Following behind Jon Kosmoski’s SuperHawk on the Zen ride in Minnesota, seen from the Honda Gold Wing.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
There’s plenty of time for introspection during a long ride on a motorcycle. You don’t play music as you would in a car and you don’t listen to podcasts through earphones. You just ride and listen to the wind and the sounds of the road. If you do this, you can almost meditate as the bike hurtles through the air at a mile a minute, always hovering just one bad decision from disaster. It’s a unique blend of the restful and the awake. The yin and the yang. The romantic and the classical.
Those last two opposing forces are at the core of the Metaphysics Of Quality, which is why I’m here on the American prairie. The late Robert Pirsig wrote about them in his 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I’m along for the ride on the book’s 50th anniversary to talk about them with anyone who will listen. One afternoon it was Zen practitioners in their Minneapolis meditation room; The next night it’s North Dakota farmers and bikers at the local Chamber of Commerce. Everyone has a different take on it.
I wrote a book about Pirsig so the Robert Pirsig Association, which organized this event, invited me to join the loosely convened ride. I could only spare a few days at its beginning, but I made a couple of slideshow presentations that explain what a participant might expect. In truth, nobody really knew what to expect.
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“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a watershed in our understanding of our own selves and our own culture,” says Henry Gurr, a retired professor of physics from South Carolina who’s following behind our ride in his Toyota Prius, and occasionally leading the way. “The book helps you understand how to use your own best self to achieve a quality of life, and understand what quality can mean. So essentially, the book changed my life.”
Some call this road trip a pilgrimage of adherents to Pirsig’s philosophy, though it’s really just a journey of the curious. We’re retracing the route the author took in 1968 on a small Honda motorcycle with his son on the pillion, from Minneapolis to San Francisco, which became the basis for the book published in 1974. Now there are 18 of us who want to know if the Zen Route stands up to the test of time – a dozen of us on motorcycles.
“We know the journey was metaphorical, but it’s just the fact that the countryside you’re going through is a part of [Pirsig’s] thought process,” says Ian Glendinning, who’s also driving behind the dozen motorcycles in a rented Chrysler. “It seems important to understand the geography to get a sense of it.”
Glendinning is co-chair of the non-profit Robert Pirsig Association, which promotes the ideas of Pirsig. He flew over from his home in the north of England to join the ride and is the only person among us who ever met the reclusive author. Like most, he’s only travelling as far as Bozeman, Mont., which is the midway point of the original journey.
The Zen group pauses for a photo with Jon Kosmoski’s SuperHawk.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
“We need to slow down and reflect – apply our attention as a moral act,” says Glendinning, “and make better decisions about all our futures.”
Rod Orr, a retired geologist from Montreal, is riding a three-wheeled Can-Am Spyder and plans to leave the group in Montana to meet his wife in Edmonton. “I read the book early on – it took me several tries of course, like most of us – and it just somehow spoke to me,” he says. “It’s being on a journey, and it’s part of my own personal journey.”
Some are treating this road trip as a more literal journey of self-discovery. Jon Kosmoski is riding a 1966 Honda CB77 Superhawk, the same as the 28-horsepower motorcycle that Pirsig rode with his son Chris. That original bike is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., but Kosmoski’s machine is churning through the distance just ahead of me. I’m riding behind to help protect him from faster moving traffic at the rear, though he’s having no trouble maintaining the 90 kilometre an hour speed limit.
Kosmoski, a software architect, trailered his motorcycle to Minneapolis from his home in Neptune Beach, Fla., where he restores old Honda motorcycles. This bike is the 10th Superhawk he’s restored in the last eight years, and he’s painted it the same black-and-silver colours as the Pirsig motorcycle, because it just struck him as the right thing to do. “It almost seemed tailor-made for me,” he says. “I’m familiar with the book, I’m originally from Minneapolis, and I have a love for old Superhawks. I just thought it would be fun. It’s a way to make new friends and have a fun road trip.”
Ben Boyer tries to fix his SuperHawk beside the road in Minnesota, with help from Kosmoski.Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail
He’s one of the country’s foremost authorities on old Superhawks, which helped when Ben Boyer’s identical 1966 CB77 broke down beside the road just a few hours after leaving Minneapolis, almost at the North Dakota state line. The exhaust worked loose from the cylinder head and needed a new stud and flange. The bike was loaded on the back of a following SUV and carried here to Oakes, N.D., another couple of hours away, where a local machinist worked into the night at his home shop to create a new flange. When he delivered it the next morning, there was no charge. “That’s the kind of person you meet on a trip like this, riding a bike like this,” says Boyer, a retired high school biology teacher from Colorado. “This kind of trip really brings out the best in people.”
I’m headed home from here in North Dakota, just riding for the first day of the original two-week journey. I’ll leave the others to continue west while my wife and I return east to Toronto. We’re riding a Honda Gold Wing, large and comfortable and reliable. We have intercoms in our helmets for speaking easily with one another but most of the time, we just enjoy the silence of the wind and the company of being close to each other. We look for quality wherever we can find it, and out here, on the Zen Route, it’s everywhere.