‘I got to be his driver and so did Tony Johansen, the first. We were going down to Los Altos in the morning and for a while, Redwood City in the evening. Then it became Los Altos in the morning and evening. We had the two young children so we shared the practice as best we could. Tony was great about that. And in those drives we would ask him questions and he would say I will lecture about that. And unlike the lecture with the stick he generally did lecture about the question that I asked in the car. And so that collection that Marian made of those lectures that she typed up, so many of those hearken back to the ride in the car and what it was I was asking him.
The one about the waterfall is from the trip that Tony and I took him and Okusan on to Yosemite. He talked about the mountains of Japan and we thought, we should take him to Yosemite. So we took them in our little red Volkswagen bug for a day trip. And when we got to that valley and had the sun roof open, Suzuki Roshi stood open in the back with his head out the sunroof so that we were driving all through that valley with that wonderful image with him standing with his head sticking out looking at everything and he’d say, please stop! And we’d be out of the car and he’d disappear and he would leap up on rocks and he seemed to spring like a cat. And one of those rocks was by that waterfall that he spoke about. In the book it says exactly how high it was because there was a sign posted by it. And I remember he frightened Okusan and me and we were frightened for him because he was up on this huge boulder – I don’t know how he got there. We would just turn around and there he’d be perched up looking at that waterfall. I saw him do that a couple of times in trees. One time in Los Altos, we were in somebody’s house for breakfast and he was there beside me and the next moment he was up in the tree showing us how to prune the tree – which branches to cut off and that was one of the things he knew how to do – prune trees. And moving rocks.’ (from Cuke.com)
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