping bag.

He comes to breakfast looking insulted, eats one bite, says he isn't
hungry, his stomach hurts. I point to the lake down below us, so strange in
the middle of the semidesert, but he doesn't show any interest. He repeats
his complaint. I just let it go by and John and Sylvia disregard it too.
I'm glad they were told what the situation is with him. It might have
created real friction otherwise.

We finish breakfast silently, and I'm oddly tranquil. The decision about
Phædrus may have something to do with it. But we are also perhaps a hundred
feet above the reservoir, looking across it into a kind of Western
spaciousness. Barren hills, no one anywhere, not a sound; and there is
something about places like this that raises your spirits a little and
makes you think that things will probably get better.

While loading the remaining gear on the luggage rack I see with surprise
that the rear tire is worn way down. All that speed and heavy load and heat
on the road yesterday must have caused it. The chain is also sagging and I
get out the tools to adjust it and then groan.

``What's the matter,'' John says.

``Thread's stripped in the chain adjustment.''

I remove the adjusting bolt and examine the threads. ``It's my own fault
for trying to adjust it once without loosening the axle nut. The bolt is
good.'' I show it to him. ``It looks like the internal threading in the
frame that's stripped.''

John stares at the wheel for a long time. ``Think you can make it into
town?''

``Oh, yeah, sure. You can run it forever. It just makes the chain difficult
to adjust.''

He watches carefully as I take up the rear axle nut until it's barely snug,
tap it sideways with a hammer until the chain slack is right, then tighten
up the axle nut with all my might to keep the axle from slipping forward
later on, and replace the cotter pin. Unlike the axle nuts on a car, this
one doesn't affect bearing tightness.

``How did you know how to do that?'' he asks.

``You just have to figure it out.''

``I wouldn't know where to start,'' he says.

I think to myself, That's the problem, all right, where to start. To reach
him you have to back up and back up, and the further back you go, the
further back you see you have to go, until what looked like a small problem
of communication turns into a major philosophic enquiry. That, I suppose,
is why the Chautauqua.

I repack the tool kit and close the side cover plates and think to myself,
He's worth reaching though.

On the road again the dry air cools off the slight sweat from that chain
job and I'm feeling good for a while. As soon as the sweat dries off
though, it's hot. Must be in the eighties already.

There's no traffic on this road, and we're moving right along. It's a
traveling day.

Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there
was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it,
but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that
will become apparent I'd prefer that he remain forgotten, but there's no
choice other than to reopen his case.

I don't know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus himself, and
he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have
said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece
together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about. Since the
basic ideas for this Chautauqua were taken from him there will be no real
deviation, only an enlargement that may make the Chautauqua more
understandable than if it were presented in a purely abstract way. The
purpose of the enlargement is not to argue for him, certainly not to praise
him. The purpose is to bury him...forever.

Back in Minnesota when we were traveling through some marshland I did some
talking about the ``shapes'' of technology, the ``death force'' that the
Sutherlands seem to be running from. I want to move now in the opposite
direction from the Sutherlands, toward that force and into its center. In
doing so we will be entering Phædrus' world, the only world he ever knew,
in which all understanding is in terms of underlying form.

The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it
is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of
their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying
form, and when you try to discuss these modes of discussion you get
involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no platform
from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.

Previously I was discussing his world of underlying form, or at least the
aspect of it called technology, from an external view. Now I think it's
right to talk about that world of underlying form from its own point of
view. I want to talk about the underlying form of the world of underlying
form itself.

To do this, first of all, a dichotomy is necessary, but before I can use it
honestly I have to back up and say what it is and means, and that is a long
story in itself. Part of this back-up problem. But right now I just want to
use a dichotomy and explain it later. I want to divide human understanding
into two kinds...classical understanding and romantic understanding. In
terms of ultimate truth a dichotomy of this sort has little meaning but it
is quite legitimate when one is operating within the classic mode used to
discover or create a world of underlying form. The terms classic and
romantic, as Phædrus used them, mean the following:

A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form
itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate
appearance. If you were to show an engine or a mechanical drawing or
electronic schematic to a romantic it is unlikely he would see much of
interest in it. It has no appeal because the reality he sees is its
surface. Dull, complex lists of names, lines and numbers. Nothing
interesting. But if you were to show the same blueprint or schematic or
give the same description to a classical person he might look at it and
then become fascinated by it because he sees that within the lines and
shapes and symbols is a tremendous richness of underlying form.

The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative,
intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. ``Art'' when it is
opposed to ``Science'' is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or
by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the
northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with
femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.

The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws...which are
themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European
cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law
and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although
motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
The dirt, the grease, the mastery of underlying form required all give it
such a negative romantic appeal that women never go near it.

Although surface ugliness is often found in the classic mode of
understanding it is not inherent in it. There is a classic esthetic which
romantics often miss because of its subtlety. The classic style is
straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully
proportioned. Its purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order
out of chaos and make the unknown known. It is not an esthet- ically free
and natural style. It is esthetically restrained. Everything is under
control. Its value is measured in terms of the skill with which this
control is maintained.

To a romantic this classic mode often appears dull, awkward and ugly, like
mechanical maintenance itself. Everything is in terms of pieces and parts
and components and relationships. Nothing is figured out until it's run
through the computer a dozen times. Everything's got to be measured and
proved. Oppressive. Heavy. Endlessly grey. The death force.

Within the classic mode, however, the romantic has some appearances of his
own. Frivolous, irrational, erratic, untrustworthy, interested primarily in
pleasure-seeking. Shallow. Of no substance. Often a parasite who cannot or
will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society. By now these battle
lines should sound a little familiar.

This is the source of the trouble. Persons tend to think and feel
exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand
and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing
to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living
has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes. There is no point at
which these visions of reality are unified.

And so in recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic
culture and a romantic counterculture...two worlds growingly alienated and
hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this
way, a house divided against itself. No one wants it really...despite what
his antagonists in the other dimension might think.

It is within this context that what Phædrus thought and said is
significant. But no one was listening at that time and they only thought
him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then
genuinely insane. There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of
his writing at the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this
hostile opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in
others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the
estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached.
In Phædrus' case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent
removal from society.

I see we are at the left turn onto US 12 and John has pulled up for gas. I
pull up beside him.

The thermometer by the door of the station reads 92 degrees. ``Going to be
another rough one today,'' I say.

When the tanks are filled we head across the street into a restaurant for
coffee. Chris, of course, is hungry.

I tell him I've been waiting for that. I tell him he eats with the rest of
us or not all. Not angrily. Just matter-of-factly. He's reproachful but
sees how it's going to be.

I catch a fleeting look of relief from Sylvia. Evidently she thought this
was going to be a continuous problem.

When we have finished the coffee and are outside again the heat is so
ferocious we move off on the cycles as fast as possible. Again there is
that momentary coolness, but it disappears. The sun makes the burned grass
and sand so bright I have to squint to cut down glare. This US 12 is old,
bad highway. The broken concrete is tar-patched and bumpy. Road signs
indicate detours ahead. On either side of the road are occasional worn
sheds and shacks and roadside stands that have accumulated through the
years. The traffic is heavy now. I'm just as happy to be thinking about the
rational, analytical, classical world of Phædrus.

His kind of rationality has been used since antiquity to remove oneself
from the tedium and depression of one's immediate surroundings. What makes
it hard to see is that where once it was used to get away from it all, the
escape has been so successful that now it is the ``it all'' that the
romantics are trying to escape. What makes his world so hard to see clearly
is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.

His way of looking at things produces a kind of description that can be
called an ``analytic'' description. That is another name of the classic
platform from which one discusses things in terms of their underlying form.
He was a totally classic person. And to give a fuller description of what
this is I want now to turn his analytic approach back upon itself...to
analyze analysis itself. I want to do this first of all by giving an
extensive example of it and then by dissecting what it is. The motorcycle
is a perfect subject for it since the motorcycle itself was invented by
classic minds. So listen:

A motorcycle may be divided for purposes of classical rational analysis by
means of its component assemblies and by means of its functions.

If divided by means of its component assemblies, its most basic division is
into a power assembly and a running assembly.

The power assembly may be divided into the engine and the power-delivery
system. The engine will be taken up first.

The engine consists of a housing containing a power train, a fuel-air
system, an ignition system, a feedback system and a lubrication system.

The power train consists of cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, a
crankshaft and a flywheel.

The fuel-air system components, which are part of the engine, consist of a
gas tank and filter, an air cleaner, a carburetor, valves and exhaust
pipes.

The ignition system consists of an alternator, a rectifier, a battery, a
high-voltage coil and spark plugs.

The feedback system consists of a cam chain, a camshaft, tappets and a
distributor.

The lubrication system consists of an oil pump and channels throughout the
housing for distribution of the oil.

The power-delivery system accompanying the engine consists of a clutch, a
transmission and a chain.

The supporting assembly accompanying the power assembly consists of a
frame, including foot pegs, seat and fenders; a steering assembly; front
and rear shock absorbers; wheels; control levers and cables; lights and
horn; and speed and mileage indicators.

That's a motorcycle divided according to its components. To know what the
components are for, a division according to functions is necessary:

A motorcycle may be divided into normal running functions and special,
operator-controlled functions.

Normal running functions may be divided into functions during the intake
cycle, functions during the compression cycle, functions during the power
cycle and functions during the exhaust cycle.

And so on. I could go on about which functions occur in their proper
sequence during each of the four cycles, then go on to the
operator-controlled functions and that would be a very summary description
of the underlying form of a motorcycle. It would be extremely short and
rudimentary, as descriptions of this sort go. Almost any one of the
components mentioned can be expanded on indefinitely. I've read an entire
engineering volume on contact points alone, which are just a small but
vital part of the distributor. There are other types of engines than the
single-cylinder Otto engine described here: two-cycle engines,
multiple-cylinder engines, diesel engines, Wankel engines...but this
example is enough.

This description would cover the ``what'' of the motorcycle in terms of
components, and the ``how'' of the engine in terms of functions. It would
badly need a ``where'' analysis in the form of an illustration, and also a
``why'' analysis in the form of engineering principles that led to this
particular conformation of parts. But the purpose here isn't exhaustively
to analyze the motorcycle. It's to provide a starting point, an example of
a mode of understanding of things which will itself become an object of
analysis.

There's certainly nothing strange about this description at first hearing.
It sounds like something from a beginning textbook on the subject, or
perhaps a first lesson in a vocational course. What is unusual about it is
seen when it ceases to be a mode of discourse and becomes an object of
discourse. Then certain things can be pointed to.

The first thing to be observed about this description is so obvious you
have to hold it down or it will drown out every other observation. This is:
It is just duller than ditchwater. Yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah-da, yah,
carburetor, gear ratio, compression, yah-da-yah, piston, plugs, intake,
yah-da-yah, on and on and on. That is the romantic face of the classic
mode. Dull, awkward and ugly. Few romantics get beyond that point.

But if you can hold down that most obvious observation, some other things
can be noticed that do not at first appear.

The first is that the motorcycle, so described, is almost impossible to
understand unless you already know how one works. The immediate surface
impressions that are essential for primary understanding are gone. Only the
underlying form is left.

The second is that the observer is missing. The description doesn't say
that to see the piston you must remove the cylinder head. ``You'' aren't
anywhere in the picture. Even the ``operator'' is a kind of personalityless
robot whose performance of a function on the machine is completely
mechanical. There are no real subjects in this description. Only objects
exist that are independent of any observer.

The third is that the words ``good'' and ``bad'' and all their synonyms are
completely absent. No value judgments have been expressed anywhere, only
facts.

The fourth is that there is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an
intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don't see it
moving. You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are
being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and
organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves.

For example, the feedback mechanism which includes the camshaft and cam
chain and tappets and distributor exists only because of an unusual cut of
this analytic knife. If you were to go to a motorcycle-parts department and
ask them for a feedback assembly they wouldn't know what the hell you were
talking about. They don't split it up that way. No two manufacturers ever
split it up quite the same way and every mechanic is familiar with the
problem of the part you can't buy because you can't find it because the
manufacturer considers it a part of something else.

It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into
thinking that motorcycles or anything else are the way they are just
because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to
concentrate on the knife itself. Later I will want to show how an ability
to use this knife creatively and effectively can result in solutions to the
classic and romantic split.

Phædrus was a master with this knife, and used it with dexterity and a
sense of power. With a single stroke of analytic thought he split the whole
world into parts of his own choosing, split the parts and split the
fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until he had reduced it
to what he wanted it to be. Even the special use of the terms ``classic''
and ``romantic'' are examples of his knifemanship.

But if this were all there were to him, analytic skill, I would be more
than willing to shut up about him. What makes it important not to shut up
about him was that he used this skill in such a bizarre and yet meaningful
way. No one ever saw this, I don't think he even saw it himself, and it may
be an illusion of my own, but the knife he used was less that of an
assassin than that of a poor surgeon. Perhaps there is no difference. But
he saw a sick and ailing thing happening and he started cutting deep,
deeper and deeper to get at the root of it. He was after something. That is
important. He was after something and he used the knife because that was
the only tool he had. But he took on so much and went so far in the end his
real victim was himself.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

7

Heat is everywhere now. I can't ignore it anymore. The air is like a
furnace blast so hot that my eyes under the goggles feel cool compared to
the rest of my face. My hands are cool but the gloves have big black spots
from perspiration on the back surrounded by white streaks of dried salt.

On the road ahead a crow tugs on some carrion and flies up slowly as we
approach. It looks like a lizard on the road, dry and stuck to the tar.

On the horizon appears an image of buildings, shimmering slightly. I look
down at the map and it must be Bowman. I think about ice water and air
conditioning.

On the street and sidewalks of Bowman we see almost no one, even though
plenty of parked cars show they're here. All inside. We swing the machines
into an angled parking place with a tight turn that points them outward,
for when we're ready to go. A lone, elderly person wearing a broad-brimmed
hat watches us put the cycles on their stands and remove helmets and
goggles.

``Hot enough for you?'' he asks. His expression is blank.

John shakes his head and says, ``Gawd!''

The expression, shaded by the hat, becomes almost a smile.

``What is the temperature?'' John asks.

``Hundred and two,'' he says, ``last I saw. Should go to hundred and
four.''

He asks us how far we have come and we tell him and he nods with a kind of
approval. ``That's a long way,'' he says. Then he asks about the machines.

The beer and air conditioning are calling, but we don't break away. We just
stand there in the hundred-and-two sun talking to this person. He is a
stockman, retired, says this is pretty much ranch country around here and
he used to own a cycle years ago. It pleases me that he should want to talk
about his Henderson in this hundred-and-two sun. We talk about it for a
while, with growing impatience from John and Sylvia and Chris, and when we
finally say good-bye he says he is glad to have met us and his expression
is still blank but we sense that he really meant it. He walks away with a
kind of slow dignity in the hundred-and-two sun.

In the restaurant I try to comment on this but no one is interested. John
and Sylvia look really out of it. They just sit and soak up the
air-conditioned air without a move. The waitress comes for the order and
that snaps them out of it a little, but they are not ready and so she goes
away again.

``I don't think I want to leave here,'' Sylvia says.

An image of the elderly man outside in the wide- brimmed hat comes back to
me. ``Think what it was like around here before air conditioning,'' I say.

``I am,'' she says.

``With the roads this hot and that bad back tire of mine, we shouldn't go
more than sixty,'' I say.

No comment from them.

Chris, in contrast to them, seems to be back to his normal self, alert and
watching everything. When the food comes he wolfs it down and then, before
we are half-finished, asks for more. He gets it and we wait for him to
finish.

Miles later and the heat is just ferocious. Sunglasses and goggles are not
enough for this glare. You need a welder's mask.

The High Plains break up into washed-out and gullied hills. It is all
bright whitish tan. Not a blade of grass anywhere. Just scattered weed
stalks and rocks and sand. The black of the highway is a relief to look at
so I stare down at it and study how the blur whizzes by underfoot. Beside
it I see the left exhaust pipe has picked up a bluer color than it has ever
had before. I spit on my glove tips, touch it and can see the sizzle. Not
good.

It's important now to just live with this and not fight it mentally -- mind
control -- .

I should talk now about Phædrus' knife. It'll help understand some of the
things we talked about.

The application of this knife, the division of the world into parts and the
building of this structure, is something everybody does. All the time we
are aware of millions of things around us...these changing shapes, these
burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock
and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road...aware of
these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something
unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We
could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them
because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to
think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call
consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of
selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape
of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.

Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a
process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide
the sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now
and then. The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into
parts.

The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it
the more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two
are alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way,
and we can form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this
similarity and dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles...sizes in
different piles...grain shapes in different piles...subtypes of grain
shapes in different piles...grades of opacity in different piles...and so
on, and on, and on. You'd think the process of subdivision and
classification would come to an end somewhere, but it doesn't. It just goes
on and on.

Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for
sorting and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward
the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of
looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.

What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that
does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites
them into one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or
contemplation of unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will
instead seek to direct attention to the endless landscape from which the
sand is taken. That is what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.

To understand what he was trying to do it's necessary to see that part of
the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure
in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without
seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part
of the Buddha that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the
Buddha entirely.

There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the
motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to
ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is
everywhere. But just as obviously to ask that question is to look in the
right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. About the Buddha that exists
independently of any analytic thought much has been said...some would say
too much, and would question any attempt to add to it. But about the Buddha
that exists within analytic thought, and gives that analytic thought its
direction, virtually nothing has been said, and there are historic reasons
for this. But history keeps happening, and it seems no harm and maybe some
positive good to add to our historical heritage with some talk in this area
of discourse.

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is
always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in
the arts. Mark Twain's experience comes to mind, in which, after he had
mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he
discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed. But
what is less noticed in the arts...something is always created too. And
instead of just dwelling on what is killed it's important also to see
what's created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity
that is neither good nor bad, but just is.

We pass through a town called Marmarth but John doesn't stop even for a
rest and so we go on. More furnace heat, into some badlands, and we cross
the border into Montana. A sign by the road announces it.

Sylvia waves her arms up and down and I beep the horn in response, but when
I look at the sign my feelings are not jubilant at all. For me its
information causes a sudden inward tension that can't exist for them.
They've no way of knowing we're now in the country where he lived.

All this talk so far about classic and romantic understanding must seem a
strangely oblique way of describing him, but to get at Phædrus, this
oblique route is the only one to take. To describe his physical appearance
or the statistics of his life would be to dwell on misleading
superficialities. And to come at him directly would be to invite disaster.

He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a
reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him
at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see
the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at
it. Otherwise your own opinions block the way. There is only one access to
him that I can see as passable and we still have a way to go.

I've been going into all this business of analyses and definitions and
hierarchies not for their own sake but to lay the groundwork for an
understanding of the direction in which Phædrus went.

I told Chris the other night that Phædrus spent his entire life pursuing a
ghost. That was true. The ghost he pursued was the ghost that underlies all
of technology, all of modern science, all of Western thought. It was the
ghost of rationality itself. I told Chris that he found the ghost and that
when he found it he thrashed it good. I think in a figurative sense that is
true. The things I hope to bring to light as we go along are some of the
things he uncovered. Now the times are such that others may at last find
them of value. No one then would see the ghost that Phædrus pursued, but I
think now that more and more people see it, or get glimpses of it in bad
moments, a ghost which calls itself rationality but whose appearance is
that of incoherence and meaninglessness, which causes the most normal of
everyday acts to seem slightly mad because of their irrelevance to anything
else. This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that
the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but
that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds
struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen
ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no
other purpose. That is what the ghost says.

At Baker, where we stop, the thermometers are reading 108 degrees in the
shade. When I take my gloves off, the metal of the gas tank is so hot I
can't touch it. The engine is making ominous knick-knicking sounds from
overheating. Very bad. The rear tire has worn badly too, and I feel with my
hand that it's almost as hot as the gas tank.

``We're going to have to slow down,'' I say.

``What?''

``I don't think we should go over fifty,'' I say.

John looks at Sylvia and she looks at him. Something has already been said
between them about my slowness. They both look as if they've about had it.

``We just want to get there fast,'' John says, and they both walk toward a
restaurant.

The chain has been running hot and dry too. In the righthand saddlebag I
rummage for a can of spray lubricant, find it, then start the engine and
spray the moving chain. The chain is still so hot the solvent evaporates
almost instantly. Then I squirt a little oil on, let it run for a minute
and shut the engine off. Chris waits patiently, then follows me into the
restaurant.

``I thought you said the big slump was going to come on the second day,''
Sylvia says as we approach the booth they are in.

``Second or third,'' I reply.

``Or fourth or fifth?''

``Maybe.''

She and John look at each other again with the same expression they showed
before. It seems to say, ``Three's a crowd.'' They may want to go ahead
fast and wait for me in some town up ahead. I'd suggest it myself except
that if they go much faster they won't be waiting for me in some town.
It'll be by the side of the road.

``I don't know how the people here stand this,'' Sylvia says.

``Well, it's hard country,'' I say with a little irritation. ``They know
it's hard before they come here and are ready for it.''

I add, ``If one person complains he just makes it that much harder for the
others. They've got stamina. They know how to keep on going.''

John and Sylvia don't say much, and John finishes his Coke early and is off
to a bar for a snort. I go out and check the cycle luggage again and find
that the new pack has been compressing a little and so take up the slack in
the ropes and retie them.

Chris points to a thermometer in direct sunlight and we see it has gone all
the way above the scale at 120 degrees.

Before we are out of town I am sweating again. The cool drying-off period
doesn't last even half a minute.

The heat just slams into us. Even with dark sunglasses I have to squint my
eyes into slits. There's nothing but burning sand and pale sky so bright
it's hard to look anywhere. It's just become white-hot everywhere. A real
inferno.

John up ahead is speeding faster and faster. I give up on him and slow it
down to fifty-five. Unless you're just looking for trouble in this heat you
don't run tires at eighty-five. A blowout on this stretch would really be
it.

I suppose they took what I said as a kind of rebuke but I didn't have that
in mind. I'm no more comfortable than they are in this heat but there's no
point in dwelling on it. All day while I've been thinking and talking about
Phædrus they must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That's
what's really wearing them down. The thought.

Some things can be said about Phædrus as an individual:

He was a knower of logic, the classical system-of-the-system which
describes the rules and procedures of systematic thought by which analytic
knowledge may be structured and interrelated. He was so swift at this his
Stanford-Binet IQ, which is essentially a record of skill at analytic
manipulation, was recorded at 170, a figure that occurs in only one person
in fifty thousand.

He was systematic, but to say he thought and acted like a machine would be
to misunderstand the nature of his thought. It was not like pistons and
wheels and gears all moving at once, massive and coordinated. The image of
a laser beam comes to mind instead; a single pencil of light of such
terrific energy in such extreme concentration it can be shot at the moon
and its reflection seen back on earth. Phædrus did not try to use his
brilliance for general illumination. He sought one specific distant target
and aimed for it and hit it. And that was all. General illumination of that
target he hit now seems to be left for me.

In proportion to his intelligence he was extremely isolated. There's no
record of his having had close friends. He traveled alone. Always. Even in
the presence of others he was completely alone. People sometimes felt this
and felt rejected by it, and so did not like him, but their dislike was not
important to him.

His wife and family seem to have suffered the most. His wife says those who
tried to go beyond the barriers of his reserve found themselves facing a
blank. My impression is that they were starved for some kind of affection
which he never gave.

No one really knew him. That is evidently the way he wanted it, and that's
the way it was. Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence.
Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny
solitary intelligence.

This still doesn't do it though, because this and the image of a laser beam
convey the idea that he was completely cold and unemotional, and that is
not so. In his pursuit of what I have called the ghost of rationality he
was a fanatic hunter.

One fragment becomes especially vivid now of a scene in the mountains where
the sun was behind the mountain half an hour and an early twilight had
changed the trees and even the rocks to almost blackened shades of blue and
grey and brown. Phædrus had been there three days without food. His food
had run out but he was thinking deeply and seeing things and was reluctant
to leave. He was not far away from where he knew there was a road and was
in no hurry.

In the dusk coming down the trail he saw a movement and then what seemed to
be a dog approaching on the trail, a very large sheep dog, or an animal
more like a husky, and he wondered what would bring a dog to this obscure
place at this time of evening. He disliked dogs, but this animal moved in a
way that forestalled these feelings. It seemed to be watching him, judging
him. Phædrus stared into the animal's eyes for a long time, and for a
moment felt some kind of recognition. Then the dog disappeared.

He realized much later it was a timber wolf, and the memory of this
incident stayed with him a long time. I think it stayed with him because he
had seen a kind of image of himself.

A photograph can show a physical image in which time is static, and a
mirror can show a physical image in which time is dynamic, but I think what
he saw on the mountain was another kind of image altogether which was not
physical and did not exist in time at all. It was an image nevertheless and
that is why he felt recognition. It comes to me vividly now because I saw
it again last night as the visage of Phædrus himself.

Like that timber wolf on the mountain he had a kind of animal courage. He
went his own way with unconcern for consequences that sometimes stunned
people, and stuns me now to hear about it. He did not often swerve to right
or to left. I've discovered that. But this courage didn't arise from any
idealistic idea of self-sacrifice, only from the intensity of his pursuit,
and there was nothing noble about it.

I think his pursuit of the ghost of rationality occurred because he wanted
to wreak revenge on it, because he felt he himself was so shaped by it. He
wanted to free himself from his own image. He wanted to destroy it because
the ghost was what he was and he wanted to be free from the bondage of his
own identity. In a strange way, this freedom was achieved.

This account of him must sound unworldly, but the most unworldly part of it
all is yet to come. This is my own relationship to him. This has been
forestalled and obscured until now, but nevertheless must be known.

I first discovered him by inference from a strange series of events many
years ago. One Friday I had gone to work and gotten quite a lot done before
the weekend and was happy about that and later that day drove to a party
where, after talking to everybody too long and too loudly and drinking way
too much, went into a back room to lie down for a while.

When I awoke I saw that I'd slept the whole night, because now it was
daylight, and I thought, ``My God, I don't even know the name of the
hosts!'' and wondered what kind of embarrassment this was going to lead to.
The room didn't look like the room I had lain down in, but it had been dark
when I came in and I must have been blind drunk anyway.

I got up and saw that my clothes were changed. These were not the clothes I
had worn the night before. I walked out the door, but to my surprise the
doorway led not to rooms of a house but into a long corridor.

As I walked down the corridor I got the impression that everyone was
looking at me. Three different times a stranger stopped me and asked how I
felt. Thinking they were referring to my drunken condition I replied that I
didn't even have a hangover, which caused one of them to start to laugh,
but then catch himself.

At a room at the end of the corridor I saw a table where there was activity
of some sort going on. I sat down nearby, hoping to remain unnoticed until
I got all this figured out. But a woman dressed in white came up to me and
asked if I knew her name. I read the little name clip on her blouse. She
didn't see that I was doing this and seemed amazed, and walked off in a
hurry.

When she came back there was a man with her, and he was looking right at
me. He sat down next to me and asked me if I knew his name. I told him what
it was, and was as surprised as they were that I knew it.

``It's very early for this to be happening,'' he said.

``This looks like a hospital,'' I said.

They agreed.

``How did I get here?'' I asked, thinking about the drunken party.

The man said nothing and the woman looked down. Very little was explained.

It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that
everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was
reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the
growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk
experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of
which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate
court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean
me?

It was explained to me finally that ``You have a new personality now.'' But
this statement was no explanation at all. It puzzled me more than ever
since I had no awareness at all of any ``old'' personality. If they had
said, ``You are a new personality,'' it would have been much clearer. That
would have fitted. They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality
as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears.
But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A
collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones
and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality,
not the other way around.

But who was the old personality whom they had known and presumed I was a
continuation of?

This was my first inkling of the existence of Phædrus, many years ago. In
the days and weeks and years that have followed, I've learned much more.

He was dead. Destroyed by order of the court, enforced by the transmission
of high-voltage alternating current through the lobes of his brain.
Approximately 800 mills of amperage at durations of 0.5 to 1.5 seconds had
been applied on twenty-eight consecutive occasions, in a process known
technologically as ``Annihilation ECS.'' A whole personality had been
liquidated without a trace in a technologically faultless act that has
defined our relationship ever since. I have never met him. Never will.

And yet strange wisps of his memory suddenly match and fit this road and
desert bluffs and white-hot sand all around us and there is a bizarre
concurrence and then I know he has seen all of this. He was here, otherwise
I would not know it. He had to be. And in seeing these sudden coalescences
of vision and in recall of some strange fragment of thought whose origin I
have no idea of, I'm like a clairvoyant, a spirit medium receiving messages
from another world. That is how it is. I see things with my own eyes, and I
see things with his eyes too. He once owned them.

These EYES! That is the terror of it. These gloved hands I now look at,
steering the motorcycle down the road, were once his! And if you can
understand the feeling that comes from that, then you can understand real
fear...the fear that comes from knowing there is nowhere you can possibly
run.

We enter a low-rimmed canyon. Before long, a roadside stop I've been
waiting for appears. A few benches, a little building and some tiny green
trees with hoses running to their bases. John, so help me God, is at the
exit on the other side, ready to pull out onto the highway.

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.