Friday Writings for Randos - nineteen-twenties feeling

{Friday Writings for Randos - A weekly post that features pieces from other writers that touch some facet of the Randonneuring experience, even if that was not the author's intent. It's stuff that's best read out loud - slowly.} This week it's:...

An excerpt from: 

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -

An inquiry into values

by Robert M. Pirsig

We travel down the eastern shore of Klamath lake on a three-lane highway that contains a lot of nineteen-twenties feeling. That's when these three-laners were all made. We pull in for lunch at a roadhouse which belongs to this era too. Wooden frame badly in need of paint, neon beer signs in the window, gravel and engine drippings for a front lawn.

Inside the toilet seat is cracked and the washbowl is covered with grease streaks, but on my way back to the booth I take a second look at the owner behind the bar. Uncomplicated, uncool and unbowed. This is his castle. We're his guests. And if we don't like his hamburgers we'd better shut up.

When they arrive, the hamburgers, with giant raw onions, are tasty and the bottle beer is fine. A whole meal for a lot less than you'd pay at one of those old-ladies places with plastic flowers in the window. As we eat, I see on the map we've taken a wrong turn way back and could have gotten to the ocean much quicker by way of another route.

It's hot now, a West Coast sticky hotness which after the Western Desert hotness is very depressing. Really, this is just transported East, all of this scene and I'd like to get to the ocean where it's cool as soon as possible.

I think about this all around the southern shore of Klamath Lake. Sticky hotness and nineteen-twenties funk.