As we get into the warmer weather of spring, many of us On the Dogwatch will start to think of road trips. One of the many great things about these trips is that they can afford us time to think about our lives. There is no more iconic North American road trip than Robert Pirsig’s travels in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. On this Dogwatch, we have the pleasure to be joined by Mark Richardson, a longtime motorcycle and automotive writer, now writing for the Globe and Mail in Canada, who retraced Pirsig’s footsteps in Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In our conversation with Mark, we discuss how he decided to write his book on Pirsig, what he learned along the way, and how he thinks about Pirsig and the book now.
Our feature today is the pump at the Wayside Rest Area where Pirsig stopped on the first leg of his journey on Highway 55 out of Minneapolis. Mark stopped at what seems certain to be the same stop around 2004 and pumped the pump himself. Just several days ago, I made my own trip to this small rest stop. Although the pavilion is still there, the pump has disappeared. So where is Pirsig’s pump? If you have any information about this let us know, as we are on the trail of this important historical object.
Episode 34 Transcript
Michael Canfield: Hello. This is Michael Canfield, and thank you for joining us today On the Dogwatch. A Dogwatch is an evening shift of early or late duty or the people who undertake it. This Dogwatch considers the natural world and the things that help us experience it, from dogs to watches and everything in between. Ultimately, it’s a place for us to go wherever curiosity takes us. As we get into the warmer weather of spring, many of us on the Dog Watch will start to think of road trips. One of the many great things about these trips is that they can afford us time to think about our lives. There’s no more iconic North American road trip than Robert Pirsigs travels in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on this dogwatch. We have the pleasure to be joined by Mark Richardson, a longtime motorcycle and automotive writer now riding for the Globe and Mail in Canada, who retraced Pirsig’s footsteps in Then and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In our conversation with Mark, we discuss how he decided to write his book on Pursuit, what he learned along the way, and how he thinks about Pirsig in the book now. Our feature today is the pump at the Wayside Rest area where Pirsig stopped on the first leg of his journey on highway 55 out of Minneapolis. Mark stopped at what seems certain to be the same rest area that Pursuit used and pumped the pump himself. Just several days ago. I made my own trip to this small rest stop. Although the Pavilion is still there, the pump has disappeared. So where is Pirsig’s pump? If you have any information about this, let us know as we are on the trail of this important historical mystery. And now let’s get onto the journey with Mark Richardson. Mark, thanks so much for joining us today On the Dogwatch.
Mark Richardson: It’s cool to be here. Thanks, Mike.
Michael Canfield: So you have an interesting background, living in England until I think you were about 18 and then moving to Canada, where you settled and have done a real range of things. You’ve written widely on motorcycles and cars. I love the Lego Land Rover piece, too. So really a lot of different things. So I’m wondering, have you driven anything recently that you found inspiring?
Mark Richardson: Yes. I’m lucky in that I write about cars for a living. Right. Cars and motorcycles and trucks and things. So I drive lots and lots of different types of cars and motorcycles. And now, of course, we’re all moving into electric vehicles. So I’m getting a chance to get to drive the first electric cars that actually start to make sense. They’ve been out for a decade or so, but they weren’t terribly good. They’re only bought by people you call first adopters. But now they’re getting to be very good. And I get to drive them all. And it’s kind of cool. I have a Mini outside at the moment. It’s sort of an electric mini plug in mini. It’ll only go about 20 miles or so on an electric charge. And the theory is that that’s all you really need that day. I need more than that, to be honest with you. But probably most other people don’t. I don’t know. But it’s fun to drive, especially just in electric. It’s like a big golf cart.
Michael Canfield: So is that your mini or somebody?
Mark Richardson: No, sorry. No, that’s a Press unit. So I usually drive a different car every week and I try them out and I write about them in the Global Mail newspaper, Canada’s National newspaper. Right. Everybody tells me I have the coolest job in the world, by the way. And I try to tell them that, look, every now and again, there are cool cars, but they’re also just humdrum stuff, too. It’s not always so cool. Right?
Michael Canfield: Do you have any highlights? Like, these are some incredibly cool cars that I’ve driven recently or in the last couple of years, anything to make us salivate?
Mark Richardson: Well, Rolls Royces and McLaren and things like that. If you know my address and you go on to Google Earth and you look down on my house, there is a McLaren parked in the driveway, which is kind of cool.
Michael Canfield: Are you kidding me?
Mark Richardson: Yeah. My wife says, look, it just looks like we couldn’t pay the rent and the landlords round to stand out. The rest of the houses around me have Rav fours and Civics, things like that.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. So how before you came to writing about motorcycles and cars, how did those experience equip you for that? Like what trained you to be able to become a car and motorcycle rider?
Mark Richardson: Well, what I’d like to tell people is that I did used to be a real journalist. I worked for newspapers and covered daily news and all sorts of different types of news and learned about journalism and how to be a journalist and how to write a good story. And I always specialized in feature writing, getting your teeth into something rather than just banging out the headlines. And then sort of somewhere along the way, I just sort of progressed into vehicles because they’re more fun. More fun to write about. A long time ago, I wrote an essay. I was working as a feature writer in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, the Artwork Citizen newspaper. And I was working there just writing about death and destruction and everything else that goes on. And I just wanted to write an essay about why I liked riding a motorcycle, because I’ve always ridden a motorcycle. Okay. Ever since I turned 16. I was born in Britain, like you mentioned. And in Britain, you could ride a motorcycle or moped at 16, but you couldn’t drive a car or ride a bigger motorbike until he was 17. So if you wanted powered transport at 16, you had no other choice than a moped. And so, hey, I wanted powered transport. I wanted to get out away from just my bicycle. So I bought a moped and I souped it up so it looked like a fancy motorbike and everything. And actually, from about 15 and a half, I was illegal. I rode around all over the place on this moped and discovered how great it was to just go off and look at somewhere and explore it. And I haven’t looked back. So I ended up writing just an essay about motorcycles and why I like riding motorcycles. And then I left that job. I did some other stuff. And then the late ninety s, I came back to Toronto, worked at the Toronto Star newspaper, and I went in to see the editor of the driving section. I said, hey, can I just write you an essay about motorcycles? Because I enjoyed writing that one years before in Ottawa. And he said, hey, you know about motorcycles? And I said, well, I know some. Yeah. And he said, well, our motorcycle riders just quit. If you can write me the odd piece, that would be great. And I said, oh. So the next day I came back to him. I had 52 column ideas for motorcycle. And he said, hired. And he didn’t pay me much, but that was okay. I just wanted to write about motorcycles. So I sort of cut my teeth from that. And then after a while, his job came up and I applied for it and got it as the editor of the automotive section. So I figured that I’d been writing all these columns, Motorcycles, Good, Cars, Bad, which I didn’t think was good for the editor of what was at the time the largest automotive section in North America. And I sort of switched over to cars. And while I haven’t looked back.
Michael Canfield: Yeah, super. And I feel like I wanted to start out by describing that one part of your journey led to you writing this book, Zen, and now on the Trail of Robert Pursuit and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And I recently dug out my own pink copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Right. Sort of as I’ve gotten interested in this and you were able to generously agree to talk to me. And I looked inside the cover and I realized I got it the year after I graduated from high school. And I didn’t realize how it had been that long. And I’ve been rereading it and listening to it in the car, and I think it influenced me more than I think I noticed. So I’m curious, can you describe how you first came to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and how that then led you to want to retrace perfect steps?
Mark Richardson: Well, you tell me first of when you read it for the first time, did you love it?
Michael Canfield: I liked it a lot. I think it influenced me. I had the overarching sense that I didn’t understand it. And it’s been interesting. And looking back now, I’m not sure I understood the philosophical aspects, like all the philosophical things he’s talking about, et cetera. But what I really liked about it and I think I’ve drawn a lot of years worth of sort of puzzling about is just this question of quality about the classic versus romantic, even though I don’t think I internalized those terms so much. I think about that a lot. And I wonder how much of it sort of was at least a seed planted by that book. So, yeah, I liked it a lot, although I did feel and still feel right. There’s a lot in that book, right?
Mark Richardson: Yes, there is. That’s an understatement.
Michael Canfield: But yeah, I loved it. Love is probably not the right word. I respected it and that it was serious and brought things forward that I thought were really important and wanted to learn more about, I guess, is how I describe it, and it just kind of clicked with you. Yeah. And again, I don’t know why I decided to pick it up in the first place. I don’t know where I heard about it, et cetera, how I came to sort of understand that it existed. But yeah, somehow I got my hands on it and felt like, yeah, I need to read this.
Mark Richardson: So before I answer your question, my other question because I’m a journalist, too. Sure. What year was this when you first read it?
Michael Canfield: Well, the date inside my book say 1990.
Mark Richardson: So the reason I ask that is because it was published in 1974. He actually sat down to start writing it in about it’s, based on a road trip that the author, Robert Pirsig, took with his son Chris, who was trying to remember, I think he was eleven years old at the time, 13, very young, very young boy. He took with his son at the time in 1968. And when the story was published, it was somebody called it a zeitgeist for the nation, that it really spoke to the nation in spoke to The Times of 1974 and other people who have been discussing it recently because the author died several years ago. And his widow, Wendy, has just published a series of essays on his work written by him, published them posthumously, called On Quality. And people have been saying, well, you know, what he says still makes a lot of sense, but it’s not quite so relevant for these times as it was back in the would disagree with that. I think that what he is asking for or advocating for in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and then his later book, Lila, which I think was published around 1990. What he’s advocating for is kind of a simpler time when you can concentrate on doing the job properly and you’re not so rushed through with so many distractions. And these days there are way more distractions than there ever were in 1974 or 1968 or whatever it is. I think that the message is even more relevant. What you have to do is just step back, think about what it is you’re trying to do, what you want from life, from this particular project, from your marriage or whatever it might be, and just step back and think, let’s get rid of all the clutter, concentrate on what is important, and focus just on that, and get that done and do that properly. That’s what Robert Pirsig was advocating way back when. And I still live by that tenett. I think one of the things when I was reading your account. Right. I don’t know, I felt like there’s some parallels. Right. In how you would sort of come about this book.
Michael Canfield: Right. I wonder now that you mentioned that Lila was about 1990, I wonder if I saw Lila come out and then was like, oh, I should look back at his first book, which was more famous because I did get Lila eventually. And I think I read it, although I don’t remember much about it. It’s about a sailing trip or something. But. So I’m wondering if you can kind of describe how you came to the book originally.
Mark Richardson: I think I came to it in the same way that most everybody else did. I’d heard about this book when I ask people, have you ever heard of Zen and the Automotorcycle Maintenance? Most of the time they have, but often or sometimes they have not. They don’t know what I’m talking about. The book was published a long time ago, sold millions of copies a long time ago. And I say, well, have you ever heard of Zen and the Art of Doing Something? And they say, oh, yeah. And I say, well, really, that expression. And I mean, I see it all the time, even now. Zen and the Art of Cookery, Zen and the Art of Proper Gardening, that sort of stuff that really has that was based on an original book way, way back. A Japanese book zone in the Art of Archery, and the author took his title from that. But people have heard of the book, but they haven’t necessarily read it. And the only reason that I read it in the first place, I found it on my aunt who lived in Montreal. It was on her bookshelf, and it was the pink copy, and it had a motorcycle in the title. And I liked motorcycles. And I thought, hey, that sounds good. And I read the back of it, and there was something about a road trip, and I like road trips. I thought I could do that. I should read this book. And I began reading it. And this would have been in the 90s, probably. Actually, no, it was way back before then. Sorry. It would have been in the late 70s when I first picked it up off my aunt’s bookshelf. And I made it through the first 20 pages or so. And then I just drifted off because as the author himself said, it’s not really about Zen and it’s not really about motorcycles. It’s about something else entirely. And all I wanted to do at the time and I would have been a teenager, I guess, was read about motorcycles and it wasn’t about motorcycles, so I put it down. Plus, it wasn’t the easiest book to read. He gets pretty involved in stuff, and I wasn’t interested. So anyway, I left it. I thought, oh, fair enough. And then a few years later, I was going to University, and I was thinking that I should do a course in philosophy. And I stumbled across this book again. For some reason, I guess I probably stolen it from my aunt’s bookshelf. Actually, that’s true. I did. Oops. So I stole it from her bookshelf, and I still had it sitting there. And I thought, well, this is about philosophy. It’s got motorcycles in it, and I’m older and smarter and wiser now. I should give it another go. So I did. And I probably read about 100 pages. And then my eyes just glazed over. He’s gone on about ghosts and the machine, and he’s gone on about Aristotle and Plato. And I still just wanted to read about motorcycles. And of all the people I’ve spoken with about this book, probably 95% of them, I would say, had the same attitude as me. I just wanted to read about motorcycles. And this was a very difficult for many complicated, involved book that was not at all what they expected. The number of people that I talked to who said, yeah, I started to read it, but I never made it very far. I didn’t enjoy it, but I guess it was a good book because other people liked it. It’s astonishing a number of people. Anyway, I was the exact same way. And then I got older and no wiser, but I still like motorcycles, and I’m 40 odd years old, and I’m going to a cottage with my family, and I’m looking for a book to take to the cottage. We’re just going there for a week. I’ve got young kids. I’m going to have my 41st birthday at the cottage, and I’m looking for a book on my bookcase. And there’s that pink one that I’ve stolen from my aunt almost years ago. And I thought, you know what? I should maybe give it one more try, because this is supposed to be such a great book, and I’ve never figured out why, but I should give it a try. I took some other books to Stephen King and decent things like that. And this time I had the time to devote to it because I was just at a cottage rather than a few pages before bed, and I sat in a hammock and read the book. And when I got to the difficult bits, the bits where he goes off into whole theories about philosophy. And before my eyes had glazed over, I just skipped over those bits. I thought, no, this is a great book. Apparently I’m going to do it. So I skipped over them. I thought, yeah, anyway, back to the bikes. And I made it all the way through the book that way. And I remember that I finished it on my 41st birthday lying in that hammock beside Rice Lake in Ontario. And I got to the end and it sort of made sense because it’s a complicated book with the fact that you have an unreliable narrator called Phaedrus. And I had couldn’t figure out who this guy was at all when I was first trying it. But after it gets some context, you realize where it’s all coming from. So literally I got to the end of the book and I thought, wow, that was a pretty good book. And I literally ended it, turned back to page one, and then I read it again without a pause, read it and read all the difficult philosophical bits and they all sank in because at this time I had the context and I thought, this is a great book. This is telling me a lot. And I also thought it’s also a pretty good road trip. It goes all the way from Minneapolis to San Francisco, along the sort of roads less traveled across the north and meets interesting people and all of that. And I thought, you know what I should do this next year? I should do this road trip. And maybe there’s a book to be done from it. I’ve never written a book before. I wanted to write a book. And I thought, why don’t I tell myself right now that I will do this as a road trip? If I can justify it to my wife as a book that might help pay for the road trip, then she might let me take the time away from the family. I’ll do it on my motorcycle, my old motorcycle, just like the author had an old motorcycle. And I will end in San Francisco on my 42nd birthday. And if you’ve ever read Douglas Adams, you know that 42 is the meaning of life. So it seemed to make sense to do this. So I did it and I took the book with me and I ended up giving it away to somebody on my return home. Actually, I regret doing that. I wish I still had that pink copy, but I have the black copy with the whole afterward from his 25th anniversary edition. That’s what counts. Wow, that’s a great sort of context and story. And probably, as you say, the way a lot of people come to it is sort of from being interested in a road trip or motorcycles or come to it kind of obliquely and then see that there’s a lot more in it that actually applies to those pursuits that I think things we like about some of those things, actually he talks about. And his underlying messages you mentioned really does, too.
Michael Canfield: So after reading your book, I realize I may be on my way to being one of the Pirsig’s pilgrims that you mentioned because I live actually right off of highway 55 outside Minneapolis, which is the road that Pirsig started his journey on. So I’m curious, how did you figure out what exactly road to take? I mean, he doesn’t say exactly in the book. And I also wondered if you know where the water pump is. I know it early on. There’s a picture of you with the water pump and all that stuff. And I’m kind of like, where is that? And how would I find out? So how did you figure out the specifics?
Mark Richardson: I did have some help, not a lot of help, but I had some help because other people had done this before. As you mentioned, there are people called Persecute pilgrims, and there are people who are just like me who figured that, you know what? This is a good road trip. And maybe if I do this road trip, I might learn something along the way. So a lot of people would do the road trip more often than not. They do a part of it. They wouldn’t try and do the whole thing. The trip itself goes all the way from Minneapolis through to Bozeman, Montana, where it pauses for a while and then through Idaho into Oregon and then down the coast from basically from about Bend, Oregon, it goes over to the coast and follows it down. And it’s a pretty sweet trip. It’s nice. It takes you on some wonderful roads, like the Bear Tooth Highway in Montana. That’s truly stunning. That’s not really something that most people know even exist, but was built in the Depression is one of those ways to give money to people. And these people had sort of patched together what the route was, kind of sort of. But even so, it wasn’t exact. Persic himself often doesn’t tell you the route. He tells you that he went through a strange little town. And then you can figure out when you get there that this town seems pretty strange because it has a building that seems to match the description of the book, that sort of thing. By the time I got to researching the route, there had been probably two or three people who had patched together roughly what it was, but they weren’t quite sure where the right turn off was for this or for that. And I had to figure out a lot about myself. There was a route given to me by a fellow called Henry Ger, Professor Henry Ger from the Carolinas, who had a whole website devoted to Robert Pershing in his writings. And he was very, very helpful with me with the book. Even he had not traveled the whole route properly and was still trying to patch bits together. And he actually was in contact with Robert Pirsig, asking him obscure questions like, well, did you turn left at the stop sign or did you go straight ahead and then turn left 50ft later? And Persic said, look, if I’d known people were going to ask me these questions, I’d have kept better notes, but it doesn’t really matter. Perfect. And people like me said, well, yeah, it kind of does. Anyway, we figured it out. I figured out with the help of, I guess, three different people who were posting pilgrims, and I took the route that in the end did turn out to be pretty much the exact route. And at the very end of it, there’s this big scene at the climax of the book, which is the meeting of the unreliable narrator with the reliable narrator and all of this stuff. And I managed to figure out exactly where that was. And I managed to get to that point, and nobody had actually done that before. It was really kind of cool when I realized it was happening. But you asked about the water pump. I can go into my notes and I can have a look and see where it is. But it’s on a northerly route, as I remember, and it’s off the secondary highway, whichever that one is. You go out of Minneapolis, it’s St. Paul, Minneapolis. You go out for an hour or so, and then you turn north about an hour up that way. And exactly. That’s the sort of point where I realized when I was there. Yeah. This is that same water pump, the one that’s mentioned in the book. There’s only a sentence about it, but this will be it. Yeah.
Michael Canfield: So you didn’t know in advance where the water pump was exactly? No, I see.
Mark Richardson: No, I would ride by and actually, in this case, I stopped just for a break because, you know what? I wanted to stop for a break because I was on an old, uncomfortable motorcycle in the same way that those two guys, those four people wanted to stop for a break on their two motorbikes. We felt the same way.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. So let’s talk a minute about motorcycles. I have to say, I initially had a hard time squaring your background as an automotive and cycle rider with the motorcycle you chose for the trip. And that’s more about me than you coming to it at naively. Right. I’m thinking, hey, this guy’s going to have a sweet bike, and you chose what I understand was a 1985 Suzuki Dr 600 dual purpose, which is sort of a cross between a dirt bike and a road bike is kind of an understanding. So can you just contextualize the bike and how you decided to choose that one? Mark Richardson: Well, because it was my bike. It was the bike that I owned at the time. That was the easy answer. And when I first thought, I’m going to do this as a road trip in one year from now. Having been reading the book on the Hammock, the first thing I started thinking of was, well, what motorcycle should I take? Because in my job I have access to all kinds of different motorcycles, and I can request a motorcycle from a manufacturer, and I’ll tell them what I want it for. And they’ll say, sure or no or whatever. And to be honest with you, in this case, I could have had pretty much any motorcycle that I wanted. I remember BMW actually offered me a motorcycle. And then they said, well, if you’d like, would you like a seven series? Which is the car, right. This $100,000 limo? Would you like to do the seven series? Then you can. It’s nice and quiet. You can think? No, I don’t think so. But unfortunately for me, I had to agree at the end that Robert Pirsig, when he did his ride, it was on his not terribly reliable, small and uncomfortable Honda Hawk. And I needed to do it on the same sort of bike. So I had ridden my old Dr 600 back in 1084 when I bought it new. I’d ridden the same bike all the way up to Alaska, and I’d gone to the Northwest Territories and down to Mexico. I spent a year living off my motorcycle when I was trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life. And so I figured I should do it again on the same bike. It wasn’t quite the same bike. It was the identical bike, because my old Dr that I’ve written to Alaska was totally crapped out at this point. But I had found the identical model, the identical colors, everything on a barely used bike in Toronto. And I bought that bike just because I wanted the bike. And then I fixed her up so that she would be okay to ride all the way across the country. And in the end, of course, it turned out that that was the bike that I always should have taken, because that bike crapped out on me. The Shark absorber broke, the brakes were dodgy the wheel, the tires wore out, all of this stuff. And the whole story becomes about living in the moment and appreciating what you have rather than I’m about to run out of road, I’m about to run out of motorcycle. Whatever. Oh, my God. The bike is not working right. If I’d had a seven series and never even had to think about the vehicle, it just wouldn’t have been right. But in this case, I had my old bike and I had to somehow keep it on the road. And I had adventures because of that. And you seem to have some skill as a mechanic to where you could work on it and do some of the repairs yourself, et cetera. Right? Well, I’m an enthusiastic mechanic. There’s a point in Montana, Wyoming, where I had to fix something, and I ended up using an axe. My firewood axe was the only way I could get the Bolt off, so I don’t think any proper mechanic would ever do that. But enthusiastic. Kind of like dancing. Right. But you have some knowledge of the bike, and we’re able to in some ways confront those things that Pirsig asks us to confront through his journey about how you deal with those things. Yeah. Well, you see, Pirsig was the kind of guy he says right at the beginning of his book that he had his motorcycle fixed by some mechanics somewhere, another in town, long before he was doing this trip. And they mess it all up. They rounded off the bolts, they punched a head through the top of the cylinder, all of this stuff. And he blamed it all on the fact that they had the radio on while they were trying to do the work. How can you have the radio on when you’re trying to do a good job? It’s just distracting. It says Per second. And now I think that’s a bit extreme because I have the radio on when I’m working on my bike in my garage, I must admit. But it’s the kind of guy he was. He was totally focused on what was important at the time, and he could fix his bike that way. But he also, although he was a trained mechanic and a certifiable genius, he also messed up. There was the time that he rode up north and the bike broke down. He couldn’t figure it out. They had to hitch back. They trailed the bike back, and ultimately he found all he’d done was run out of gas. That’s an impressive story because he wasn’t seeing the obvious. He was so busy trying to find the background.
Michael Canfield: So one question I had about the trip you sort of came to the book, the text of this then in the art sort of toggles between the narrative of the trip itself and then person’s ideas on philosophy of quality and all those things and search for who he had been before. From what you learned and experienced, I’m wondering how we should think about the biographical nature of the book. Like, for someone who’s just coming to that and reading it maybe for the first time, how do you make sense of what was going on with the narrator?
Mark Richardson: Well, it’s kind of semi biographical, apparently. When he first wrote the book, he knew when he set off on this road trip in 1968 that he was going to write a book about it. He wasn’t quite sure what the book was going to say. He knew it was going to be some way in which he could talk about the way that he felt about life. And when he originally wrote the book, there was no Phaedras. It was all Robert Percy with his son having a road trip and thinking thoughts and it just didn’t work. He wrote the whole thing, 130,000 words. He tossed it, as far as I know. Maybe Nancy, his wife at the time, she read it, but that was it. His editor certainly never read it because he realized it was wrong and he needed to have some kind of narrative hook in there to make things more interesting. And he came up with the idea of Phaedras. Nancy told me that it was her who suggested it, whether it was or not, I don’t know. This is a long time ago, and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that the other thing that you know about Robert Pursuit, if you know only the bare bones about Robert Pirsig, is that he wrote this book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and that he had at one time in his life being certifiably insane. He was locked up in an insane asylum close to where you live, actually. And he received electric shock treatment. Brutal electric shock treatment. This is the stuff of the 60s, right where they tied you down, as he described it later. He said that they gave you a drug like Kirari, and it made you feel like you were drowning just before you slipped out of consciousness. It’s horrible. They gave him something like 30 zaps of this over a period of months. And then they released him back into the environment to get on with his life. He had gone insane because he was inclined that way. The guy was a genius. He couldn’t wrestle his thoughts together in the way that he wanted. And his environment didn’t help him at all. And he was teaching at the time, he was teaching philosophy and not really very happy. And anyway, he got the electric shock treatment. He was then released back to society. He had a pilot’s license, and that was taken away. But he was allowed to ride a motorcycle, and that’s how he got into motorcycles. And he was starting to get his life back and decided to do this road trip with his son. Eleven years old, by the way. I couldn’t remember exactly how. He was eleven. And he wrote off with Chris to San Francisco. And then the next year, he wrote off with his other son, Ted, up to Churchill, Comedian, Norfolk, something that he did. But he was trying to wrestle the idea of how to tell a good story that was also relevant to philosophy and relevant to him. And so he realized that he needed to have two narrators. He needed to have the guy who was riding the motorcycle, and he needed to have this other guy, which he called Phaedras. And Phaedrus was the person from before the electric shock treatment. The father of Chris that Chris remembered from way back when. And the complication of the book, one of the many complications of the book that you don’t really realize until you’ve gotten to the end of it is that you think that Phaedrus is the good guy. You think that Phaedrus is the father, that the son is yearning to be reconciled with, who he hasn’t seen forever, and that the guy riding the bike is just this evil fella who’s just all the sun ever sees the back of his head. But in fact, it’s the other way around. Phaedrus is the bad guy, and Phaedrus is taking over the father who’s riding the motorcycle. And you don’t realize any of this until you get to that very climactic scene in California. Yeah, it’s pretty moving. That’s sort of Pirsig and his narrator.
Michael Canfield: I wanted to turn to you, and I don’t know if you have a copy of your book with you now. I have about a dozen. Okay. So I have the hardback. And I wonder if you wanted to take two short sections of paragraphs and wonder if you’d read them, and then we can just talk about sort of your own experiences. Would that be okay?
Mark Richardson: Sure. But I should warn you, I went on a book tour when this book was published, which is every author’s dream. And I have been very careful in this book, and I was told to do this by my agent and by my publisher. I was very careful to just be the guy next door. You don’t know who I am as the narrator because I want me for you as the reader. I want me to be the guy who lives next door to you, who is every man. And that’s fine. When I went on the book tour, people were shocked that I was Canadian. What is this Canadian coming down here telling us Americans how to live our lives? Canadians. And then, of course, I do the reading itself, and I open my mouth and say, Well, hello, my name is Mark. And I go, what is this? Who the hell is this guy? So I don’t know if it really worked out or not, but anyway, but I can give it a shot that sounds like it’s more about them rather than you tell me.
Michael Canfield: So on page 125, I really like this quote. At the bottom, it starts, I found an old hockey stick, and I wonder if you could read that paragraph.
Mark Richardson: I still got that hockey stick piece of it. Yeah. I found an old hockey stick lying in a ditch and wedged it behind the panel up against the exhaust. Tuning the wood of the stick was already cured, so the Muffler’s heat did not affect it, and it kept the panel in the bag away from the hot metal. But when I headed west across the Prairie, the stick finally caught fire and melted half the panel, sending flames shooting against my jeans and burning through the saddlebag, toasting half the underwear inside. In Saskatchewan, a welder formed a bracket from the discarded chair to sit over the muffler, making it into a resting place for the bag just an inch from the pipe, but far enough away to avoid another mishap. So I should explain that paragraph. That particular incident didn’t happen on my trip out west following the Zen route. It happened years previously just going across Canada and. Yeah. Melted my underwear and melted half the panel.
Michael Canfield: So I think one of the things I liked about it, obviously, it’s dramatic and you’re talking in the book. This is in the context of talking about your two motorcycles, Jackie New and Jackie Blue, as I remember. Yes. And just this context of things happen and it’s kind of how you deal with them and how you are in the moment. And I’m wondering what makes you feel or made you feel close to person on that trip?
Mark Richardson: Well, I was lucky in the timing of this trip in that I did it in summer of 2004, and I was able in the research for it to find people who had been involved with the trip at the time and to be able to hook up with them. So I mentioned that he pauses for a while in Bozeman, Montana. He stays with his close family friends, the Dewise’s. And I did the same thing. I found them, Jenny DeWeese, who would still get people writing to her every year saying, hey, can I just pop by? I read this book and I found your address somewhere and I’d like to come and say hello. And I stayed the night with Jenny Dewis and her family stayed in a yurt on their property in the mountains outside of South Bozeman, Montana. And yeah, when you’re sitting there holding on to Jenny’s first edition copy that’s inscribed to her by Robert Pirsig, talking with her at the time about how it was then, you’re pretty close to Pirsig. Then the next day when I woke up from the yurt and came up to the house and she had had a flat tire, and she asked me to fix that flat because she’d hurt her foot and couldn’t do it herself properly. And I climbed underneath the car and all I did was change the wheel over, but I was actually changing the wheel over and getting it ready for her to be able to drive into town. And you’d better believe that I made sure that the wheels were properly talked and everything was done right and that I didn’t have a radio playing in the background while I did that. So I felt pretty close with that. Another time was, of course, at the very beginning of the trip, I met with John Sutherland, who was the other guy on the first half of the road trip with Robert Pirsig. At the time, John and his wife Sylvia rode their BMW with Pirsig and his son Chris on their Honda all the way out to Bozeman. And I met with John Sutherland and I actually talked with him about how it had been. I didn’t meet with Sylvia. She hated the book. She didn’t want anything to do with it. She was around. They separated at the time, but she didn’t want anything to do with it. And John Sutherland showed me took me to the house that Persick had lived in. And that was the house where he had on Otis Avenue, where he had written the book. And we went and banged on the door, and there was a nice woman in there, Susan Nemetz, who answered the door, and she knew about Pirsig, and she wanted to hear stuff. And so we sat down in their house and talked about it. And then they took me downstairs and showed me a few of the things that were left over from the Persecute. One of them was the workbench in the basement, and Persecute had actually fixed a drawer so that it opened and slid properly using the wheels from one of his boys roller skates. And when I slid that drawer open and shut, I realized, yeah, I’m touching something here that’s truly persecuted, as it were. When I mentioned it to the sun, the surviving son, years later, he said, yeah, dad never even asked me if he could take that wheel off my roller skates. He just took the roller skate. I wondered why my roller skates didn’t work so well, but sure, something like that. But when I changed my oil on my bike in South Dakota and I made a point of doing the right change, tightened the chain, made a point of doing it right. I was trying to just take the time to do it properly rather than thinking, well, I got to be on the road by 11:00 or whatever it might be, and I help the motorcycle to run a little better because of that. And I try and do that now whenever I go off on road trips, though, I’m really on such an unreliable machine.
Michael Canfield: Yeah. And I think the second quote that I wanted you to read is on page 143, and it starts a big part, and this one while you’re kind of finding it. One of the things that you’re describing, I think, is what you find when you go on a road trip or on a trip, and certainly the hero’s journey or the idea of a journey going off, being changed somehow and coming back as old as Ulysses, et cetera. But I think it’s as true now as it was then and all the time in between. And it seems like I’m interested sort of hearing you talk a little bit in this paragraph and in general about how you were changed. You’re sort of waiting into that with the drawer which you actually mentioned or you refer to in way in this quote. I’m just wondering how you think about how you were changed by this experience.
Mark Richardson: Sure. I’m just sort of trying to sum up the book itself. It’s about halfway through my own book, and I’m trying to sum up what’s on in The Art of Cycle Maintenance is about. And I do say here, because a big part of the message of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be boiled down to a truism. If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. Persecute would spend hours considering a problem and its solution. How to fix a motorcycle, how to build a workbench drawer. And I so wish I had the time in my own life to devote to such satisfying pursuits. But I don’t. At any given moment, a dozen things are competing for my attention, and they usually get short shrift as the priorities get worked through. And the thing is that at this time, my kids were five and seven, and remember, they were young, right? Five and seven. That’s right. And they’re a handful. And my wife didn’t want to be left alone with the kids all the time. Motorcycles are a very selfish thing. You can’t share a motorcycle easily with somebody, even when they’re a passenger. It’s not the same thing for the passenger as it is for the driver. It’s not like a car. And when you have young kids, you can’t take them on a motorcycle. I mean, legally speaking, their feet have to be able to touch the foot pegs, safety speaking, they absolutely have to be able to touch the football. So they’re going to fall off. And that’s not good. But they’re just going to be on the motorcycle because they want to be with their dad or their mom or whomever I wanted to be on the motorcycle on this particular trip because I just wanted to get away from everything and be on my own for a while and get my thoughts straightened out. And yeah, the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. For me thinking about this motorcycle trip, it was a time in my marriage, too, and I really didn’t know. Is this what it’s all about? I have my kids. I love my kids. I love my wife. But this life is driving me nuts. It’s not the life I used to live, and I feel so constrained. And it was the same thing for Robert Percy, but he was never quite so constrained, and I could not respect that with him. People have called me in this book. They’ve called me a very respectful disciple of Pirsig. But actually I’m not really I never met the guy. He never wanted to meet with me. I’m quite happy that I never met the guy. I don’t think I would actually like him very much. I think that he abandoned his family too many times and at critical times for them. I don’t think that he was a good father. I think that he was very selfish in his own mind. And I think he was a control freak, to be honest with you, who absolutely had to be in control of absolutely everything, which is another reason why you never wanted to meet with me. Because getting back with your original question about autobiography, his book Zen and the Art, is not very accurate autobiographically. And he certainly never talks about some of the bad things that he did, which I found out about. I think I regret writing about them in this book. I think that I hurt him, and I don’t think he deserved to be hurt by saying this. I mean, I backed them all up. I spoke to his family. They told me the stories, all of this stuff. But I think that he was the kind of person he was a very private man. He told me in a letter and we wrote half a dozen times. And they were brief exchanges right up until the end. And he told me once that he wanted to be the second most reclusive author in American history after J. D. Sanjay. And I wouldn’t let him do that because I wanted to write this story because I thought there were enough people who were interested in him and were interested in what he had to say. And when I first wrote the whole manuscript for this book, I didn’t get into who he was at all. I got into his philosophy and I got into my own road trip. But I skipped the whole story about who Robert Pirsig was, mostly because I didn’t know. But nobody was interested in reading that manuscript. And it wasn’t until somebody read it for me and told me, yeah, the thing that’s missing is about this author, this guy who went to an insane asylum. I want to know more about this Kooky guy. So I found out more about the Kooky guy. Slowly but surely when I tracked down his former wife and his son, his surviving son, Ted, they told me a lot of missing history that Persecute would never have wanted to tell me himself. And I just didn’t want to tell a story that was missing any important parts or that was untrue in any way. So I included it.
Michael Canfield: I want to be respectful of your time here, and I really appreciate that. I’ve learned a lot so far and really makes me want to know more. And I think a lot of it, at least for me, and I think most people who are trying to travel down this path, it’s a way of trying to understand a lot of things about big questions and little questions in your own life. I’m curious, just as a last thing, what’s going on for you? What’s next? Do you have any other road trips planned? You’ve done a lot of road trips in your life that would probably fill a couple of other podcasts which would be fun to have some time about other adventures you’ve had, but other things coming up, projects or road trips or things that you’re looking forward to?
Mark Richardson: Yes, I like to do road trips. I love doing road trips. I got a couple of plans for this year. I should tell you, this particular Zen trip coincided with my birthday. And I like to do things that coincide with my birthday for some reason. And so I’m about to turn 60 years old this year. When I was 50 years old, I traveled the entire length of the Trans Canada Highway from Newfoundland to Victoria, BC. It was 7000 km. That’s close to that’s, more than 5000 miles on a motorcycle. No, I wasn’t stupid. I pulverized my back end on the Zen trip. This time around, I phoned up General Motors. They gave me a convertible. But I realized on another road trip, one that I took in an RV with my family. I realized that the Trans Canada Highway is exactly the same age as me. I was born on the day that the Trans Canada Highway was officially opened, and that was very relevant. I’m a big believer in fate and coincidence. These things happen. So I realized that that was when I was 49 years old and next year was going to be 50 years for the Trans Canada Highway. And I realized, wow, I got to do this. So I quit my job at the Toronto Star and I got in a Camaro and I drove the length of the Trans Canada Highway. And on my 50th birthday, July 30, I was at the top of the Rogers Pass, which is in British Columbia, which is where the Trans Canada was open 50 years ago to the day and made a point of being there and talking to the CBC for what it’s worth, just to commemorate the day with my youngest son. So that was cool. But now I’m coming up to 60, which is another big sort of round, round number thing. So what I’m going to do this year, it’s much less ambitious, but it’s just as important. I live outside Toronto, so I’m getting into a Mazda Miata. Mazda is giving me this car. I’m going to write a story for the Global Mail, but I’m getting into and I’m going to drive with my wife to Lake Placid and go up White Face Mountain. You can drive all the way to the top of the mountain, which is about four 0ft, look out over Lake Plastic and it’s gorgeous. And then I’m going to move on. And on my birthday itself, Saturday, July the 30th, I’m going to drive to the top of Mount Washington, which is the highest point in the east. And thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, you can get an elevator the final couple of hundred feet to the very, very summit. You can drive all the way to the top of the mountain, and then you can stand on the absolute summit and look out over America. And I think that that’s important to do on my 60th birthday.
Michael Canfield: Well, that sounds like a fantastic trip. I’m looking forward to it awesome. Well, I really appreciate you spending this time with me and also I was driving in this morning to work with my son and it just happened to be the end of Zen and the art on. I was listening to it on an audiobook and it was an incredible moment to just be on highway 55 with me then and talking to my son. He was asking some questions. We were talking about really the end of the book, which I hadn’t rehearsed. I hadn’t orchestrated. It sort of happened in the fact that we were going to talk today, like you said, fate and how these things are really meaningful. And part of what set that in motion is you agreeing to spend some time with me and talk to us. So thank you so much, both personally and for the listeners for joining us today On the Dogwatch.
Mark Richardson: It’s been my pleasure, Mike. Thanks.
Thanks again to Mark for helping us learn about Percy’s journey and his philosophy and for inspiring us to take road trips of our own. Our music credit today is Whiskey on the Mississippi by Kevin McLeod courtesy of Creative Commons until our next shift. This is Michael Canfield thanking you for joining us On the Dogwatch
