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In the Footsteps or Bike-Tire Tracks... My Trip to Interview Gennie and Bob DeWeese

By Thomas J. Steele, S.J. -- Regis University (Denver CO), Coauthor of the "Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM).

I have enough trouble remembering what I did fifteen minutes ago, so I have had considerable trouble reconstructing the days in June 1987 when I repeated a small portion of the ZMM trip. I do know that on 14 June 1987 I left Riverton (St. Stephen’s Mission on the Wind River Reservation), drove through DuBois, passed along the NW side of Yellowstone Lake, and came shortly to the intersection of the road I was on, with the road that went from the NE gate of Yellowstone to Gardiner. At that intersection I "joined the trip" and traveled from there to Bozeman, a distance of about 80 miles. After staying overnight in an el-cheapo motel, I went out the next morning to visit Robert and Gennie DeWeese – another ten miles or so, I’d guess – and returned after a visit of a couple or three hours; I spent the afternoon running the paper trail in the Montana State University (no longer "College"), Bozeman.

The next day, Tuesday the 16th, I left Bozeman on I-80 eastward, thereby doing the trip backwards for about 25 miles. At Livingstone I departed from the trip and stayed on I-80 at least as far as Columbus, then I turned southeast and went through Bearcreek to Red Lodge, a point on the ZMM trip, but after only a quarter of a mile I left the ZMM path again and drove through Belfry, Cody, Meteetsee, Thermopolis, and Riverton and returned to St. Stephen’s. [Editors note: I believe Father Steele in mentioning “Bearcreek to Red Lodge is referring to the road in Rock Creek Canyon. This is the road to the Beartooth Pass, and the route over the Beartooth Mountains to Yellowstone, a route followed in ZMM.].

So much for the geographical journey. The psychological experience was much more interesting – imagining the two cycles as if they were running down the road a few dozen yards in front of me, seeing the scenery as they might have seen it, and viewing the towns as they might have viewed them. The time at the DeWeeses’ home was terrific because now I saw the real home (I had imagined more of an A-frame), the actual deck where the group sat with the ground below it falling away sharply to Cottonwood Creek, the genuine Peter Voulkos pottery that John "almost kicked over," and so forth. It turned out that Gennie and I grew up within about three-quarters of a mile of each other in University City, Missouri; when she asked me, "Does Flynn Park School meaning anything to you," I almost fell off the chair. Bob DeWeese acted out for me the time when he was doing some yard work near the road and a fellow came along on a bike, caught a glimpse of the DeWeese name on the mailbox, and slammed to a stop. He stared at the mailbox and at DeWeese three or four times each and then said, "You’re ... ?" DeWeese nodded. The biker went on, "And this is ... ?" DeWeese nodded again. The biker gazed around and said, "Oh ... . Oh!" Then he gunned his motor, put the cycle in gear, and roared off up the road. –The home was as idyllic as John and Sylvia said it was: hard to leave, especially since the DeWeeses were so hospitable.

I have always had sense that I can’t thoroughly know anything until I know the history (if there is one, and there usually is) and the geography (ditto), so if I can I try to "walk the ground." (I make exceptions: I wrote a Foreword to a book on the Franciscan missions of California without ever having set foot in California.) But perhaps the best part of "driving the ground" – retracing the path of the ZMM journey - was the feeling of having entered into the book itself, of participating in Pirsig’s and Phaedrus’ and the narrator’s discourse, sharing in his and Chris’s and John’s and Sylvia’s journey. The experience in Wyoming and Montana gave me something of the sense of what happens in Woody Allen’s hilarious "Kugelmas Episode": the title character, a literature professor, takes a copy of Madame Bovary into a magic box, and he emerges from the box and finds himself in the novel! Normal time and place are suspended, and the participating reader becomes one with the journey, one with the story. What happened to Kugelmas happened to me: I was in Pirsig’s novel – or maybe more accurately and more satisfying, I was simultaneously in the real trip that led to the novel and in the novel as well. In sixties jargon, it was a nifty experience.

Click on the link below to go to Life is Like a Swift Mountain Stream.
An essay by Rosemary Bradford Grant, Retired History and Humanities Teacher, Monett High School, Monett, MO and Adjunct Professor, University of Missouri-Kansas City. LifesSwiftMountainSt