I am in the land of 10,000 lakes where Robert Pirsig launched a 2,100 mile motorcycle trip in 1968 with his 11-year-old son; a 17-day journey through the western United States that became the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
“One can acquire some peace of mind from just watching [the] horizon,” writes Pirsig of the road ahead. “It?s a geometer?s line … completely flat, steady and known.”
One of the aims of such trips ? like the one I took with my 17-year-old son in 2000 crowned by the Crazy Horse monument in the Black Hills of South Dakota ? is to introduce us to what wedon?t know.
About the world that spreads out before us, about ourselves and the person riding shotgun.
The unknown and the infinite options we have to become familiar with it is one of many themes of ZMM, as Pirsig calls his classic.
By chance, I began reading ZMM a year ago in Los Angeles. I?d known about it since college (it was an immediate sensation after its 1974 release) and had been given a copy, virtually untouched, some 15 years ago.
By something a little spookier than chance, I turned the last page in Minneapolis, where Pirsig was born in 1928. When I began the book ? more tough philosophical sledding than the journal of a man and his son on a motorcycle ride ? I had no plans or inclination to visit Minnesota.
With his son Chris holding on ? and no way of knowing that a dozen years later the boy would be murdered in a street robbery ? Pirsig cycled from Minnesota, through South Dakota, into Montana, cut across northern Idaho and Payette National Forest, and from one end of Oregon to the other before crossing into California and zipping down the coast to San Francisco.
“He has learned a lot,” writes Pirsig of the journey, both on the road and, more deeply ? at times bordering on and crossing over to the insane ? into the nature of truth and his own psyche. “Which is what he has come for.”
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” was rejected by 121 publishers before its eventual release. To date, it has sold more than five million copies.
Happy motoring.
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
