3. “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and Me

In the spring of 1975, when I was 17 years old, I was accepted to the University of Virginia.  I had not been a great student in high school, and I felt lucky to be there.  Presumably in order to facilitate the mixing of young people who were all away from home for the first time, the incoming class was directed to read a recently published book that as on the best seller list called “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (ZAMM from now on) by a guy named Robert M. Pirsig.  We were to be prepared to discuss this book with a group of about twenty classmates and a member of the faculty during the “welcome new students” week. 

I found the book to be essentially unreadable.  It began like it was going to be a story about a man and his son riding around the country on a motorcycle, but it quickly veered off into strangeness, such as the difference between “classical” and “romantic” thinking – something like left-brain versus right brain, or C.P. Snow’s “The Two Cultures,” but more abstract.  The dichotomy between the two types of thinking, the book’s narrator argues, is responsible for a lot of the unhappiness in the world.  Or something like that.  In between these discussions was the mysterious Phaedrus, who was some brilliant guy who went crazy.  The narrator somehow knew this guy, but I couldn’t figure out how, or what any of this had to do with the plot (such as it was). I quit after about 70 pages.  Based on the group discussion at UVa I was not the only one who was confused by all this.  Over the next four years I recall a few brief comments about “that weird book,” but not much more.

I graduated from UVa in 1979, and partially as a reward my father gave me his support to spend that summer hiking on the Appalachian Trail (the “AT”).  I covered about 500 miles in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and a bit of southwestern Virginia in seven weeks before leaving with an injured foot.  No trophies or medals, but on the whole I felt that honor was satisfied.  A few weeks before I left the trail, I came across a fellow hiker who was reading – yes – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  I told him I tried it and couldn’t make sense of it; he told me he had the same problem until he finally figured out that the book’s narrator WAS Phaedrus, now recovered from his psychotic break and with a different personality.  He finished the book and asked me if I wanted it; this was not really kindness, since even an extra few ounces in a backpack takes its toll and he had no further use for it.  I said “sure,” and started reading it again.  This time I got through it, and even enjoyed it, although I still didn’t understand what the heck the narrator was talking about much of the time when he went off into philosophy.  What seemed to stay with me, however, were the first-person, present-tense descriptions of riding the motorcycle.  The book begins:

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 the 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 the 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 warm up again.

There was something about that low-key, almost passive description that seemed to get into my subconscious.  A page or two later, he describes what he finds attractive about riding:

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 the 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. 

Yeah. That.

Its effect on me seems to have been subliminal.  I started graduate school in Arizona that fall, and quickly discovered the department was not what I thought it was.  Both I and my friend Rusty from UVa who also ended up in Arizona dropped out, and we drove his yellow Pinto with all our worldly belongings to San Francisco.  I got a job in Silicon Valley, and later Rusty went back east.  (He would later get his doctorate from UVa.)  I had my first real job, and for the first time (and the last!) I had more money coming in than going out.  For reasons that seemed to me to come out of the blue, I thought that maybe I would spend the surplus on a motorcycle.  This was a strange idea; no one in my family rode (my father had years before I was born but quit after a crash), and I was a nerdy physics major if there ever was one.  I recall being interested in re-inventing, or at least expanding, myself – I liked the idea of being a guy who rode a motorcycle.  This was way outside of my view of myself. I found a nice used 400-cc Honda and bought it, and began riding it to work.   I still remember the first time I took an on-ramp and sped that motorized bicycle up to 65 miles an hour.  Holy S%&T!

At the end of my brief but influential 10-month stay in California, I mailed most of my possessions to Houston, Texas, where I was determined to try graduate school again.  With perhaps three months of riding experience under my belt, I decided I would ride that undersized bike from San Francisco to Houston – via Canada and Mexico.  I strapped a backpack to the rear, which contained a tent, a sleeping bag, and not much else.  I was 22.  Five weeks and 7500 miles later, I arrived and started graduate school at Rice University. I don’t recall consciously thinking about ZAMM very much during the trip, although I do recall going out of my way to stop in Bozeman, Montana, where a good deal of the story takes place.  I remember writing post cards noting my location from a Pizza Hut there.

Me, in the act of departing San Francisco for Houston, July 1980

 I spent six years at Rice, and the motorcycle was my primary mode of transportation for much of that time.  I never took it out on the open road again. When I finally graduated in 1986, I had it shipped to Alexandria, Virginia, with the rest of our stuff (I had gotten married).  Job, mortgage, divorce, a second marriage, two kids; I stopped riding and finally gave it away to someone who promised to restore it and ride it. Motorcycling became something I had done in the past but didn’t do now, like many other things.

I am not usually one to re-read books; there are too many that I haven’t read the first time.  However, it did seem that I would re-read ZAMM every ten years or so.  Each time I did I would find more things to dislike about it, both form and content.  Still, there was that quietly seductive prose about riding itself. In my mid-fifties, with my kids of college age and on my third marriage, I re-read it again.  A few months later, I found myself looking at motorcycles. Then my 20-year-old daughter (who had never even heard of ZAMM) got bitten by the riding bug, and I helped her buy a full-sized Honda 750.  Then I broke down and got one too.  I had no idea what my riding style would be, but soon determined that it was of the “long day trip” variety.  I do not ride the cycle to work or to the grocery store; I will let it sit for three weeks, and then ride it for 300 miles into (say) West Virginia and back. It was somewhere in here that I finally, for the first time, consciously realized that ZAMM was likely what got me into riding at age 22, and again at age 55 or so.  That stupid book, first assigned to me as a pre-college student, has probably had more influence on my life than any other, though perhaps not for the reasons the author intended.

On my first motorcycle journey, most of my life was ahead of me.  On this second trip, most of my productive years are probably behind me.  Without getting maudlin or sappy, I may try to use this blog to explore the similarities and differences of my worldviews, then and now.  Perhaps, as one last homage to the great and terrible ZAMM, I may – as a past and current student of physics, a former Pentagon bureaucrat, the creator of a web site on the natural history essays of Stephen Jay Gould, and, not least, an occasional long-distance rider – explore and discuss the concepts of Truth, Beauty, the Nature of Reality, and All That.  Just like Robert Pirsig.

Self-portraits shortly before long motorcycle trips: 1980 (age 22), 2015 (age 57)