![\"bearbutte\"](\"https:\/\/indianz.com\/News\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/bearbutte.jpg\")
\r\n<\/P>\r\nThe annual week-long Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, which recently ended, began in 1938,\u00a0I\u2019m told,\u00a0and there have been thousands of stories told about it since.\u00a0Most locals believe,\u00a0as I do,\u00a0that its impetus was for the economic tourist development in the Black Hills.\r\n
<\/p>Some more philosophical types would like to believe it began as some kind of existential spiritual journey through the sacred Paha Sapa,\u00a0a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world as technology was bursting into our lives and people were beginning to worry,\u00a0even then,\u00a0that the modern world was marked for extinction. We\u2019ve come a long way toward that eventuality since, yes?\r\n
<\/p>\r\nIt is no accident that the motorcycle itself depicted in this old story,\u00a0a machine which began to sell wildly some twenty years later,\u00a0a 1966 Super Hawk,\u00a0\u00a0is at the center of this book, which many of you have read and which I read during my college years titled Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values<\/em><\/a> by Robert Pirsig.\r\n <\/p>\r\n <\/p>\r\nThe book was written probably because Pirsig performed his own maintenance as he rode through the prairies of North and South Dakota even while\u00a0the early tech and computer development at places like Palo Alto, California,\u00a0was conflicting with the American historical notion of the sacredness\u00a0of\u00a0\u201cworking with your hands\u201d.\u00a0And,\u00a0as you read about\u00a0his early road trip though the prairie you learn that it was his way of articulating his own version of\u00a0what might be called \u201cmetaphysics\u00a0values.\u201d\r\n <\/p>\r\nToday, thousands of overweight sixty\u00a0and seventy year old counter-cultural men and women of the past roar on their machines past my house on their way to settling down in a camp in the trees with a couple of six-packs of beer and they say they are just trying to \u201cget away from it all.\u201d\u00a0One wonders if they have read the Zen<\/em> story.\r\n <\/p>\r\n![\"elizabethcooklynn\"](\"https:\/\/indianz.com\/News\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/elizabethcooklynn.jpg\")
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