Mark Richardson - Zen and Now: on the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

CONTENTS

For RMP,
who started it all,
and for Wendy,
who never stopped believing

CHAPTER ONE

Minnesota

I CAN TELL from the sign by the bank, without turning my head from the road, that its nine thirty in the morning. The sign flashes to show its 80 degrees, and the heats already coming through my jacket. Its going to be hot today. Thats okayon a motorcycle, heat is always welcome.

The small town passes, and Im back among the fields. The bikes running well this morning, and both of us are stretching out a little, starting to relax on the road now that this trips finally under way. Youll have to excuse me if I think of her sometimes as if shes a person. Its just me now, me and my old bike.

Im on Highway 55, the original road that runs up from Minneapolis toward Minnesotas northwest. This is an old road, made from concrete with flattened stones in the mix for hardness and ridges every few dozen feet that set up a clickety-clack sound like a locomotive on its tracks.

There arent many cars on this stretch of highway because anybody whos really trying to get somewhere is on the interstate that runs alongside a couple of miles away. Sit on the interstate and you dont need to stop till you run out of gas. In fact, on the interstate, if you didnt have to pull over every few hours and pay at the pump, thered be no reason to ever slow down or even speak to anyone. Truckers do it all the time. Stay awake for long enough and youll be at the coast by Wednesday.

Not on this road, though. Trucks stay off this road. Clickety-clack. Theres been a track here for centuries, paved sometime in the 1920s or 30s to better link farmers with their markets, Bible salesmen with their customers, children with their schools. This is the kind of road on which life happens, connecting other roads and streets and driveways and communities, not a thruway that picks you up here and throws you off there. It meanders around properties and makes way for the marshes that breed the ducks and red-winged blackbirds that take flight as I ride past. Clickety-clack.

The only way to truly experience a road like this is to be out in the opennot shut up in a car but riding along on top of it on a motorcycle. Its tough to explain to someone whos only ever traveled behind a windshield, sealed in with the comforting thunk of a closing door. On a bike theres no comforting thunk. The road is right there below you, blurring past your feet, ready to scuff your sole should you pull your boot from the peg and let it touch the ground. The wind is all around you and through you while the sun warms your clothing and your face. Take your left hand from the handlebar and place it in the breeze, and it rises and falls with the slipstream as if it were a birds wing. Breathe in and smell the new-mown grass. Laugh out loud and your voice gets carried away on the wind.

At least thats how it is on a warm, sunny day like this Monday morning. Some rain a couple of days ago was a struggle, but I wont think about that now. Therell be plenty of time for that later.

Clickety-clack. Somewhere beside the road near here should be a rest area with an iron water pump. Nearly four decades ago a couple of motorcycles stopped here, and their riders took a cool drink from the pump. Should be coming up on the left andhere it is. Just like in the book. This road really hasnt changed much at all.

Theres a place to park the bike near some picnic tables under a shelter, and the grass drops down to a stream behind the trees. To one side is the iron hand pump thats mentioned in the book. It still draws cool water. The spout is opposite the pump, so I have to dash around with my hands cupped to catch the gushing water. I capture just a trickleI have no proper cup. The Zen riders would have brought a cup. Besides, there were four of themenough for one to pump and another to drink. Im on my own today.

Those Zen riderstheyre why Im here. Robert Pirsig and his eleven-year-old son, Chris, on Pirsigs old 28-horsepower, 305-cc Honda Superhawk CB77, and Pirsigs friends John and Sylvia Sutherland on their new BMW R60/2. They were making a long summer ride back in 1968, and then Pirsig went and wrote about it and his book became a best seller. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is still in bookstores, and of the five million copies sold, two are in my saddlebags.

One of those two books is an early edition, liberated from the bookshelf in my aunts living room years ago because it had a picture of a motorcycle on its pink cover; the other is the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, larger and a little revised. And now here, at the first stop mentioned in the book, its the pink edition I pull out and read awhile, lying back on the grass.

Ive always been curious about this book, although it took years for me to read it all the way through. I pulled it from that bookshelf one quiet afternoon, settled on the sofa, and was captivated by its first pages, by the evocative description of these ponds and marshes and the riders gentle progress. It tells the story of a man and his son, ostensibly Pirsig and Chris, on a vacation trip to San Francisco by motorcycle from their home in the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul. This is the framework for a multilayered, intricately structured narrative that is far more about their personal struggles with inner demons than it is about getting to the coast. Its also the platform from which Pirsig explores and explains his philosophy. Only a few pages in, the narrator wanders from his road trip to lament the lack of quality in his modern-day America, and thats when my teenage attention tuned out. I took the book home anyway. There was something about that illustration on the back covera guy standing with his son, beside a motorcycle, looking away to the horizon.

A few years later, halfway through Philosophy 101 and getting nowhere, I found the book again and gave it another try. Reading slowly but steadily, I made it to the mountains of Montana before the term ended and other courses overwhelmed me. Something had clicked, though. Maybe it was Pirsigs luggage list, his rhyming off of the same sweaters and gloves and rain gear that Id grown accustomed to packing for frantic weekend trips to the mountains on my sport bike. More likely it was the items on the list that made us different: rope when I carried bungee cords; goggles instead of a full-face helmet; a cold chisel, a taper punch, and point files for those mysterious workings inside the bikes engine, when I carried just a pair of Vise-Grips. Both of us were looking for the same thing from our travels, just using different tools.

It wasnt until last summer that I picked up the book for a third time, looking for something to read on the first vacation in five years during which I could relax from some of the responsibilities of parenthood. That time, reading with a whole new perspective, I sailed right through. The guy