Give up your phone. Get a motorcycle

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(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, September 14, 2024)

Today let’s talk about motorcycles. And the children in the nearby schoolyard. The ones who run and jump and scream and laugh and do what children do. I hear them when I open the front door. School is back.

I wish they all had motorcycles, or at least a long ride on the back of a bike along some winding road with nothing around but the rushing air on their face. Give up the phones. Get motorcycles.

They’d be like Chris, the 11-year-old in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” The classic book translated into 27 languages turned 50 this year.

Funny enough, Robert Pirsig’s fictitious autobiography isn’t really about Zen Buddhism or maintaining motorcycles. It’s about maintaining life. It’s like a signpost showing when we opt for roads less taken, surprises will come. For one, we might know ourselves better.

Chris rides on back of his father’s motorcycle for 17 days during a road trip to the Pacific Ocean. Along the way the book explores various things including mental illness and the ways of the head and the heart. The unnamed narrator wrestles with his past, an uneasy time in academia.

Then there’s our relationship with technology and making peace with all that. How we handle new technology. Or not. How we fear it. Or not. It was a concern in 1974. Like now. As it was in, say, 1894 when Hildebrand and Wolfmüller, in Germany, became the world’s first mass producers of motorcycles.

But about motorcycles. They don’t always get a fair shake. The children’s mother, and the mothers of many children, would disagree. Statistics of injury and death come with these machines and I don’t dispute that. I once gave a hospital visit to a step-cousin who’s never been the same since an absent-minded driver hit him on his motorcycle.

My own experience, though, is that at 19 I had a fire-red, economical Honda XL250. My heartthrob. Many mornings I’d secretly sneak it from the garage before dawn to enjoy sunrises on quieter roads in Niagara. I’d explore what Pirsig calls “a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and having an appeal because of just that.”

Prior, in boyhood, my bedroom had posters of minibikes while I envied someone like Randy Reece, a middle-school chum who knew the pleasure of taking his Yamaha YZ80 into pastoral woods and fields. Even now in a confined car, when driving I often take backroads. It’s nourishing.

Much of this crosses generations. Just sitting on the back of a bike, without control – so difficult, yet common in life – is daring at any age.

And consider an old family album. There’s my father with his motorcycle in post-war Germany. Then there’s this other photo, a woman riding, a boy on back showing a grin as noticeable as his wild goggles. The two are unknown to me, unidentified riders from old Europe.

The boy could be like Pirsig’s boy, Chris. Or like the running, laughing children at the nearby school. Which is to say that we all need to explore and risk in life. Or we’ll calcify and die inside. As Pirsig once said, “The real motorcycle you’re working on is yourself.”

By the way, 121 publishers rejected “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” before one printed it. More than five million copies have since sold. Just saying. Want risk? Write a book.

Of course, every generation has its fears. And courage. Further, it seems to me that the enemy of anything that’s half-right in this world isn’t evil as we commonly think of it. Rather, it’s apathy. Indifference. That shrug of the shoulder. The big meh. It’s the crazy distractions.

No, our problem isn’t that we don’t have anything to live for. It’s that we don’t have anything to die for. That’s nothing that a good motorcycle ride of one type or another won’t cure.

There’s a useful thought for anyone’s school days.