Montana Magazine
Esquire
New Yorker
Missoulian
USA Today
USA Today
New Yorker
An Indian, Haefele explains at the outset, is a make of motorcycle not built since 1953 but highly esteemed by American bikers in the '930s and '40s. A Montana tree surgeon and an ex-teacher of creative writing, Haefele (City of Trees ) set out to reconstruct an Indian, and that task gives the principal thrust to this memoir. The rehabilitation project involved searching for abandoned machines, negotiating for old parts, purchasing replacement parts when originals were not available and keeping an eye out for 'basketcases,' a motorcycle built from a hodgepodge of makes, from which valuable parts may be salvaged. Also included are accounts of the birth of his third child (the first of his second marriage), the vagaries of Montana weather and portraits of other bikers. But all else takes a backseat to the machine, and such a focus limits the book's appeal to readers equally committed to or fascinated by the construction of a what he calls a technological 'work of art.'
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
There are books about motorcycling as a metaphor for life; here life -- within the writer's pregnant wife -- is a metaphor for restoring a 1947 Indian Chief motorcycle. Haefle, a 51-year-old tree surgeon from Missoula, describes how his search for vintage parts eventually involved an entire community of fanatical mechanics, impoverished motorcycle collectors, and renegade bikers -- a collaboration, he realizes, that gave him skills as much social and spiritual as practical. 'Parts are a never-ending quest,' he tells us. They are the fever and the cure, the question and the answer.'
An entertaining if somewhat flawed look at how a middle-aged hobbyist finds new meaning in life through rebuilding a classic motorcycle. Haefele is a frustrated novelist and academic who works, albeit happily, as a tree surgeon. Deciding after visiting an annual motorcycle rally to invest in a vintage American-made Indian Chief motorcycle, he finds himself friends with bikers and other assorted characters whom he would normally avoid. In the end, he finds that he has much in common with these folks, even as he has managed to sell his first novel and, by book's end, is back on the academic trail chasing down university jobs. Because of the setting (Montana) and motif (motorcycles), Haefele's book is doomed to comparisons with Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . These similarities notwithstanding, Haefele is able to guard himself well from any influence anxiety, though in one particular scene where he uses beer can slivers as a maintenance tool, the similarity is a little too close. Haefele's style is more relaxed and he isn't, for the most part, prone to the didacticism that mires down Pirsig's work. Unfortunately, the bottom begins to fall out when, for instance, the 'naming ceremony' for his newborn daughter, Phoebe, is juxtaposed against the episode in which he names his motorcycle the 'Millennium Flyer.' By the end, Haefele has dubbed his biker friend and tree-surgeon assistant Chaz the 'mythical trickster" who has kept him going on his quest to rebuild his bike, and even more clumsily, he draws open comparisons between the clothes bought for his daughter and the parts bought to help build his cycle when most readers would catch the similarity on theirown. These slips are not enough to ruin Rebuilding the Indian , though, which leaves one curious to see his forthcoming novel.
