Zen and the Art of Bear Spotting
Thoughts from the Alaskan Highway, part one
It starts in a trailer park in Livingston, Montana. The trailer park is full of goats. They climb onto the bonnets - sorry, the hoods - of cars and vans, sleep under listing caravans, eat what they can, which is everything. Wake up in the morning and look out of the window of the trailer and there they are, standing on the step, which they’ve covered with droppings, looking up at you. Go outside and the goats will let you pet them. They are deeply relaxed goats.
My son wants to take one home. I, on the other hand, am studying their lifestyle. I think I could learn something from them. Apart from the occasional head-butting session between the lads, the goats are happy just hanging about. They don’t seem to have any ambitions other than to eat, and even their fights are pretty chilled. The head-butting is more hobby than hate crime. These are Zen goats. They are at one with the Tao of the Trailer Park, and I, who am not at one with anything much, am studying their practical theology.
We’re leaving the goats behind today though. Our friend Paul, who lives here, is taking me and my family on a road trip to Alaska, where he also has a place, and the goats aren’t coming, though we could fit at least one into the capacious truck we’re travelling in. Actually, I shouldn’t say ‘truck.’ What I call a truck, Americans call a pickup, while what I call a lorry, Americans call a truck. We are two nations divided by a common tongue, though I’m trying to adapt. I’ve already learned to say things like ‘French press’ and ‘eggplant’ and ‘arugula’. It’s not a hard language to learn if you concentrate.
The goats do not go into the back of the truck/pickup, but our suitcases do, and a coolbox of food, and a lot of fishing equipment and some hats and boots. This is a proper adventure. I’m not sure my children realise quite how proper it’s going to be. We have over 3000 miles of blacktop (look at me go!) to cover if we’re going to meet our goal of reaching Alaska by the Fourth of July. Paul has made it quite clear that if he has to spend the Fourth in Canada he is going to be a broken man, and none of us wants that. So we have five days to hotfoot it from Big Sky Country to the Last Frontier. The two Pauls are going to share the driving. This is our only plan, and I’m feeling pretty Jack Kerouac about it all.
Mind you, by the time he was my age Kerouac, like most good writers, was dead. Perhaps I need a better comparison. I find one on Paul’s bookshelf, in a book I read when I was about 21 and haven’t thought about since, another American-road-trip classic: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. Pirsig is a middle-aged writer whose head is so full of ideas that he fears he is on the edge of a breakdown, which he seeks to fend off by driving miles around the country on his motorbike with his young son. He spends most of his time overthinking his Big Idea, and the rest worrying that he is a crummy parent.
Yes, this is much better. I can, as the lingo of the time would have it, very much dig this.
I’ve been breaking down myself recently: recurrent episodes of exhaustion, thumping headaches, the shakes, days on my back, all sorts. I’ve had every test under the sun and nothing has turned up, but there’s one thing they can’t test for: overwork, stress, burnout. Taking the weight of the whole world onto your shoulders and then writing it down. This seems to have become my career, but I now have a creeping realisation that, having reached its sixth decade on the Earth, my body has had enough of it. I don’t blame it, either. I kind of have, too.
Kerouac can’t teach me much here: dying of alcoholism at 47 demonstrates the same terrible attitude to the body. Writers are always killing themselves one way or another. ‘Art that doesn’t come from pain’, writes Alice Thomson, ‘is just entertainment.’ Nothing wrong with a bit of entertainment, but neither Kerouac nor Pirsig nor I seems really capable of it, at least on the page. Our hearts are too thorny, or heavy, or something. Still, I’m still going to do my damnedest to learn from the goats and the road. I want to see bears and catch salmon and sit in the vast stillness of everything. My words don’t matter much, and yet everything matters somehow and fits together. I wonder how. I wonder what it is that binds it all up.
This is a very Pirsig kind of question. I have only vague recollections of what his book felt like to me when I read it as an idealistic young student. After that much time, nothing much remains of a book but its taste; its feeling. Now that I read it again, it tastes different. For a start, I notice that it is not really about Zen at all. It’s mainly about Ancient Greek philosophy and Pirsig’s argument with it as he tries to pin down some mysterious binding force he calls ‘Quality.’ Pirsig is still trying to work out how the whole world fits together, even though his first attempt led him to electro-shock therapy in a mid-century asylum. Writers never learn, because we all believe things like this:
‘Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it's a shame more people don't switch over to it.’
Still, the man’s not wrong, is he? Being on the road for a long time allows a lot of space for such reflection, and no space at all for TV. It’s three thousand miles to Alaska. We need to get into gear. Not that our car has any gears - another American thing - but I can adapt to that too. If we can’t adapt, we end up stuck, driving up and down the same road all our lives. Sometimes you just have to drive due north and see what you find.
