Welcome to the 'Sletter, what is this? and more
First of all, if you’re reading this in your inbox, I’d like to say thanks for signing up based on very thin evidence. First subs are the hardest to get.
Second, OK, here’s the setup: I’ve been to all but four of the US states in the lower 48. I haven’t been to Montana, South and North Dakota, and Rhode Island. RI I’ll get to eventually, maybe, but here and now three of the most beautiful states are calling. So, for my 40th birthday in September, I’m shipping my motorcycle to Minneapolis, and riding it back to my home in Oakland, CA, over the course of a couple weeks.
I knew I wanted to hit those three states, and probably spend some time stopping and photographing, but there’s not some pilgrimage route, no Camino de Santiago or Kumano Kodo to guide me. I was somewhat thinking about just winging it, but that can be hard to manage; when I’ve done that kind of trip in the past, it was very easy to just stay on the road, sleep in rest areas, and go too fast. Also I’m just too old to wing it. I had started planning a route with google maps and a spreadsheet, trying to keep to roughly 300 miles / 6 hours a day, and then I saw this page, and I realized I could use that for my route. The fact that it’s the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of my favorite books is just kismet (say what you will about its strange perspectives but it had a big effect on me in my late teens).
I was still thinking about an out-and-back at that point; some delusional part of me thought I could make that work if I went out on the nice back roads and did long interstate days on the way back. The road back would be pretty miserable that way, but it was barely possible, if I didn’t have any rest days. I was talking about the whole trip on a big family zoom call, and one of my in-laws suggested I go out and ship the bike back to myself, and fly home. The idea of shipping the bike hadn’t even occurred to me, but shipping it to a friend in Minnesota and then riding all the way home seemed very reasonable, and a good way to buy myself valuable time.
A word or two about the name: I’d been casting about for what to call this thing for a while. I’m doing this newsletter as a way of keeping myself honest; it would be easy to ride through all that territory and not really engage with it, just lost in my own thoughts. Because the ride is following the path of Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there were a lot of names along those lines I was thinking of, but I didn’t want to completely marry myself to that concept. This is my journey; I’m a photographer not a philosopher anyway. I mentioned I still needed a name in the Tabs subscriber discord last night, and in by the time I’d woken up a bunch of good ideas had come in, so of course I used none of them. Someone suggested a song I’d never heard of, ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, and that got me thinking about emptiness in general (it’s a whole chapter in the Dhammapada) and that led a few seconds later to ‘Big Empty’. The dot com was taken, but dot photos and dot pictures are mine now.
That’s enough for now. Probably next week I’ll send out something talking about gear, what I’m taking for the road and what I’m leaving behind, so to speak. Until then—
Matt