Soon after arriving, the man took off his watch; he no longer needed to keep time, or so he thought. It would take several days until he realized the depth of his action. Hawai‘i made him feel no distinct need for measuring time. His Harley-Davidson Sportser, which he stored with a friend on the North Shore, also made him feel this way. Sporties, as they are affectionately known, are the smallest of Harley’s motorcycles, but the quickest and most balanced. This is what interested the man.
He returned to Hawai‘i yearly to ride with his friends and escape thinking philosophically. Motorcycles bring their riders into the moment, make them aware of their surroundings and heighten and sharpen the senses. Motorcycles ground their riders to the earth and the earth’s flow in natural and human ways like nothing else can. Harley-Davidsons, the most visceral of all bikes, especially bring their riders into an embodied state of awareness. The man needed this yearly experience in order to flee the disembodied state of Western philosophy, which still grappled with its Platonic and Cartesian legacy that seemed to forever place the human species as superior to all others and forever leave it alienated from all that was natural. This legacy conflated soul and mind; it sucked soul out of the body and gave it to spirit; it divided mind and body and pitted thoughts and senses against each other as ways of knowing. The man needed to return to his body, and 550 pounds of Milwaukee’s finest pig iron was the perfect prescription for a renewed sense of self. The man would find his soul once again. And caring for the soul was the first definition of philosophy proffered by Plato in his Apology.
He sat overlooking the ocean at Ali‘i Beach Park in historic Hale‘iwa Town. Not consciously realizing, he had deeply inhaled and the smell of the Pacific Ocean filled his nostrils, and after letting go of an unexpected sigh the man felt the first sign of release that he had come to expect in his many visits to these islands over the years. He looked over at his black Sporty, its glistening chrome dual pipes, chrome oil tank, and black textured covers. Silver and black, shiny and dark, smooth and textured—this was his bike. His bike, that brought the polarities together. He had not seen other motorcycles transformed and individualized in this particular way. There was something of him there and in return those humanly constructed gears and what encased them, that rubber, the shiny Harley paint, and his fringed saddle somehow defined him in a significant way. Perhaps it was the strength of his shadow side that brought him to the saddle of this rumbling engine that came to life as he pushed the start button. He didn’t quite know for sure exactly, but this thought never entered his mind as he slowly brought the bike to life; and as he rolled on the accelerator, he set it into motion, and he came to life with it.
He rode along the hump of the island between the two volcanic mountain ranges called the Wai‘anaes, the older range, and the younger Ko‘olaus. These ranges are as distinct as yin and yang, the receptive and active mutually inclusive principles of Chinese cosmology; the ranges are dry and wet respectively and provide the extremes of the island, and each of the islands with its high rate of endangered plant and animal species and the urban sprawl and its accompanying environmental demands, especially on O‘ahu, is a microcosm of the prognosis of the planet. The man knew all of this, but reveled still in what remains one of Earth’s Edens. And how better to experience this beauty than on his Harley-Davidson Sporty with the constant throaty mantra of its dual pipes tuned just like any other musical instrument—the sound of which placed the man into a meditative state of awareness and made him feel alive once again and in his body. Over the years of coming to this Eden, the man’s bike was slowly transforming into a work of art. Harleys are built to be altered, to become individualized signature events of their riders, and the man was slowly giving his signature to this Harley as it breathed its OM into the early morning chill under the silent gaze of Mt. Ka‘ala, the highest point on O‘ahu.
As the first chapter of the Zhuangzi, that Daoist text so many love, states, he was “Rambling without Destination” this day. Rambling without destination is the Daoist prescription to find the way, the dao, to find oneself along the way. He was a sole rider today without his local riding buddies who were attending to the business of making their livings. Even in Hawai‘i people need to work. The man enjoyed riding with his friends, especially Ken and Leo who brought him into this world of needing to be attentive and aware of what he was doing, of learning to balance and blend with the forces of sun, wind, water, gravity, and the presence other people who philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre proclaimed could be hell. For motorcycle riders, other people could indeed be hell as they moved about in their compartmentalized realities with climate control, sound systems that make them oblivious to what’s around, and their mindless distractions of putting on make-up, eating ice cream and Big Macs, talking on cell phones, and sometimes even reading books, none of which were ever philosophy books that demanded too much attention and focus. Such mindless activities on a motorcycle mean death, and the man came to appreciate the exhilaration of being fully attentive and responsive to the world of which he was invariably a part. To be responsive, he realized, is to be appropriate to the context at hand, which is different from the environmental and ethical view that we are stewards responsible for the environment or for our actions. To ride is to figure out somehow what both the Confucians and Daoists already knew—that each of us needs to respond appropriately to all beings encountered, not to assert ourselves so willingly upon others, but rather to affect a harmony by blending with the flow and learning to affect its flowing when necessary in order to promote meaningful change. Without this meaningful change, life would be random, and perhaps even impossible. The man could see that the presence of so many motorcycles on the streets of O‘ahu changed driving patterns; other motorists simply were aware, albeit sometimes only at a remotely subliminal level, that they shared their road space with the two-wheeled. When he had this thought, the man knew this was a good lesson for developing a friendlier way for two-legged humans to live with their four-legged brethren.
Not riding with Ken and Leo this day would place the man in a more Daoist space than a Confucian one where they would spend the day engaged in the practice of li, the rites or ritual propriety. When they were together, often times encountering some of the many other riders on Oahu, they would participate in rider li. As in any kind of li, the objective is to promote well-being and robust, enhanced, and meaningful relationships with others. With these kinds of relationships established, harmony is likely to ensue. One sensed this harmony through the at-first unexpected polite manner in which riders in Hawai‘i encounter each other through their communal sense of being on two wheels where life was always held out over death. This was especially and certainly part of the subculture of Harley riders who were even more seemingly polite than their mates who rode atop the non-American bikes from Japan, England, and Italy. All magnificent bikes in their own right, ones that could blow the Harleys off road and track—but nevertheless they simply weren’t Harleys. But today, the man was alone. He would circle the island and end where he started, in Hale‘iwa Town, the North Shore home to the best surfing in the world, another practice of attuned awareness and balance. The man would be better off for his journey on this day.
The morning was crisp and clear as it often is in Hawai‘i. The cool air moved across his face as the sun’s rays streamed through the mountains where they intersected with the misting rain of the Ko‘olaus and formed a rainbow. The man would see many rainbows this day and would even seek to ride through them, but they would remain evasive, always eluding him as some unreachable horizon. Life itself was this way—there is always that approach to meaning, to love, to intimacy that seems to withdraw at the very last moment and pass over us like the wind moving across the man’s face and around his body as he rolled on between the mountains. How to keep our balance through these kinds of experiences is one of our overriding challenges. It too would be his challenge throughout the day.
As he glided to the other side, the man began to feel the warming of the day and the sun’s hint of the afternoon. The sun makes Hawai‘i the tropical paradise it is, but brutalizes the skin when given a chance. For this rider, sunscreen was more important than wearing a helmet, which inhibited vision, sound, smell, and the feel of the ride no matter what others maintained, no matter what the safety Nazis insisted. If he was going to go down, for sure he wanted full body armor, but to avoid going down was, he often reasoned, even more important. Hawai‘i law, despite attempts to change it, allowed riders to expose their heads to wind, sun, rain, and the pavement if fate would have it. The constant attempts to mandate helmet use were well intended, but one can never measure what doesn’t happen except by anecdotal evidence and the man had such a story when his full-faced helmet lulled him into a false sense of security, relaxed his head turns, and impaired his hearing and vision. When he almost pulled into the small pickup that day, he immediately pulled over and strapped this piece of gear, which might save his life or prevent some donor recipient from a needed organ some day, to the back of his bike, and there it remained. His unprotected head made him feel freer, and wasn’t this what he longed for, wasn’t this freedom to go “rambling without destination,” without some teleological goal such as Plato’s perfect realm, an Abrahamic heaven, or some vision of ultimate reality what he wanted? Wasn’t this feeling of being back in his body, to court the death that was always with him anyhow, and simply to be aware of everything around him again—to be alive!—wasn’t this what he wanted and why he rode? Wasn’t this the reason he came yearly to Hawai‘i? And thereafter, this is the way he rode, clad in leather, denim, boots, gloves, and hatless as he made his way, along the way.
He cruised over H1, the only U.S. interstate that never leaves the state, into Waipahu Town, a warmer, drier, and more industrial part of the island. In Waipahu, the man would stop at the Hog Pen, Larry’s shop. Larry was the Harley man to whom most riders ultimately found their ways; he was the one who talked the man out of his standard issued pipes and breather and into tweaking his Sporty. Larry was the biker guru, at least for the Harley riders. Like other Harley riders, Larry understood the man’s longing for freedom, for rambling without a goal in mind, for riding for the sheer joy of just riding, and understood what it meant to be an accomplished rider, the ruler of one’s ride.
But Larry did not consciously know in a scholarly way, as did the man, the trained philosopher, that the accomplished rider is like the shengren, the Daoist sagely ruler, who is the rhythmic expression of the pulsating dao, the way, that ebbs and tides as it gives expression to the yang and yin of the natural world. The man’s Sporty was this tension of the human-made and the natural, the sounds of the natural and the throaty OM of his customed pipes, and it was this tension that brought him into harmony with the four qi of heaven, which are the energetic fluids in the atmosphere and inside the body; these qi were in his body too although often hidden until he sat in the Sporty’s saddle. These qi are wind and rain, dark and light, and mix with the five xing, the “goings” or processes of wind, fire, soil, metal, and water that transition reality into a harmonious order in Chinese philosophy. This is heaven, or tian, a heaven on earth where the sage learns to float in harmony with the apparently disharmonious transformations of yin and yang, the four qi of heaven, and the five xing of earth that combine to give force to the changing world; Hawai‘i, with its subtlety of change and power of transformation, is the changing world of tian and its flow. The sage tides and ebbs, lives and dies, with spiritual deference to dao’s flow; this is the life the man wished to live.
The man, who was now stripped of any encapsulating structure that dualistically separated his true self—a self of no merit or fame for the Daoists—became a being without ego as he rode down the road, along with its flow, with his machine pulsating under him; it gave him the power to not be his encapsulated self, to be open to all around him, to be part of the machine under him, and the pavement under the machine and the earth under the pavement; it gave him the power, more than just intellectually, to understand Heraclitus’s challenge to expect the unexpected. The man came to expect the unexpected as he rode westward out of Waipahu down the Wai‘anae coast to the end of the road.
The Wai‘anae coast of Oahu is punctuated by the browned western mountain range of the islands. The Wai‘anae Mountains had been clear-cut for sandalwood and koa trees by early profiteers of Hawai‘i’s many natural resources. Replanted with eucalyptus and other non-native species that flourished in the tropical sun, the mountain range would be forever transformed. The volcanic rust brown color of the mountains and their attending cinder cones that jut out into the remarkably blue water of the Pacific framed the man’s ride as he headed toward the end of the road. This was the part of the island where many native Hawaiians were pushed as most of their land was stolen and remains occupied to this day by outside invaders. The man was sensitive to the history and politics and the greed and the self-indulgent gluttony of those who came to these islands and exploited and forever transformed everything in this last of Earth’s Edens from its coral reefs to its mountaintops. The ghosts of the first Hawaiians, those Polynesians who sailed the great expanse of ocean to these most remote islands on the planet, do not even recognize most of the plants they encounter on their nightly spirit walks in search of their original early paradise. As the man rode along the hot stretch of coastal road protected only by his denim jacket, pants, boots, gloves, sunglasses, and sunscreen, young girls and boys would smile and wave when their parents weren’t looking. Harleys were the bike of choice on the Wai‘anae Coast, and this sentiment brought a smile to the man’s face and a feeling of connection in his heart.
As he approached the end of the road another rider streaked passed him on a red Kawasaki or Suzuki; its whining engine sound reminded the man of rapidly flapping insect wings that sounded distant and got louder as the insect approached. And approach he did, and with incredible speed. The man reacted to seeing the rider approach as he did with all other riders on Oahu by giving the man the low greeting of an extended hand, biker li in Hawai‘i, but the helmeted rider was focused on just the road before him. With no more of his throttle remaining, he streaked passed the Sporty; it was an awesomely fast bike. The man himself once approached the century mark of 100 m.p.h. one night on an open road and understood the thrill of speed, but on this day he was cruising. At the end of the road, he stopped at the beach park and took a prolonged moment with the sparkling ocean and the sound of the ocean’s rhythmic approach to the shore. He filled his lungs with the smell of ocean and wondered if the specters of Hawai‘i past could still smell its familiar fragrance. This, he thought, was the one thing that could never be destroyed for them. The man stayed until a thumping stereo of someone enjoying the beach in a much different way interrupted his meditation. Riding along the way back, not far from where he was passed by the intent rider, he saw the flashing lights of the ambulance and the police cars and the mangled, misshapen red bike off to the side of the road. The man knew the young man to be dead; there was no way anyone could survive at that speed. Over a beer and lunch in Wai‘anae, he honored the unknown rider, who was, he hoped, an organ donor. Giving life, being a part of another, was the Daoist thing to do. This day was the young biker’s, not his.
There is only one way in and out of Wai‘anae unless one has an off-road vehicle. Retracing his way, the man decided to head for the coolness of the Windward Side where the chance of getting wet was almost predictable. Bypassing historic Hale‘iwa Town, the man headed down the North Shore where the Ko‘olau Mountains collected clouds and dumped rain, usually in the form of passing showers. This side of the island is wetter, greener, and windy. With the blue ocean and its turquoise waters around the coral reefs and the light brown sand to his left and the rippling green spine like mountains to his right, the man leisurely rode the coast where fragrant smells from passing flowers wafted their ways to his nostrils. Waiting out the rain is always a good idea for once wet coldness invariably sets in even under the warm riding conditions in Hawai‘i. But sometimes one just can’t escape the forces of nature and the man got wet; his shiny bike got spotted with watermarks and dirt from the road. He accepted the rain and the coldness that followed as he made his way along H3, the most expensive and one of the most beautiful stretches of Interstate in the country. H3, a main artery along with the Pali Highway and the Likelike Highway, connects the Windward and Leeward sides and flows into various spots of the city side of the island when traveling across the mountains to the town side of Honolulu. Here he rolled on his throttle and felt his Sporty come to life, the patented “potato-potato-potato” sound of the engine transformed into its throaty OM chant of his custom pipes that never once paused for a breath. The change of speed heightened the man’s senses a notch as he achieved perfect poise on the massively vibrating human-made machine whose power can provoke the foolishness of a ruling ego as its seductive rumbling affirms and enlivens form and power. But his ego wasn’t foolish; he had left that behind somewhere when he exhaled at the beginning of the day at Ali‘i Beach Park. He felt the flowing currents of qi through his body and the presence of the zone as he entered its nearness.
Accomplished riders, like Cook Ding in the Zhuangzi, who never sharpens his cleaver as he cuts through ligament, cartilage, muscle, but never hits the bone, learn the art of the ride and appropriate what the Daoists call wuwei. Wuwei is a spontaneous yet learned skill that arises as a naturally emergent action perfectly appropriate to the context of encountered situations that can change suddenly and dramatically. Wuwei literally means no-action, but the Daoist sensibility is to act as if not acting, to leave the ego behind and just perform one’s actions naturally and harmoniously within the situation at hand—the dancer is the dance, the lover the loving, and the rider the riding. The sagely rider who overcomes this seduction of the controlling ego’s will by his mastery on the road shapes the structure, focuses the energy of the road’s flow, and performs actions so perfectly, skillfully, and appropriately that he appears to do so without effort—the way of dao is wuwei. A sagely rider is fluid and melds with the system of the bike, the road, and the transformations of yin and yang, the four qi, and the five xing of the earth. As the earth moves, the conditions of the road move, and as the road moves so does the rider. The man was balanced at his high speed, and leaning into his turns with the pitch of the road, he was poised for anything. The rush of the leaning into turns came and passed without attachment. He felt as though he were in the heart of the system, conjoined with its forces, and it was through his training on this 550 pound vibrating human-made machine that he was adept at being a part of his world—all of this without the presence of thought. Coming into town he realized he had appropriated the qi at will and that dao had flowed through him and that this stretch of open road flowed through him as if the arteries of the earth gave him the power, the de, of wuwei, which flowed through all things. He felt as though he had made his way home.
The yang of the day was moving toward its yin. The man always enjoyed a brief run through Waikiki along Kalakaua where he was greeted by the smell of coconut tanning oil, burnt bodies of tourists from around the world, and the sight of Diamond Head jutting out with splendor into the Pacific. He couldn’t stay long around so many people with their many vacation demands, but this too was important for him to occasionally experience because it reminded him how he had his own set of demands for coming. He headed out the Lunalilo Freeway toward the North Shore where he would park his Sporty and hook up with friends for food, drink, and conversation. “Talking story,” as it is referred to in Hawai‘i, is a vital part of life. He too would have his stories about the fallen rider, hitting the zone over the Ko‘olaus, and the smiling children on the Wai‘anae Coast.
His route home took him close to Pearl City where he remembered a former student who emigrated from Vietnam and had opened an Italian restaurant some years back. He wondered if the hardworking student had made it and was delighted to see the restaurant’s proprietor greet him with a warm smile of aloha. And it was from there he set out down the busy street with its ebbing flow of traffic, thumping stereos, and many intersections; from the restaurant he set out for the hump between the mountain ranges toward the North Shore, for all journeys on an island, the microcosm of this planet, end where they begin.
Kamehameha Highway was busy toward the end of the day with the after-work crowd who waited out rush hour before heading to their homes in Pearl City, Mililani, and Wahiawa. Some were heading for Kapolei, a new planned city to handle O‘ahu’s urban sprawl. The man rode his Harley through the remnants of the day’s “tropical traffic.” The traffic wasn’t quite stop and go; it moved with an irregular flow—not quite stop and go, but not freely open either. Every time he managed to get his bike into either third or fourth gear, this main artery homeward for so many would get clogged, or all “choked” as his buddy Leo would say. He was tired, it had been a long day, and there were dinner plans for later that evening. But he was in no hurry. The sun was ready to dip behind the horizon. Locals and tourists alike would gather for the day’s main event—the setting of the sun and the birth of the rising moon. Hawai‘i made the man realize what Heraclitus meant when he said the “sun was new every day.” The man always tried to watch the spectacular sunsets when he was in Hawai‘i, but this day he would just bask in its afterglow. Finally, the traffic seemed to break and that wonderful feeling of moving freely brought relief and air to his lungs. His Sporty rumbled beneath him as he moved through the gears—second, third, fourth—and just as he was ready to hit fifth the traffic immediately choked in front of him. The setting sun pierced through his sunglasses and he momentarily missed the red suggestion of the brake lights in front of him. His left toe brought the smallest but the quickest and most balanced of Harley’s motorcycles into fifth-gear position and he let out the clutch and the Sporty responded like a horse wanting the barn. Finally, some air! Finally some freedom!
It was then, at that moment of freedom, the exhilaration of the promise of open road, that the man saw the dotted sea of red in front of him; it was then he saw the quickly approaching container truck stopped in front of him; it was then he remembered the young biker of the morning; and it was then he responded. The man applied the clutch, down shifted, firmly squeezed the hand lever that controlled the front brake, and pressed down on the foot brake pedal that controlled the rear wheel all in a singular motion, so choreographed that only the most disciplined eye would have been able to discern the unison of the individual executions. He heard the voice in his head, “You never want to high-side your motorcycle. You never want to release your rear brake once it’s locked and skidding.” The back wheel locked, which meant he was losing traction, and that meant control; the transmission grumbled as it experienced the unexpected lower gear, and the tail end of the bike began to skid from side to side under the friction of the rear tire’s rubber of the locked wheel. He backed off the brake just a bit to gain more traction, but heard the voice of his teacher in his head again, “You never want to high-side your motorcycle. You never want to release your rear brake once it’s locked and skidding.” To fight the natural tendency to grab, not squeeze, and only use the front brake, which is much more efficient but in this situation when used alone could send the rider over the bars, requires discipline, and there is never freedom without discipline. But the front wheel chirped. “You don’t want to lock the front brake,” the voice in his head seemed to say clearly. The man trusted this voice of Morgan, his instructor. “She’ll be so upset with me,” he thought, “for not wearing my helmet and dying on the high side.” Only the discerning eye of an adept rider could understand the beauty of controlling a front and rear wheel skid almost simultaneously.
The man released the front brake for a split second, then immediately reapplied it, squeezing, not grabbing, and the front wheel gained traction with the earth under it and unlocked. The bike shimmied with its rider poised on top of it, he held his knees tightly against the black shiny gas tank, and he kept his head up with his eyes looking ahead with the front wheel straight. Any change in his path while stopping would surely high-side him in the opposite direction over his motorcycle, and he knew this would likely kill him; riders just don’t survive this kind of fall. He needed to keep the front wheel straight until he came to a complete stop. But there just wasn’t enough room for the motorcycle to stop. The message became boldly visible: “WARNING, THIS TRUCK MAKES FREQUENT STOPS!” Collision was inevitable. And it was at this moment of realization the man jettisoned his individualized signature black Sporty, with its shiny chrome dual pipes, chrome oil tank, and black textured covers—he would be taking the low-side. Out of the corner of his eye he would later remember the sparks generated from metal meeting pavement, the gasping sound of the Sporty’s stalling breath, and the smell of the Sporty’s bodily fluids. But his focus was on the approaching rear guard of the truck and its message of warning that this truck makes frequent stops. He was sliding on his buttocks with his left leg somewhat tucked under the right and with his left arm slowing his momentum as much as he could. He held his head up with his right arm wrapped around and his hand grasping the back of his neck. Curiously he felt no pain, but somehow realized his head was positioned in line with the low guard in front of him. Lowering his head at the last moment, the man continued his slide as if into home plate, and gradually came to rest under the rear axle of the truck.
The man felt himself breathing as he looked up at the underside of the truck; he contemplated the huge universal joint looking back at him with its unblinking studded third eye in its middle. Its silent gaze punctuated the closeness of life and death and the universe’s utter indifference toward any particular member of any species. From this perspective, he realized he was dispensable. All meaning is created. And Beyond, Mt. Ka‘ala gazed down upon the scene from above the clouds that shrouded its indifferent expression. The man methodically inventoried his body. He could move, and he felt the great need to move out from under the belly of the massive monster that swallowed him. The man emerged and slowly got to his feet. He noticed the red-orange glow of the sky, felt the trade winds welcoming him back to life, and stood on the firmness of what was the wake of motion just a moment ago.
The man felt as though he were still moving, but now it felt as though he were sliding through an empty space; this feeling of sliding through the cold darkness of empty space would be forever with him thereafter. Later, the gaze of the universe’s indifference would accompany him through this empty space—all meaning is created—and he would come to realize he projected this gaze; there was, after all, no gaze, just indifference except for the people who gathered around with their concerned faces and looks of astonished shock as they beheld this man in ragged leathers and denims in front of them. How was he alive, he imagined. Why was he not hurt? Later the soreness would find its way from his body’s depths and a fractured hand would make itself present, but the road rash would somehow be minimal. He called Larry from the hospital where he was released after being checked over and they picked up his mangled motorcycle. Larry drove him to the North Shore where he met up with Leo and Ken for their late dinner. “Hey man, keep ’em up next time.” All the man could do was smile at Larry as he closed the door. Over dinner, the man told the stories of the day, of how he got into the zone over the Ko‘olaus, drove through a rainbow, and of the high-pitched sound of death passing without any acknowledgment to him from the young rider in Wai‘anae. They drank a toast to the dead rider. It was, after all, his day.
The man told his friends that his bike would be in the shop for a while, and that he would be joining the ranks of the four-wheeled, compartmentalized majority until his bike got a once-over—some cosmetic surgery he told them. The man excused himself, explaining it had been a long day, and slowly walked toward home for the pain was beginning to find its way to him; the drugs were wearing off. That day, he made the remainder of his way on foot. He remembered the Zhuangzi, “The way is made by walking it.” He smiled, and then found himself smiling broadly for his life, and the life of the dead rider, for he had spent the entire day blending with and emerging from the unfolding and pulsating road of Dao.
