Zen and The Art of Bicycle Maintenance

When you do it yourself, a bike becomes a physical canvas on which you can express who you are. Case in point: sitting on the floor one day, was a dreadlocked man screwing a bicycles seat onto his yellow frame. This was not your standard bicycle seat, the kind shaped like an arrow, with a wide part in the back and a pointed part in the front. He had outfitted his bike with something called a MoonSaddle, which is shaped like a wide, thin, crescent half-moon.

“Is that good for your butt?” I asked him.

“You don’t sit on your butt,” he grumbled.

“Sorry?” I said.

“You sit on your pelvic floor. And, yes, it’s better. You’d have to be an idiot to sit on a regular seat,” he said with real contempt, as if I’d asked whether drinking arsenic, straight, was considered health food.

I looked around at all the standard bicycle seats visible in the shop. But I also noticed that tinkering was not unusual; people were trying new shapes and forms, from single-fork shocks to grip shifters. But what was perhaps unusual about this gentleman and his MoonSaddle was that he had chosen his seat in part to make a political statement. He believes that regular bike seats damage male reproductive organs to the point of inutility; he also believes that this damage is not a result of an inadvertent design flaw; he believes that their shape is a wide, intensional conspiracy by powerful interests. “Population control, you know?” he said, a wild look in his eyes. Did I mention that the garage is in Boulder?

Robert Pirsig, in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” sees bike maintenance in terms of a larger question, a question about how to view the world. Those who do not know how to fix their rigs have only a surface worldview, a romantic worldview, in which they only know what things do, not how they work. If you can’t fix your bike, you can never see past the surface of anything. Pirsig, in contrast, has his ear tuned to every hum and breath of his motorcycle. He sought to delve deeper into the details of the bike, and thereby understand the root structures.

Bill Martin, 50, is a volunteer at Community Cycles, and he iterated that repairing something is not drudgery, not if you understand the beauty of the system you’re repairing. What is a bike but a system of pulls and pushes designed to achieve a result?

Martin has salt and pepper hair and the air of a guy who has spent his life around bikes, both for fun, for a job, and now as a volunteer. He is helping a woman named Bonie Shupe with her old bike wheel, which is set up on a “true stand” that lets it spin freely. It wobbles. It undulates. Shupe wants to make the wheel as close to its original, circular form as possible.

Martin points the various aspects of the spokes, the way the spokes weave in and out of each other, the way they pull against each other. A mechanic must pay attention to at least five variables, and must imagine the wheel in three dimensions in order to make the millimeter-size adjustments that will make it perfect. The senses are involved, from touch to hearing. He plucks the spokes like an iron string, and it vibrates like a cello. He can tell from the sound if it’s too tight or too loose. If a mechanic like Shupe is able to tune her wheel, Martin says, “it’s a wonderful mental exercise.” It aids her “conceptual mind,” like a crossword puzzle or a Rubik’s cube. “It’s a good life lesson,” Martin says. Watching the wheel spin, and smoothing the rough parts, Martin says, can help folks understand the world as a whole, more than just riding around in a Ferrari ever could.

Is that a stretch? Why? Don’t Buddhist monks spin prayer wheels? Don’t Sufi mystics spin themselves? If there’s no deeper meaning to making a bike wheel spin smoothly, then why is it known as making the wheel “true”?

Shupe pulls her bike tire off, mounts it, and heads off down the bike path into the warm spring air.