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 toward 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 up 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, "What!" he hollers.
"Blackbird!"
He says something
I don't hear. "What?" I holler back. He grabs the back of my helmet and
hollers up, "I've seen lots of those, Dad!"
"Oh!" I holler back.
Then I nod. At age eleven you don't get very impressed with red-winged
blackbirds.
You have to get older
for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn't have.
Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails
were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck
stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun
to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were
frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between
the dead cat-tails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and
cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they're back and
everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming
and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of
living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.
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 that 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.
Chris and I are traveling
to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed farther
than that. Plans are deliberately indefinite, more to travel than to arrive
anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads are preferred. Paved
county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst.
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis
on "good" rather than "time" and when you make that shift in emphasis
the whole approach changes. Twisting hilly roads are long in terms of
seconds but are much more enjoyable on a cycle where you bank into turns
and don't get swung from side to side in any compartment. Roads with little
traffic are more enjoyable, as well as safer. Roads free of drive-ins
and billboards are better, roads where groves and meadows and orchards
and lawns come almost to the shoulder, where kids wave to you when you
ride by, where people look from their porches to see who it is, where
when you stop to ask directions or information the answer tends to be
longer than you want rather than short, where people ask where you're
from and how long you've been riding.It was some years ago that my wife
and I and our friends first began to catch on to these roads. We took
them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway,
and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling
of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing
what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the
main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live
along them are different. They're not going anywhere.
Excerpted from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance © Copyright 2009 by Robert M. Pirsig. Reprinted with permission by HarperCollins. All rights reserved.
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