This is an excerpt from Throttle On: Unstuck on the Way to the Arctic Ocean, a travel memoir about riding a motorcycle from Austin, Texas to the Arctic Ocean and back. In this scene, I’m camped at Wapiti Campground south of Jasper, Alberta — settling into a week that was supposed to be quiet.

Wapiti felt practical, peaceful, close to the bone of nature. Hot showers, pine-scented mornings, evenings that opened into blue sky. That first night, sitting in my chair with the last coffee of the evening, the stars were blazing — bright, innumerable. The sound of water rushing nearby.

While preparing meals each day, Columbian ground squirrels emerged from their burrows like curious spectators — stocky tawny bodies sitting upright in the grass, dark tails held bushy behind them, whiskers twitching, waiting for a stray crumb. They’d vanish into one burrow and pop up from another nearby. One particularly bold squirrel (I named him Steve) developed a system. He’d approach from the left while his partner flanked right. Ocean’s Eleven, but with rodents and granola.

By day three, they’d recruited a third accomplice who worked perimeter security, only identifiable by a black streak across its back. I was being conned by an organized crime syndicate that weighed less than my helmet.

Throttle On is currently seeking publication. If you’d like to follow the journey, subscribe below — you’ll get monthly excerpts and occasional essays about motorcycles, grief, and the things we carry.

This is an excerpt from Throttle On: Unstuck on the Way to the Arctic Ocean, a travel memoir about riding a motorcycle from Austin, Texas to the Arctic Ocean and back. In this scene, I’m camped at Galbraith Lake on the North Slope of Alaska — no trees, no services, no company. Just gravel, wind, and whatever else is out there.

There’s a particular negotiation that happens at 2 AM in a tent when your bladder wakes you.

The first stage is denial. I don’t actually have to go. I can hold it. I’ve held it before. I’m a grown man with decades of bladder management experience. You shift positions. You try to think about deserts. You calculate the hours until dawn and realize dawn is a geological epoch away.

The second stage is bargaining. If I just go back to sleep, the feeling will pass. It will not pass. It has never once passed in the entire history of human-bladder relations. But you try anyway, because the alternative requires leaving the sleeping bag, and the sleeping bag is the only warm place in a cold universe.

The third stage is reconnaissance. You unzip the bag two inches and insert one hand into the air outside. The cold is immediate, absolute, personal. It has opinions about your hand. You withdraw.

The fourth stage is logistical planning. Headlamp: where? Somewhere near your head, theoretically. You pat around in total darkness, touching tent fabric, stuff sack, something that might be a sock. The headlamp is eventually located underneath your hip, where it has been slowly bruising you for hours. You put it on but don’t turn it on yet, because turning it on makes this real.

The fifth stage is acceptance. You’re going outside.

The unzipping of a tent fly at 2 AM is the loudest sound in nature. It exceeds chainsaws, thunderclaps, the collapse of civilizations. Every zipper tooth announces your movements to whatever is out there in the darkness, waiting.

You emerge in a condition that can only be described as half-dressed and fully ridiculous. Boots seemed like too much commitment, so you’re barefoot. Long underwear. Jacket thrown over bare shoulders. Headlamp casting a beam approximately four feet into a darkness that extends to infinity.

You tiptoe toward the brush, and the ground reveals itself as a sea of Legos engineered by nature — loose scree, tundra tussocks that twist your ankle, rocks that find the arch of your foot with surgical precision. Every step is a negotiation. You’re trying to walk quietly because of bears, but the pain keeps producing small involuntary sounds that are definitely not quiet.

And now comes the actual task, which requires aiming at something you cannot see with equipment you can barely feel because the cold has already begun its work. You stand there, exposed in multiple senses, while the tundra makes noises. Something shifts in the brush. Gravel crunches where no gravel should be crunching. Wind asks a question you cannot answer.

You try to hurry. Hurrying does not help.

The beam of the headlamp catches eyeshine thirty yards out. Two points of reflected light, animal height, watching. You freeze, which is the wrong thing to do anatomically. The eyes blink once, slowly, then vanish.

You have no idea what it was. You will never know what it was. This is somehow worse than knowing.

The return to the tent is faster than the departure. You zip the fly with the same thunderous announcement, burrow into the sleeping bag, and lie there with heart pounding, wide awake, bladder empty, wondering why anyone does this voluntarily.

Twenty minutes later, you’re asleep.

In the morning, you’ll tell no one about this. You’ll pack your gear, make coffee, and ride out looking like a man in command of his journey. The wind will keep your secret. So will whatever was watching from the dark.

Throttle On is currently seeking publication. If you’d like to follow the journey, subscribe below — you’ll get monthly excerpts and occasional essays about motorcycles, grief, and the things we carry.

Subscribe now

Three hours south of Tok, I stopped at Destruction Bay, a quiet outpost on the edge of Kluane Lake. One gas pump, one café, a lake reflecting sunlight under still ridges.

A stripped-down Harley pulled up beside me. Bare essentials. No saddlebags, no windscreen, nothing that wasn’t engine, frame, or wheels. White-haired rider, eyes narrowed from decades of road glare.

“Wow, now that’s a bike,” he said, noticing the mud-streaks on the BMW. “Heading north?”

“South. Coming back from Deadhorse.”

He grinned. “On that? Hell, I’m impressed. Coffee?”

“Always.”

Inside, the café was warm, almost too warm. We took the window seat where we could see our bikes — his stripped bare, mine loaded with everything I owned.

“So, what brought you up here?” he asked. “Besides Deadhorse.”

“Needed to go somewhere that wasn’t home.”

He nodded. “That’s usually how it starts.”

“How what starts?”

“This.” He gestured toward the window, the road, the horizon. “People don’t just ride to the Arctic on a whim. Something pushes them.”

“Divorce. Mother died. Work was eating me alive.”

“The usual suspects,” he said, no judgment in it. “I left after my second marriage ended. Sold the house, sold most of what I owned. Kept the bike.”

“When was that?”

“Twelve years ago.” He said it like weather. “Haven’t stopped moving since.”

“Where do you live?”

“Wherever I am.” He smiled. “Storage unit in Spokane. Rest of the time, the road.”

“Don’t you worry about breaking down somewhere remote?”

“Breakdowns happen whether you’re carrying thirty pounds or three hundred. First long trip, I had everything. Tools, spares, gear for Antarctica. Then I realized I was carrying it all to feel safe, not because I needed it.”

“What changed?”

“Broke down in Montana. Middle of nowhere. Had every tool. None of it helped. What mattered was patience — and a tow.”

I laughed. “So, you just ditched it all?”

“Gradually. Every stop, I asked: did I use this? Usually no.”

The woman refilled our mugs. Tim nodded thanks. By now I’d caught his name.

“The thing is,” he said, “all that extra weight. It’s not just physical. You spend energy managing it, protecting it. You stop experiencing the ride. You’re managing an inventory.”

I thought of my morning rituals. Straps, zippers, redistribution.

“You made it to Deadhorse and back on that bike,” he said, nodding outside. “Trust yourself more. The gear less.”

We finished our coffee in easy silence.

Outside, he pulled on worn gloves.

“Where you headed next?” I asked.

“Wherever the road wants to go,” he said, and rode off.

I watched him disappear along the lake. His bike carried almost nothing. Mine carried everything.

That evening, I pressed on to Whitehorse under a brooding sky, still thinking about Tim. About what to carry and what to let go.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir, Throttle On: Unstuck on the Way to the Arctic Ocean — the story of a solo motorcycle journey from Austin to the Arctic and back. Follow along for more excerpts from the road.

Subscribe below to get new excerpts delivered directly to your inbox.

Subscribe now

The week found its pattern. Mornings I worked in coffee shops. Tim Hortons, then Starbucks, tethered to Wi-Fi and obligations. Evenings I chased sunsets, followed roads I’d never seen, stopped when the pie looked good.

Monday, July 15

Morning at Tim Hortons. I’d claimed a table near an outlet, laptop open, coffee cooling, when an older man appeared at my shoulder, muttering something sharp under his breath — something ending in “ … sucker.”

In his sixties, worn hard. Hands scarred, face lined deep. He had the look of someone displaced and wandering. I’d seen him pacing near the entrance earlier, his lingering stares hard to ignore. Now he was seated just feet from me, eyes locked.

“Sorry, problem?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know!” he snapped.

Part of me wanted to stand my ground. I’d claimed the table fairly. But being an American in spaces that carried their own history made me recalculate. I was in his home.

“Would you like me to move?”

Politeness seemed to enrage him further. Accusations about tourists followed, anger spilling from some deeper well. My mother’s words surfaced: When you travel abroad, you’re an ambassador for your country.

“Take the table,” I said, packing up. “Can I buy you lunch?”

The offer hung there. The barista at the register looking on, him half-seated, me holding my bag. Then his expression shifted — surprise, suspicion, a small crack in the anger. He took the seat but declined the meal with a “Nah.”

As I packed up my laptop, I heard him mutter to the barista: “Fuckin’ American.” But there was almost a smile in it. Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t kindness.

My mother would have been proud. Or confused. Possibly both.

I found a nearby table and worked the rest of the morning with a persistent side-eye on my new friend.

By noon I needed a break. Montana’s BBQ and Bar sat a few blocks from the main drag — wood-paneled, smoky in the right way, the kind of place where the menu doesn’t apologize for anything. I ordered brisket and a beer and watched tourists navigate the sidewalk through the window. Nobody here seemed to be in a hurry. I was learning not to be.

That afternoon I switched to Starbucks, and that’s where I met Cheryl.

She was already set up in the corner — laptop, iPad propped beside it with a route map glowing on screen, travel mug, noise-canceling headphones around her neck. Mid-thirties, the kind of tan you get from living outdoors rather than seeking it. Through the window, a Subaru Outback packed to the headrests.

She glanced up when I arrived. “Creature of habit?”

“Or just good Wi-Fi.”

We worked in parallel for most of the afternoon, the way strangers in coffee shops sometimes do — aware of each other without needing to talk. She took calls throughout the day, her voice shifting into something practiced and patient. Training, maybe, or customer support — the kind of work that requires presence without proximity. Between calls she’d swipe through her route map, adjusting pins, calculating distances.

Eventually, she asked what brought me to Jasper.

“Heading to Alaska. That’s my bike out there.”

“I’m camping just north of here,” she said. “Been traveling through Canada and the US for two years. Quebec originally.”

I didn’t ask where she was staying. A woman traveling alone might not want to trust a stranger with that.

We talked in fragments between work — her route through the Maritimes, a transmission problem in Manitoba that stranded her for a week, the mechanic who fixed it and refused full payment. She’d worked remotely from campgrounds, libraries, motel lobbies. Two years of it, and she seemed more settled than most people I knew with permanent addresses.

I expected two years of solo travel to show as loneliness. It didn’t. Whatever she’d found out here, it hadn’t cost her the way I assumed it would.

Tuesday, July 16

Cheryl already had her laptop open when I arrived.

“Need a charge?” she asked, sliding over her battery pack.

We fell into the same rhythm — working, talking, not talking. She took another string of calls, patient with each one, then pulled off her headphones and rubbed her eyes.

During an afternoon lull, I asked what the hardest part was.

She didn’t hesitate. “The people who wait for you.” She turned her mug in her hands. “My mom calls every Sunday. My sister sends pictures of her kids growing up. They don’t complain — that’s what makes it harder. They just quietly make room for my absence and hope I’ll come back soon.”

“And you feel that.”

“Every week. The freedom out here is real. But so is the gap it creates back home. You have to tend to it. You can’t just assume they’ll understand.” She looked at me. “You have kids?”

“Two. Both adults.”

“Then you know. They’ll tell you it’s fine. They might even mean it. But the distance still costs something, and if you’re not careful, you’ll realize too late what it cost them.”

My coffee had gone cold without my noticing.

That evening, I rode south toward Sunwapta Falls — thirty-four miles back down the Icefields Parkway, the same road I’d taken into Jasper but different now, unhurried, with nowhere to be. The road swept through spruce forest, long views opening across glacier-carved valleys. Traffic had thinned with the hour. The mountains appeared suddenly around bends, closer than they had any right to be.

At Sunwapta, the river gave no warning. One moment a wide glacial flow, turquoise with rock flour, the next it narrowed to a gap in the rock and dropped violently into the canyon below. I stood on the viewing bridge and felt the sound in my chest. A short trail led to the lower falls through dense forest and moss-covered ground. Down there the canyon opened slightly and the water felt more powerful, more remote.

I rode back in the long light, Cheryl’s words somewhere behind me on the road.

Wednesday, July 17

I arrived early. Her corner table was empty.

Mid-morning she appeared, travel mug in hand, already packed.

“Heading out,” she said. “System’s moving through. Better weather toward Calgary.”

“Safe travels.”

“You too.” She hesitated. “Don’t wait too long.”

Then she was gone. No numbers exchanged. No promises to stay in touch. Just someone who’d shared a few quiet afternoons and then moved on, the way travelers do.

Her table stayed empty the rest of the morning. I worked through lunch without noticing.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir about riding a motorcycle from Austin to the Arctic Ocean.

The Dalton Highway gets all the attention—400 miles of Arctic gravel, no services, legendary difficulty. But sometimes the road humbles you before you even get there. Deep in the Yukon, this is about the afternoon I learned what the fuel gauge means when it stops showing numbers.

Three Dashes

The road opened up after Haines Junction—a well-known stopover and last chance for fuel for a while. Smooth, empty, infinite. Without thinking, I rolled the throttle forward. Fifty-five. Sixty. The bike hummed, the bugs thinned, and for the first time all morning, riding felt effortless.

I wasn’t paying attention to the math.

Fifteen miles later, Kluane Lake appeared—brilliant turquoise under a white sky—and the wind hit like a wall.

I glanced at the range: sixty-three miles.

Then at the GPS: fifty-one miles to Destruction Bay.

Twelve-mile cushion. Still comfortable.

Except the wind wasn’t comfortable. It hammered at me—relentless, vicious, personal. The kind of wind that makes trees grow sideways and fuel economy collapse.

Five miles later, I checked again.

Range: fifty-five miles. Distance: forty-six miles.

Nine-mile cushion. Tighter, but manageable.

Then the math shifted.

Range: fifty miles. Distance: forty-two miles.

Eight miles.

Range: forty-six miles. Distance: thirty-nine miles.

Seven miles.

Wait.

I’d been riding at sixty. Higher RPMs. Wind resistance. Fuel consumption spiking while the range indicator recalculated on the fly, revising its promises downward with every gust.

For those keeping score at home—I should have filled up at Haines Junction.

I drop to fifty. Then forty-five. The bike settles, the wind eases slightly, the math stabilizes.

Range: forty-three miles. Distance: thirty-six miles.

Seven miles. Manageable. I can nurse this.

The lake stretches beside me in impossible turquoise, mountains rising behind it like ancient witnesses. Stunningly, achingly beautiful.

I can’t look. My world has collapsed to the tiny digital display between the handlebars.

Forty miles. Then the road climbs.

Range: thirty-eight miles. Distance: thirty-three miles.

Five miles.

I drop to forty. The bike whines in protest, RPMs climbing in a lower gear. Fuel economy plummets on the incline.

Range: thirty-four miles. Distance: thirty miles.

Four miles. The cushion’s gone. Now it’s just hope and arithmetic.

I drop to thirty-five. At this speed, I’m basically emotional support for a struggling motorcycle.

Range: thirty-one miles. Distance: twenty-eight miles.

Three miles. Barely progress.

The road levels. Small mercy. I hold steady at thirty-five, watching the gap fluctuate with every breeze, every slight grade.

Range: twenty-eight miles. Distance: twenty-five miles.

Three miles. Holding.

Then another climb. The bike downshifts, RPMs spike.

Range: twenty-three miles. Distance: twenty-two miles.

One mile.

Range: nineteen miles. Distance: eighteen miles.

One mile. Still one mile. The margin refuses to close.

Ten miles out, the range drops below the distance.

Range: twelve miles. Distance: fourteen miles.

Two miles short.

Then the three dashes appear, my old friends from Wyoming.

Range: — — —

Distance: ten miles.

Kluane doesn’t care. The lake stares back, turquoise and indifferent.

Eight miles. The engine hiccups.

“Please please please.” I’m negotiating with machinery now.

Six miles. Buildings ahead, still impossibly far.

Four miles. The engine coughs, longer this time.

“Not yet. We can do this,” I whisper.

Two miles. The bike is running on fumes and the memory of gasoline.

One mile. Every moment the engine fires feels like a miracle.

Half a mile. The engine cuts out for a full second before catching again.

Quarter mile. It sputters. Catches. Sputters again.

Now I’m gliding. Coasting on wind, slope, and sheer denial.

The gas station sign appears ahead. The engine cuts completely.

But I’m still moving, momentum carrying me forward through the last shimmer of heat off the asphalt.

Twenty yards. Ten. Five.

I roll to a stop at the pump, perfectly positioned—as if I’d planned this elegant arrival rather than barely survived a mechanical death rattle.

For a long moment I just sit there—engine silent, heart pounding, hands trembling too badly to pull the key.

I dismount and grab the nozzle. Premium. The bike has earned the good stuff. The numbers climb: 0.5… 1.0… 1.5… 2.0… 2.5… Click.

2.86 gallons. The tank holds 2.90.

An attendant steps out. He was weathered, mid-fifties, the kind of man who’s seen everything twice.

“Cutting it close there,” he says.

I laugh, slightly unhinged.

“Kluane wind get you?”

“Kluane everything got me.”

He nods. “Third one this week rolls in on empty. That lake doesn’t forgive speed.”

I want to tell him it wasn’t speed, it was complacency wrapped in an eighteen-mile cushion that evaporated the moment I rolled the throttle past sensible, but he’s already heading back inside. Done with fools like me.

I sat on the curb gathering myself. The bike stood there innocently, freshly fueled, as if it hadn’t just carried me through a spiritual crisis disguised as a physics problem.

From “Throttle On: Unstuck on the Way to the Arctic Ocean,” forthcoming 2026.

In July 2024, I rode a small motorcycle from Texas toward the Arctic Ocean. The trip was about grief, motion, and what happens when you stop waiting for conditions to be perfect. I’m writing a book about it. This newsletter is where I’ll share pieces of that story as I finish it.

On July 22nd, wildfire forced the evacuation of Jasper, Alberta—25,000 people fleeing through smoke and gridlock. I was one of them. A ranger pointed me to a service road that bypassed the convoy, and I escaped north into the mountains alone. What I rode into was more dangerous to me than what I’d left behind.

Ten Meters at a Time

The drizzle started light, almost a relief after the heat and smoke. It felt like a reset—clean air, the smell of smoke washing away. For maybe ten minutes I let myself believe this was manageable. Just rain. I’d ridden in rain before.

Then it changed.

The drops got heavier, colder. Wind gusts started hitting from unpredictable angles. I watched the road ahead darken as the storm cell moved down the valley toward me, a gray wall swallowing everything in its path.

Within minutes it turned violent.

Rain came hard, driven sideways by wind funneled through the mountain corridor. My headlight scattered across the wet pavement, the road flashing silver as water pooled in low spots. The yellow centerline vanished under the runoff. I eased back from sixty to forty, then thirty, feeling for traction with every small correction of the bars.

Lightning ripped the sky open. Not distant or harmless, but close and immediate. Each flash froze the forest in stark white before throwing it back into blackness. Thunder followed instantly, a deep, physical thud that felt like a fist to the chest. Gusts of wind hit the bike from alternating sides, shoving me toward shoulders that barely existed.

The forest pressed close, walls of black on both sides, broken only by the occasional reflector catching light. There were no guardrails, no margin for error. Just road, then drop, then trees. Any mistake here wasn’t going to mean a bruise or a story—it would mean gone.

Progress became math—ten meters at a time. Pick a point in the headlight beam, reach it, pick another. The bike became the entire world. Throttle, brake, lean angle, traction. Each input mattered. Every mistake carried potential consequences.

Fear came slowly at first, then all at once.

It started as awareness. The mental calculation of risk versus capability. I was alone. The road was empty. Help was hypothetical. These were just facts, manageable facts.

Then my body took over.

It wasn’t the manageable kind of fear—the sharpened reflexes that keep you alive. It was deeper, heavier. It got inside my breathing. My arms stiffened, hands gripping too tight, muscles refusing to relax. I tried to force calm, but adrenaline overruled logic.

I started bargaining with myself. Just get to McBride. Just make it through this section. Just keep the bike upright. The negotiations got smaller as the storm got worse. Just make it through the next curve. Just keep the wheels on pavement. Just don’t die here.

The promise to my kids wasn’t abstract anymore. It was a physical presence in the helmet with me, louder than the thunder. I could see their faces between lightning flashes—not as memory but as something immediate, like they were watching. What would it mean for them if I didn’t come home? Not philosophy. Actual logistics. Who tells them? How do they hear? What’s the last thing I said before I left?

I could feel my own limits closing in.

Men are taught early to fight that feeling. To rename fear. Call it focus. Call it grit. Pretend it’s not there. But in that storm, the truth was simple. I was terrified. I knew the cost of one mistake. Gravel. A deer. A blind corner. Invisible pothole. A split-second of doubt. None of it forgives you out here.

The rain got heavier. It pounded the helmet so hard it blurred the edges of sound. My shoulders locked. My jaw clenched. I tried to relax my hands but couldn’t. The visor fogged from inside; I cracked it open, taking the sting of the rain to stay alert.

Stopping wasn’t an option. Not here. Not on a narrow mountain road with no shoulder and no visibility. The only way out was forward. Ten meters at a time.

Time stopped making sense.

I checked the odometer: 23 kilometers since the junction. It felt like a hundred. I checked again what seemed like an hour later: 27 kilometers. Four kilometers. Maybe ten minutes had passed. Maybe thirty. The clock on the dash showed numbers but they meant nothing.

Every curve took forever. Every straight stretched into infinity. I’d spot a reflector ahead, aim for it, reach it after what felt like miles of riding, only to find it was fifty meters back. Distance collapsed. Time expanded. The storm created its own physics.

The fuel gauge dropped toward empty, the needle flickering in the red. That tiny indicator hit harder than any thunderclap. If I ran dry, there’d be no place to wait it out. Just a stalled bike, invisible in the storm. Numbers I could trust. The GPS had long since failed to update. Kilometers remaining: maybe sixty. McBride distance: unknown. The math refused to work in my favor.

I caught myself whispering small deals into the helmet. Just a little farther. Let the tires hold. Don’t let the light die. Promises to no one. The storm stripped everything down. No philosophy, no adventure, no bravado. Just endurance. Just survival.

A bolt hit close enough to shake the air.

The flash came first. Not light in the sky but light everywhere, inside the helmet, behind my eyes, like the world’s exposure blown to pure white. The sound followed a microsecond later, not thunder but detonation, a physical force that hit my chest and rattled teeth.

For an instant I was blind. No up, no down, no horizon. Just white. Then afterimages, purple ghosts swimming across my vision. The road should have been there, but I couldn’t see it. Was I still pointing straight? Had I veered into the oncoming lane? Was there a cliff? A tree?

I had no idea if I’d drifted off the road until the front wheel found traction again. Pavement, rumble strip, pavement. I’d been weaving. How long had I been blind? A second? Three seconds?

The mantra kept looping. Throttle, brake, lean angle, traction. A litany. A heartbeat.

And then, gradually, the rhythm shifted. The rain thinned to thick drops. The wind lost some of its teeth. The thunder began to fade, not gone, just distant—like something finally finished with me.

Through the rain-smeared visor I caught it. A faint glow on the horizon. At first it looked like a mirage. Then it steadied into something real. Actual streetlights, gas station signs, the edges of buildings. Civilization.

Ten more meters. Then ten more. The glow became a town. McBride.

I rolled into the first gas station on fumes, the fuel light flashing red. My hands were too stiff to pull in the clutch cleanly. My legs shook when I tried to stand. For a long moment I just sat there, engine idling, helmet dripping, lungs pulling air like I hadn’t breathed in hours.

The station attendant stepped out under the awning, jacket zipped tight against the last of the rain. He looked at me for half a second and read everything that didn’t need saying.

“Evacuee?” he asked.

I hadn’t thought of myself this way until this moment, but yes. I nodded, finally finding words. “Yeah. From Jasper.”

He pointed across the street toward a brick building glowing under floodlights. “Firehouse. They’ve got people set up there. Go on in. You’ll be safe.”

Safe. The word barely registered, but I followed it. Crossed the street, the tires slapping against puddles, the engine sputtering in relief.

I parked beneath the awning of the firehouse and shut the bike down. The silence felt enormous. The storm was still moving north, but it had left me behind. For now, that was enough.

From “Throttle On: Unstuck on the Way to the Arctic Ocean,” forthcoming 2026.