I’ve made no secret of how much I enjoy Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Drivers Club, the superb quarterly magazine published by Hagerty Insurance. There’s no doubt that HDC is the greatest contribution to society that any insurance company has ever made. You’d think that bringing both Zen and HDC together would be an especially happy day for me. Instead, the HDC piece (written by Matthew B. Crawford) was just another misunderstanding and misstatement of what Pirsig meant when he wrote about quality.

But that’s another subject…

You see, Crawford’s essay also included this photo of Pirsig’s 1966 CB 77 Honda Super Hawk, which is enshrined at the National Museum of American History along with his typewriter and an original manuscript of Zen. When I read this I was heartened by the museum’s recognition of Zen’s influence. Then I began to think about the Super Hawk itself. In Zen, Prisig wrote a lot of things about motorcycles. He admitted elsewhere that some of what he wrote was just plain wrong. I consider this kind of literary error the rough equivalent of Springsteen saying he knew very little about racing yet somehow understood the spiritual significance of the Chevy 396.

The humble Super Hawk was a Universal Japanese Motorcycle. I have no idea who coined this phrase. It refers to the seam that exist between sport bikes, cruisers and touring motorcycles. I know that the categories of motorcycles go on and on and subdivide but the point of UJMs is that they are able to do a lot of things, many of them quite well, without overtly identifying themselves as one thing or another. Harleys either harken to the past or a cartoonish future while contemporary sport bikes ignite the standard Ricky Racer fantasies in a certain kind of rider. While all of this posturing goes on, a good UJM is simply ready to be ridden.

The problem is the UJM is nearly dead. The irony is that I believe the lack of UJMs over the last decade and a half has reduced the number of new riders, which in turn has made life hard on motorcycle companies. Can the argument be made that the UJM is somehow the equivalent of the American middle class? It can, and that’s a part of what I’m saying here. Motorcycles have become so polarized that marketing to the middle has been forgotten even though the middle class of potential riders is still a viable group, something I’m not sure can still be said about the actual middle class. UJM, by being designed for the middle class of riders, welcomed actual riding over style. They were easy and generally safe to ride with their upright, comfy riding position and simple 2-cylinder engines. They have no fairings or cowls. Back in 1966 there was little plastic used other than the tail/brake light lens. Nothing was hidden from view or repair. A lot of people are stunned to learn how much work you can do on a UJM with nothing more than the factory tool kit that was hidden under the seat.

The Super Hawk is not a bad looking motorcycle. But, its soul resides in its functionality rather than its overt styling. The next time you see a new motorcycle on the road make note of its stying. In the same way that vape makers know that kiddie flavors help snag and keep young, new vapers, motorcycle companies know the way to buyer’s hearts goes through their eyes. I have a friend who has 22 motorcycles, most of them Hondas. One of his greatest challenges is finding replacement plastic panels of his many vintage sport bikes. Honda doesn’t make those parts any more and used ones are often in worse shape, cracked, stained, yellowed, than the part they’re meant to replace. A good UJM, like the CB77, can live and look pretty much as it did when it was new, decade after decade, and many have.

So, yes, this is an argument for the UJM. But, more than that it’s an argument for the mindset that made and purchased them in the past. In the end, it’s an argument for a riding mindset. Looking into the soul of the Honda CB77 Super Hawk simply makes me want to go for a ride.