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I broke gravitational pull from Phoenix on a crisp Saturday morning. That’s the only way I can describe it—breaking free not just from the pull of geography, but from the ambient sorrow of watching my parents age, and the quiet ache of leaving my brother behind to carry so much.

But mercifully, for the next few hours, I wouldn’t be leaving him at all.

We’d trailered the bikes to Fountain Hills to skip the mundanity of riding a semi-beltway. You should see JJ’s truck (bed uncluttered, wheels polished) and trailer (if he doesn’t have a strap or gizmo in there, it’s unnecessary). My brother has an unerring eye for quality—in clothes, real estate, cars—everything, right down to gasoline. Where I’m thrilled over finding pure gas, he’s got his own stash of racing fuel.

Looking back to our childhood, I never would have expected him to turn out this way.

The One Who Left

I’ve said it before: I was the “junior mother” of our family, three and five years older than my two siblings, and tasked with babysitting them on the evenings that Dad was out selling life insurance and Mom was on the home décor sales circuit. They didn’t leave us alone for more than a couple of hours, but one night that was long enough for hell to break loose.

I was in fifth grade—and they were going at each other like honey badgers in a tight pen. I can only describe my state as overwhelmed. I had to get the crazy behind me. And so I walked off, wandered the cornfields behind our little cluster of houses until I could feel my soul catch up to my body.

When it did, I knew I was in a heap of trouble. Hours had passed since I “ran away from home,” as everyone called it. That phrase was everywhere in my childhood, but I don’t think people use it today. Anyway, I knew that’s not what I’d done. I hadn’t packed a suitcase or a sandwich, I’d just walked away from chaos.

That was a pretty dramatic break from a situation outside my emotional pay grade, but it wouldn’t be the last. I tend to dissociate when the going gets tough if I can’t make a clean physical exit.

Back when I was a kid, most houses had three-sided ladders bolted to the side to support rooftop TV antennas. This was before cable and Wi-Fi, when snowy channels were brought to life through turn-dials and rabbit ears, and those ladders were everywhere.

I’ve always been a nimble climber, never afraid of heights. I don’t know what made me try it, but sometime in seventh or eighth grade, I climbed that ladder straight up to the roof. I loved it up there.

From that perch, high above the flat Ohio farmlands, I could see for miles. Cornfields stretched wide, with a single giant oak at the center, rimmed by white outbuildings, and a Mail Pouch tobacco barn. It was blissfully quiet up there—away from my younger siblings, away from the hum of the afternoon movie or vacuum cleaner. I could think my own thoughts. Find my own peace.

No one knew to look for me on the frigging roof. One day, a neighbor spotted me from her garden and tossed me a big juicy tomato. “Enjoy!” I don’t think she ever told my parents, bless her.

These days, road-tripping gives me the same feeling—minus the elevation. When I’m out there—just me, the bike, the road, and the sky—I feel like that girl again. Not hiding, exactly. Just claiming some space. Looking for a view no one else thought to climb toward.

A Peace Sign and a Toll

Bebe would be riding pillion with her dad that day. At twenty, she’d grown into her mother’s riding gear, and was practically bouncing in her motorcycle boots when we pulled into the Target shopping center parking lot to launch our route to Payson. JJ promised to bring Mom a treat from a place called Pie in the Pines in Heber-Overgaard just beyond, then we would part ways.

The last time I saw her on a bike, Bebe was about four, sitting between JJ’s knees on his dirt bike, her little braids flicking his jacket like tassels. “Faster, Daddy!” she’d hollered, holding on to the crossbar between the handlebars—and he obliged, grinning like a man who couldn’t believe his luck of the genetic draw.

Time, you sly magician—you grant us miracles when we’re not looking. Just yesterday, she was a blur of braids and baby teeth. Now, her hand flashed the peace sign to every rider headed the other direction—low and casual, like a natural-born motorcyclist. I felt it in my chest. Time is a genie, all right. But there’s always a toll. In time, it will be paid. The genie gives you a beautiful day in the mountains with your brother and niece. The thief reminds you that your parents won’t be here forever.

The day felt charmed, but the winds were fierce and fire-danger meters dotted the shoulder of Arizona 87 North. About forty miles in, Google Maps pinged me with a crash report and a ten-minute delay. No big deal.

We slowed behind a tangle of stopped traffic before realizing, hey, we don’t have to put up with this on motorcycles! We filtered through the lines of cars and made for the shoulder, just as I’ve done in Europe—where no one clutches their pearls about a motorcycle bypassing gridlock. It’s not rude. It’s resourceful. Efficient.

At the top of the line, a first responder gave us the lay of the land. “You can wait if you want,” he said, “but we’ve got seven units on the way. Could be a while.” We made the turn.

The Leader of the Pack

Back at Target, where we’d started, JJ peeled off his helmet and walked toward me. Tall, lean, calm. “Well,” he said, “I can trailer you back up north of Phoenix and you can end the day near Flagstaff, or you can stay over with us again and head out early. Or…” he tipped his head toward the sun, “…you can try the other route through the White Mountains. Whatcha want?”

That’s when it hit me—all I’d been holding. Guilt, gratitude, grief. The ache of realizing I was leaving him with the messiness of life as the one who stayed—the one who steadied—and the quiet shame of realizing how long he’d already carried it.

JJ was the leader of the pack now, and had been for decades. I’d left home at twenty, thinking I was the brave one, but it didn’t look like that from the Target parking lot. He’d circled ’round our Ohio hometown most of his adult life and semi-retired to Arizona with our parents five years ago. He knew their moods, their rituals, where they hid the guns. He knew everything.

I had just dipped a toe into the terrain he’d long since mapped. And I was worn out by it. I couldn’t go back. Not even for another night. “I’m going,” I told him. “Even if I only make it a hundred miles.”

And so I turned east—into the fullness of what that direction has always meant. Reentry. Reclamation. Reckoning. I couldn’t hold back the tears, so I lifted my face shield and let the wind do its thing.

Sometimes it feels good to let your heart ache.

Once I peeled off toward Superior, the sky opened. JJ and I had avoided this route earlier, knowing there was bridge and road construction on US 60, and nobody enjoys that kind of stop-and-go hassle. But taking it now, alone, turned out to be one of the best surprises of the entire trip.

The construction bottleneck gave me time to sit still on the bike and drink in the landscape. Devil’s Canyon unspools in a series of sandstone folds—steep, narrow, and almost theatrical in its scale. The rock faces are ribbed and rust-colored. Even with construction equipment, the place felt sacred and watchful as the Salt River meandered through. I wouldn’t have slowed down for it on my own. But being made to wait gave me a better gift: time to look.

This was once known to the San Carlos Apache as Ga’an Canyon, or “Angels Canyon,” a sacred place in their tradition. Then came the settlers, who renamed it Devil’s Canyon—as they did with so many harsh or imposing landscapes across the United States. The name usually meant it was hard to get through, hard to tame. What was sacred to one group became ominous to another.

Around Miami, surface mines yawned across the earth—time-lapse scars of the Anthropocene, where human ambition mimics tectonic force. Everything rises, everything falls.

In Miami proper, I pulled off at Guayo’s El Rey, a family-run restaurant I’d visited just a week earlier with my parents and Bebe. I ordered the chile relleno—same waitress, same booth—and let the familiar food and blend of languages wrap around me like a clean cotton sheet. I hadn’t known how much emotional labor I’d been carrying until I stopped long enough to feel the absence of it.

Memento Mori, Memento Vivere

When I mounted up again, I was headed for one of the most stunning stretches of the trip: the climb into the Sevenmile Mountains along US 60. Geologists call this area the Arizona Transition Zone—where desert meets mountain, where rock uplifts and fractures—but I wouldn’t learn that until I sat down to pen this account. Riding through it, I was in a transition zone in every sense.

I could do my part for Mom and Dad from afar—pushing their doctors to provide the care my parents deserved via medical portals, texting Dad to cut his vegetables each morning so they’d be ready to roast at dinner—but it wasn’t the same as being on the front line like JJ. Still, this time I’d shown up. I had witnessed what I came to see—and now I needed to move forward without fleeing it.

The Sevenmile Mountains don’t climb and fall like a roller coaster so much as spiral—like soft-serve ice cream. The elevation came in waves, switchbacking through pine-shadowed air that felt cool and holy. This was no straight shot—it was a pilgrimage through time and space.

Climbing that mountain was a lesson in geology, yes—but also in grief. The landscape told a tale of uplift, erosion, collapse, and plates that shifted beneath the surface, mirroring the slow pressure building in me.

At the top, I stopped at Becker Butte Lookout. Two motorcycle helmets crowned roadside memorials there—crosses driven into the soil, plastic flowers faded in the sun. I dismounted and stood for a while, letting the silence settle. I lingered longer than I expected, and the swaggering Harleys I’d passed miles ago lumbered by.

I went back to my bike, but didn’t mount up. Instead, I reached into the handlebar pouch and pulled out my silver medallion etched with a skull and crossbones. Memento mori, it whispered: “Remember you must die.” The reverse side also held a truth: Memento vivere. “Remember you must live.”

So I did remember. I wasn’t just thinking about where I had to be, or what was waiting. Just the wind and the weight of a lifetime of memories, which I scanned like the cornfields from my childhood rooftop.

The Low Card Wins

Eventually, I replaced the medallion in its pouch and swung a leg over. Descending out of the sacred hush of the Sevenmiles and into an earthbound joy of small-town oddities and road signs when I reached a town named Show Low.

Yes, it’s an odd name. According to legend, the name originated with a poker game that settled a land dispute. The two men who had co-owned the land agreed whoever could “show low” in a cut deck of cards would win. One man turned over the deuce of clubs. “Show Low it is,” he said, and the name stuck.

It’s a funny origin story that makes people smile. But like so many American folk tales, it skips the part where the land was already lived in, already loved—long before colonial ideas of private property turned territory into something to be won by contract or card draw.

Before it became a Mormon ranching outpost, this region was part of the ancestral homeland of the White Mountain Apache. The nearby Forestdale Valley had long been a seasonal settlement where Apache families planted crops, hunted game, and told their own origin stories under those same stars.

When the Mormon settlers arrived, they believed they were claiming unused public land. At first, they welcomed the Apache who returned each spring. But as fences went up, water was diverted, and fields were planted, the uneasy coexistence fell apart. Eventually, the Apache insisted they leave. And unlike most stories of the western migration, these settlers actually did.

It’s a rare outcome—but not exactly a redemptive one. The Apache were eventually displaced. The land was still changed. Just without bloodshed. And if you think about it, blood isn’t the only way to erase a culture or unsettle a people.

Even my presence here is part of that legacy.

A white woman of sixty-three with bugs on my face shield and a memento mori medallion still scanning the horizon.

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