By Henry Worsley
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a strange and whimsical book, constantly oscillating between long, detailed passages which explain the literal nuts and bolts of motorbikes, and equally long, meta and open-ended spiels that dive into the philosophy behind a bike, how it can serve as a tool not just to dissect man’s relationship with machines, but also the machinery of the human mind in and of itself – why a motorbike is both a bold expression of Romanticism, but also of cold, straight logic.
I started reading Pirsig’s book in Florence, towards the end of my own two-thousand kilometre journey on two wheels. I had set out from London a month earlier, in the dead of night, my Kawasaki GPZ loaded with virtually everything I owned, or would need, for the next year: two pairs of jeans, three shirts, some books, some tools, a battered sleeping bag and a can of chain oil. The destination was Rome, where I would be living for the next ten months. I wanted no motorways, no toll roads – just the back lanes that trace the ancient pilgrim path to the Eternal City: the Via Francigena.
The most challenging part of this journey would doubtless be the Alps. My bike is twenty-four years-old; it is carburated, with a manual choke, no ABS, no traction control, no fuel gauge (when it starts to splutter, you twist a petcock below your left knee to open the reserve tank, like a Spitfire). It is, essentially, an old-world piece of engineering – and I’m no mechanic. So as I began to ascend towards the Cime de la Bonette, the highest road in France and the second highest in Europe, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
Why ride a motorbike? That’s the essential question Pirsig poses to his readers. To look fucking cool is one answer, and it’s an answer that any honest owner of a bike would give. Motorbikes just look cool; they make you feel macho, powerful, sexy. But there is more to it than just the testosterone and the adrenaline – motorbikes are also beautiful, almost magical; they feel somehow alive, which is why people give them names. That’s one way of looking at them, as hunks of steel and alloy and copper wire that seem to have some sort of soul, yet they are still just hunks of steel and alloy and copper wire – and this is also the point, that motorbikes are the product of a ruthless, exact science. So in this sense they represent both schools of thought – the Romantic and the Rational; Lord Byron and Nikola Tesla.
Sure enough, as the Kawasaki and I gradually climbed from one thousand metres, to fifteen hundred, and finally to two thousand and above, I started to feel this thing that I was sitting on change – to pant and gasp for air. The revs at idle halved, barely turning over; I was afraid that if I stopped then the bike would stall too, and I would end up stranded in the lunar wasteland near the summit – a nothingness, an airless void, grey and snowless peaks, the odd Maginot bunker emerging from the rockface.
Another reason you should ride a bike: it’s terrifying.
Motorbikes are death traps, or at the very least, they make death much more probable in an accident. When I rented a bike in Jamaica, a group of guys in their twenties approached me and, eyeing up my sweet new ride, started pulling up their trouser legs or taking their shirts off: ‘this, from a wheelie’, one said, indicating a missing chunk of flesh in his leg; ‘this, head-on collision, smaaash!’, said another, running his finger across his chest, where a deep pale scar crossed it like a lightning bolt.
Three thousand metres. You reach the summit of the Cime de la Bonette, and you feel like Zeus, jacked and omnipotent. Looking out over the vast, wonderful ruggedness of the Alps, smelling the clean air, thin and diluted, deliciously crisp, you appreciate the meaning of another word often associated with motorcycles: freedom. That star-spangled, bald-eagle kind of freedom, that freedom to ride wherever you want whenever you want – but not only that, because that would be no different to a car. When you’re in a car, and you’re looking out of a window, you may as well be staring at a television – you don’t sense anything. On a bike you feel the wind, the heat from the tarmac, the vibrations of the engine, you sense your whole centre of gravity shift as you take a corner. Italo Calvino wrote about the concept of the ‘infinite city’, the boundless metropolis, a city which he argued the modern world had already produced. By taking trains, planes and automobiles, we put ourselves in little teleportation capsules from urban island to urban island – the motorcycle is an escape from that, it is an exposure to the places in between.
From three thousand metres that sense of freedom becomes sharply defined: you see a matchstick town ten or so miles away, you hop back on the bike, and after a few turns you return to that zen state Pirsig was talking about – the bike disappears, you’re flying, and you feel fucking cool.