That’s really what Ph?drus was talking about when he said it’s all in the mind. It sounds insane when you just jump up and say it without reference to anything specific like an engine. But when you tie it down to something specific and concrete, the insane sound tends to disappear and you see he could have been saying something of importance.
The fourth tappet is too loose, which is what I had hoped. I adjust it. I check the timing and see that it is still right on and the points are not pitted, so I leave them alone, screw on the valve covers, replace the plugs and start it up.
The tappet noise is gone, but that doesn’t mean much yet while the oil is still cold. I let it idle while I pack the tools away, then climb on and head for a cycle shop a cyclist on the street told us about last night where they may have a chain adjuster link, and a new foot-peg rubber. Chris must have nervous feet. His foot pegs keep wearing out.
I go a couple blocks and still no tappet noise. It’s beginning to sound good, I think it’s gone. I won’t come to any conclusions until we’ve gone about thirty miles though. But until then, and right now, the sun is bright, the air is cool, my head is clear, there’s a whole day ahead of us, we’re almost to the mountains, it’s a good day to be alive. It’s this thinner air that does it. You always feel like this when you start getting into higher altitudes.
The altitude! That’s why the engine’s running rich. Sure, that’s got to be the reason. We’re at twenty-five hundred feet now. I’d better switch to standard jets. They take only a few minutes to put in. And lean out the idle adjustment a little. We’ll be getting up a lot higher than this.
Under some shady trees I find Bill’s Cycle Shop but no Bill.
A passerby says he has “maybe gone fishing somewhere”, leaving his shop wide open. We really are in the West. No one would leave a shop like this open in Chicago or New York.
Inside I see that Bill is a mechanic of the “photographic mind” school. Everything lying around everywhere. Wrenches, screwdrivers, old parts, old motorcycles, new parts, new motorcycles, sales literature, inner tubes, all scattered so thickly and clutteredly you can’t even see the workbenches under them. I couldn’t work in conditions like this but that’s just because I’m not a photographic-mind mechanic. Bill can probably turn around and put his hand on any tool in this mess without having to think about where it is. I’ve seen mechanics like that. Drive you crazy to watch them, but they get the job done just as well and sometimes faster. Move one tool three inches to the left though, and he’ll have to spend days looking for it.
Bill arrives with a grin about something. Sure, he’s got some jets for my machine and knows right where they are. I’ll have to wait a second though. He’s got to close a deal out in back on some Harley parts. I go with him out in a shed in back and see he is selling a whole Harley machine in used parts, except for the frame, which the customer already has. He is selling them all for $125. Not a bad price at all.
Coming back I comment, “He’ll know something about motorcycles before he gets those together.”
Bill laughs. “And that’s the best way to learn, too.”
He has the jets and foot-peg rubber but no chain adjuster link. I get the rubber and jets installed, take the lump out of the idle and ride back to the hotel.
Sylvia and John and Chris are just coming down the stairs with their stuff as I arrive. Their faces indicate they’re in the same good mood I’m in. We head down the main street, find a restaurant and order steaks for lunch.
“This is a great town”, John says, “really great. Surprised there were any like this left. I was looking all over this morning. They’ve got stockmen’s bars, high-top boots, silver-dollar belt buckles, Levis, Stetsons, the whole thing — and it’s real. It isn’t just Chamber of Commerce stuff. In the bar down the block this morning they just started talking to me like I’d lived here all my life.”
We order a round of beers. I see by a horseshoe sign on the wall we’re into Olympia beer territory now, and order that.
“They must have thought I was off a ranch or something”, John continues. “And this one old guy was talking away about how he wasn’t going to give a thing to the goddam boys, and I really enjoyed that. The ranch was going to go to the girls, cause the goddam boys spend every cent they got down at Suzie’s.” John breaks up with laughter. “Sorry he ever raised ’em, and so on. I thought all that stuff disappeared thirty years ago, but it’s still here.”
The waitress comes with the steaks and we knife right into them. That work on the cycle has given me an appetite.
“Something else that ought to interest you”, John says. “They were talking in the bar about Bozeman, where we’re going. They said the governor of Montana had a list of fifty radical college professors at the college in Bozeman he was going to fire. Then he got killed in a plane crash.”
“That was a long time ago”, I answer. These steaks really are good.
“I didn’t know they had a lot of radicals in this state.”
“They’ve got all kinds of people in this state”, I say. “But that was just right-wing politics.”
John helps himself to some more salt. He says, “A Washington newspaper columnist came through and put it in his column yesterday, and that’s why they were all talking about it. The president of the college confirmed it.”
“Did they print the list?”
“I don’t know. Did you know any of them?”
“If they had fifty names”, I say, “mine must have been one.” They both look at me with some surprise. I don’t know much about it, actually. It was him, of course, and with some feeling of falseness because of this I explain that a “radical” in Gallatin County, Montana, is a little different from a radical somewhere else.
“This was a college”, I tell them, “where the wife of the president of the United States was actually banned because she was ‘too controversial.’ ”
“Who?”
“Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“Oh my God”, John laughs, “that must have been wild.”
They want to hear more but it’s hard to say anything. Then I remember one thing: “In a situation like that a real radical’s actually got a perfect setup. He can do almost anything and get away with it because his opposition have already made asses out of themselves. They’ll make him look good no matter what he says.”
On the way out we pass a city park which I noticed last night, and which produced a memory concurrence. Just a vision of looking up into some trees. He had slept on that park bench one night on his way through to Bozeman. That’s why I didn’t recognize that forest yesterday. He’d come through at night, on his way to the college at Bozeman.
9
Now we follow the Yellowstone Valley right across Montana. It changes from Western sagebrush to Midwestern cornfields and back again, depending on whether it’s under irrigation from the river. Sometimes we cross over bluffs that take us out of the irrigated area, but usually we stay close to the river. We pass by a marker saying something about Lewis and Clark. One of them came up this way on a side excursion from the Northwest Passage.
Nice sound. Fits the Chautauqua. We’re really on a kind of Northwest Passage too. We pass through more fields and desert and the day wears on.
I want to pursue further now that same ghost that Ph?drus pursued… rationality itself, that dull, complex, classical ghost of underlying form.
This morning I talked about hierarchies of thought… the system. Now I want to talk about methods of finding one’s way through these hierarchies… logic.
Two kinds of logic are used, inductive and deductive. Inductive inferences start with observations of the machine and arrive at general conclusions. For example, if the cycle goes over a bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over another bump and the engine misfires, and then goes over a long smooth stretch of road and there is no misfiring, and then goes over a fourth bump and the engine misfires again, one can logically conclude that the misfiring is caused by the bumps. That is induction: reasoning from particular experiences to general truths.
