Opening paragraphs...................

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 towards 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 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.

-Robert M Pirsig,  Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance:  An Inquiry Into Values

Pirsig died last week.  I have owned my copy of this book since 1975.  Not sure that I ever completely read the whole book.  The attempt to correct that error in judgment is underway.