Buckskin Rides Again!

Here’s what you missed last week

[Dispatch #1] Slow Travel, Fast Truths

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I hadn’t just been putting off a trip to Arizona. I’d been avoiding the real journey for a long time.

My mind’s quick—I track patterns, connect dots—but when it comes to uncomfortable truths, I’m slow to register them.

Achieving Liftoff

Breaking gravitational pull is always the hardest part. It happens at both ends of a journey—first in the leaving, then in the returning.

Originally, I had intended to leave on April 2. But a storm front loomed over the Ohio Valley, Southern Appalachians, and Ozarks—a wall of weather fierce with tornadoes, flooding, and high winds. Rather than get marooned in a roadside motel before I’d even found my travel rhythm, I stayed put. And while I waited, I did something unexpected: I cleaned my office.

First, I reorganized the office closet. Lined up my bookshelves. Cleared out old correspondence and travel brochures from a decade ago. I rarely find joy in tidying—and I didn’t then, either. I hated it; felt overwhelmed by it. But I couldn’t seem to stop. It wasn’t satisfaction I felt so much as clearing a path that I didn’t want to walk—but knew I had to.

Now I see that I wasn’t organizing to stay put—I was clearing a path to leave. Or maybe I was organizing myself—trying to impose order before everything changed. The clutter in my office felt like a stand-in for everything I’d been avoiding—decisions, memories, expectations I hadn’t figured out how to carry.

Leaving is never just about packing the bike. In this case, it was about starting to unpack what I’d left unresolved for most of my life.

Mom has always been a master of organization, and with the rise of organizational aspirationalism—the driving force behind the booming organization-industrial complex—the rest of America has finally caught up with her. I even found myself wandering into The Container Store, emerging with a modular system designed to turn my office closet into a library.

I have to admit, I started to get the appeal of this consumerism—in a chaotic world, there’s something deeply satisfying about at least trying to contain the madness of my own messy habits.

My office chair. And yes, that’s me in the picture with my original motorcycle, a 2010 BMW F 650 GS

The Greek Chorus

Somewhere between the shelf labels and the matching bins, I started to feel like I was the one being organized—sorted into a new category of adulthood I hadn’t asked for. Down in the mailroom or in the elevators of my condo I told people I was headed west “to help my parents,” and the stories started rolling in. Real talk.

One neighbor asked if Mom had started relying on Siri to get her around town (she had). Another shared how her own mother had become a “flight risk” at her memory care home (which sounds criminal).

All of them had stories. All of them had reckonings. And none of them tried to fix it for me.

Ann, the retired librarian said gently. “You can’t force much in this situation. Something tragic might happen. That’s just the way it is.”

Together, my neighbors were functioning as a Greek Chorus, not to stoke the drama, but to narrate what happens when daughters think they’re the grown-ups now. Their stories didn’t crescendo—they accumulated in collective reckoning.

I wasn’t looking for advice, but I came away with something better—perspective. They weren’t warning me off so much as waving me forward, like people at the edge of a construction zone. Slow down, they seemed to say. The road ahead is uneven.

You can’t force much. And sometimes, something tragic happens.

Their words piled up like roadside debris—easy to ignore until you're suddenly swerving to avoid it. I was starting to understand that this ride wouldn’t just be a change of scenery. Their stories had already shifted the terrain I thought I’d mapped. Some things in life will always be uncharted.

A(nother) brief delay

When I finally set out on April 6, everything felt in alignment. I stopped at my local motorcycle dealership to grab a can of chain lube—just a quick errand. But Marc, my longtime service advisor, noticed something else.

"I'm not sure that front tire will make the round trip," he said, crouching to run his hand over the tread. "See here? Left side's pretty worn."

I was embarrassed. "Crap. I checked it with Abe Lincoln's head and it passed." As I think about it, I just put the penny in the middle tread, omitting the sides. I wasn’t wrong—but I hadn’t looked closely enough. I’d missed what was happening on the edges Which, come to think of it, was pretty on-brand for how I’d been handling things with my parents.

Marc brought the chief tire prognosticator over. He took his time, looked at the tire from both sides as I kept willing him to give me his blessing to leave. He eventually dropped the bomb: I might make it to Arizona. But not back.

Two hours later—new tire, fresh chain lube, a little poorer (I went with a Michelin) but a lot safer—I rolled out of Charlotte, pointed west—stepping into something I couldn’t avoid anymore, and knew I was ready to embrace.

I’d already told Matt I’d left when I pulled out at noon, and before exiting the dealership parking lot I texted an update. Checking the time and estimating my trajectory before sunset, I said I’d probably make it to Brevard, a college town three hours west in the mountains. I’d texted instead of calling because, as I said last week, breaking gravitational pull is hard and I didn’t want the temptation to go back home for the night.

I took a left out of the parking lot into the stuttering traffic of commuters trying to get ahead of rush hour. As I waited at the light, a familiar thought crept in—one I’d managed to avoid during the packing, the tire delay and the text to Matt. I thought about the last time I’d seen my parents in Arizona, twenty months ago.

I’d gotten good at being “supportive from afar.” The right texts. Occasional flights. But when it came to actually calling my parents, I put it off. Told myself I’d do it over the weekend or when I had some “real news” to share. I’d check in with my brother instead—ask how they were, what he thought.

Every now and then, he’d say, “You need to call them and see for yourself.” I always agreed. I seldom did. Not because I didn’t care—because I was protecting myself.

This ride wasn’t about adventure. It was part pilgrimage, part triage.

Dad’s always been easy to talk to—curious, light-hearted, always interested in the world around him. Mom stuck to familiar ground, asking for updates on my projects, my boys Carter and Tristan, and Matt’s fitness regimen, before launching into small talk and free-associating.

“Boy, I tell you what, people in our neighborhood have to wake up before dawn to walk their dogs or their little paws will get blistered. I’ve even seen some of the dogs wearing footies. At least it’s a dry heat; I can’t stand your North Carolina humidity and neither can my hair…”

I’m ashamed to admit the emptiness of it grated on me—when I should have been asking why she had changed. What’s with this? Why is this happening? Is it getting worse?

The answers would have been easy to find, but I never asked the questions.

Instead, I chalked it up to history: a relationship that neither of us had truly invested in, and had atrophied. So I just shook my head and kept not-calling.

Brevard

The next morning I woke up in Brevard, ready to roll well before the mountain temperatures (and possible black ice) were ready for me. I took my time over breakfast in the Hampton Inn’s lounge where a broadcast morning show played overhead. I don’t watch broadcast television any more—I’m an on-demand watcher through apps—so I was shocked to see that network TV is geared entirely toward the elderly. Reverse mortgages, prescription ads, and production values stuck in 1982.

I was appalled. Was this the kind of crap Mom and Dad were watching? If so, they might feel older, more infirm, than they should. I’d be on the lookout for their viewing habits when I arrived the next week. Not to play censor, but I wanted to know what version of aging they were watching on a loop.

I wish those TV hucksters could have watched me an hour later when I took Pine Mountain Road to avoid the construction traffic on US 64. The mountain views were spectacular, but I missed a turn and immediately realized it.

I pulled onto a gravel driveway beside a house with a Jesus Saves sign in the yard. This social marker could have meant any number of things—from devotion to defiance or a warning not to knock— but fortunately no one was home. Not even a dog barked. I dismounted and muscled the bike through a 20-point turn, leaning it toward me, pushing from the hip against the side case. My trainer would’ve cheered my stubborn patience as much as my balance. When I got the bike pointed the right direction, my breath was steady and my shoulders loose.

The day was unfolding exactly as it should. Take that, pharma pushers!

Ready for that 20-point turn.

An hour later I glided into Murphy, the westernmost county seat in North Carolina, and parked at Yogi’s Neighborhood Grill. I texted a selfie to Matt and my boys—“proof of life.” The boys sent back grins and jabs about my “helmet hair.” Matt was working, but I knew he’d smile when he saw our conversation.

I see now that I sent that selfie like a mile marker—less about distance than about that hinge between leaving and arriving.

When the tatted waitress asked for my drink order I clarified, “The tea is brewed, right?”

Her look told me she knew no other method. “I mean it’s not out of the soda gun from a mix, is it?”

She blanched and answered “Ewww. No way.” She must’ve grown up in the South.

Beneath the Surface

As I rode west, the sweet friendliness of Murphy still lingered. But sweetness isn't the only thing that lingers in the South. As I rode deeper into familiar landscapes I started noticing another kind of inheritance—one we don’t talk about in travel brochures.

After an hour on the interstate leaving Chattanooga, I rolled into Sewanee, Tennessee, home of the University of the South. Known as a Gothic gem with quiet streets and ivy-laced stone, my first visit showed me more than its beauty. Dorms, academic buildings, and natural landmarks are all named after Confederates and sympathizers of the Lost Cause and white supremacy.

It made me think of a phrase I heard growing up in Ohio, offered with a grim smirk or a shrug: We might be hillbillies, but at least we ain’t Black. I flinch when I hear it, even in memory. Even as a child I understood it, since the phrase laid bare the racial hierarchy I observed.

I carried that line for years without ever looking at it.

But the deeper inheritance—the way a single line can calcify over time—has taken longer to name. Now, I hear the poison behind the pride. That’s the thing about inherited language—by the time you realize what it really means, it’s already shaped how you see the world.

I felt the burden of inheritance in my shoulders as I rode out of town—the way that kind of history presses down, like sediment built up over time. I didn’t have words for it anymore, so I let the road do its quiet work.

After a delightful series of twisting passes out of Sewanee, I began slipping westward into another kind of Southern landscape—more exposed, and more grounded in agricultural commerce. The sky opened wider. Fields stretched farther. A different light hit the pavement—warmer, flatter. I felt a shift in the space-time continuum.

I was now officially on the road. The pull of home had loosened. The pull of what lay ahead hadn’t quite taken over. But I was moving. And movement—like a good chorus or a well-worn tread—changes your orbit.

If you're a writer, I’ll occasionally include behind-the-scenes writing craft tips. Here’s one from today’s excerpt.

🚦 Ahead on the road:
I’ll take the waters in Hot Springs, roll through the Ouachitas, and feel the road pull me west again. Texas and New Mexico await, where the land and the story run deeper than I expected.