DOWNSHIFTING
AMERICA — 1974 — Vietnam and Watergate are spiraling into despair. Life seems faster every day, yet as a history of the Seventies will later claim, “it seemed like nothing happened.” The “malaise,” as Jimmy Carter will later call it, can already be seen on disco dance floors, in fads and foolishness, even on bestseller lists.
The Compete Book of Running. The Scarsdale Diet. More Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. Yet somewhere holed up in small rooms, hunched over manual typewriters, thinking, thinking, dreaming, three latter day Thoreaus are preparing to put on the brakes.
After 121 rejections, Robert Pirsig had all but given up on his book. Longer than War and Peace, the book had a crazy title, no sex, and little but philosophy to recommend it. But that summer, a publisher finally took a chance. An editor told Pirsig to expect nothing beyond the small $3,000 advance. Because his book “is not, as I think you now realize from your correspondence with other publishers, a marketing man’s dream.”
That summer, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a publishing phenomenon. Fifty thousand copies in five weeks, a million in the first year. Blending a great American road trip with “an inquiry into values,” the book tapped an exhausted society’s longing for answers, slow and steady.
“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk,” Pirsig wrote. “The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s gone.”
Writing in a small apartment above a shoestore in Minneapolis, Pirsig had banged out what one critic called “a New Testament of the post-Beat generation.” Zen asked questions about quality, about technology, about “what the hell has gone wrong in this twentieth century.”
“We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.”
The New York Times called Zen “intellectual entertainment of the highest order.” Critic Todd Gitlin recalled, “Pirsig provided a kind of soft landing from the euphoric stratosphere of the late ’60s into the real world of adult life.” And if you were there, you remember that everyone you knew read it or claimed to. One who read it devoutly was the young Steve Jobs who turned away from “the real ugliness of modern technology” and towards tech designed with “Quality” in mind.
Suddenly famous and wealthy, Pirsig did what authors rarely do. He disappeared. He took the royalties, bought a boat, sailed to Europe and lived there for years. Behind him, he left a road freshly opened. Another Thoreau was already on it.
Like Pirsig, Peter Jenkins was weary. Divorced and disillusioned at the tender age of 22, he had come to loathe his country. But a janitor at Jenkins’ college in Alfred, NY told him not to give up on America until he met its people. So Jenkins threw clothes in a backpack, leashed his dog Cooper, and in October 1973, set out for New Orleans. On foot.
For the next five years, Jenkins walked America. He did not just pass through, he stayed. He lived for weeks with a hermit in Appalachia, for months with a black family in North Carolina. He walked through kindly towns that welcomed him like a friend, and mean towns that shunned him like an invader.
In New Orleans, Jenkins met a young woman from Arkansas, soon married her, and they walked on together. All the way to Oregon.
By 1979, America was still searching, still hungry. And Jenkins’ A Walk Across America provided more slow-paced wisdom.
“Mileage craziness is a serious condition that exists in many forms. It can hit unsuspecting travelers while driving cars, motorcycles, riding in planes, crossing the country on bicycles or on foot. The symptoms may lead to obsessively placing more importance on how many miles are traveled than on the real reason for the traveling.”
A Walk Across America topped bestseller lists for almost a year. Jenkins would follow with sequels, walking in China, Alaska, and the Pacific Coast. But by then, the rural roads that he and Robert Pirsig had opened had a new name.
Like Pirsig and Jenkins, William Trogdon was fed up. In the summer of 1978, divorced, fired from his teaching post, Trogdon rigged up a van he called “Ghost Dancing.” Then he tossed in copies of Whitman and Black Elk Speaks, and hit the road. But he did not travel interstates or main roads. He preferred the “blue highways.”
In just three months, Trogdon circled America, logging 13,000 miles. He met hitchhikers, runaways, native-Americans, ordinary Americans. He shared their stories and his own from remote roads that might have recently hosted a motorcycle or a man on foot.
“Instead of insight, maybe all a man gets is strength to wander for a while. Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain. An inheritance of wonder and nothing more.”
SAMPLE THE THREE DOWNSHIFTERS ON THE ATTIC’S DUSTY BOOKSHELF
Under a name derived from his Osage heritage — William Least Heat-Moon — Blue Highways came out in 1982. America was in a deep recession, still hungry. Another mega-bestseller, the book would, one critic said, “change the way you see the world.” Perhaps.
Three books, three invitations to downshift, to ponder, to wonder. Millions of Americans read one or more of these books, yet readers are always a small slice of society. And so, with the recession over, with cable TV flooding the dial, with shopping channels and mega-malls and more “mileage craziness,” America accelerated. And decades later, here we are, wondering “where all the time went,” hungry again.
“I believe that we are lost here in America,” Thomas Wolfe wrote. “But I believe we shall be found.” And as we speed on into a new “day-to-day shallowness,” who knows what would be Thoreau is hunched over a laptop, thinking, thinking, dreaming. Will we listen?
