First Look: Buckskin Rides Again

Last year, I rode 4,820 miles from North Carolina to Arizona and back to spend time with my parents in Phoenix. Parts of that journey have unfolded here on Substack over the past months.

That trip is now a book: Buckskin Rides Again: A Journey Through Family, Memory, and State Lines. The book goes deeper than the dispatches and columns that came out of the ride. It isn’t just about capturing what happened—it’s about understanding what it meant. As the miles unfolded, it became clear I wasn’t just documenting a trip. I was confronting changes in my parents, revisiting my own past, and trying to understand what still held—and what didn’t.

Along the way, some of you wrote to say the story was echoing your own.

Getting that first draft down was a white-knuckle experience—I worked on it every day, riding a wave of raw energy. I loved the discipline of writing a weekly dispatch and recording it for the podcast, and I’m grateful to those of you who wrote back along the way.

But shaping it into a book required something else: the right collaborators. Enter the two people I’ve grown to trust with making my language and meaning clear, and supporting my stories with awesome design: Ethan Powsner and Chris Parker. Together, the three of us produce On The Level magazine (OTL), a publication of the BMW Riders Association.

Ethan, the magazine’s copy editor, stepped into a larger role for Buckskin. He asked the kinds of questions that clarified my thinking and suggested changes that made the story, in his words, “flow like a river.”

Chris, owner of Roadwolf Design and OTL’s editor-in-chief, handled the cover, the maps, and interior page layout.

First, the cover’s front, spine, and back.

The second-most exciting part of writing a book is approving the cover.

Chris positioned the image in the present tense—from the seat of the motorcycle, looking out at the “melted ice cream” formations of the Blue Mesa badlands in the Painted Desert.

From there, he found a stock image of a Vista Cruiser station wagon, like the one my family drove from Ohio to California and back each summer. A trip that included a pass through that same desert landscape. Look closely at the passenger window behind the driver and you’ll see a picture of me at ten or eleven—an Easter egg I didn’t expect, and won’t forget.

Together, the motorcycle and the old photograph hold the central tension of the book itself: the present in conversation with the past, in a landscape that my family returned to again and again.

The back cover features a photo my niece Bebe took of me last December, after the book’s first draft was finished. We were on a four-day trip with my parents, exploring ghost towns near Tombstone and Bisbee, when we came upon a riverbed filled with yellowing cottonwoods.

“Stop!”

My parents watched from the overpass as Bebe and I climbed down to take photos. It was a rare, easy moment together, and I’ll always treasure the image she captured.

Buckskin Rides Again is a memoir told through a roadtrip. So of course the team wanted a map of my west- and east-bound itineraries. Behold, I give you westbound!

We wanted the pages to feel like the road—directional, but never rushed. The maps trace the route, but the photographs interrupt it, the way memory does: not in sequence, but in flashes. The layout leaves space for those moments to land.

Each chapter opens with a photograph I took along the way—grounding the narrative in lived experience. Chris chose the typography with restraint, prioritizing clarity and ease of reading over flourish.

It’s a book designed to be read the way it was lived—one stretch at a time, with something to notice along the way. I’m so happy that it’s a visual pleasure for readers!

At some point, the work leaves your hands.

This feels like that moment.

If you’re interested in the craft side of how a book like this comes together—structure, sequencing, decisions along the way—I’m always glad to talk shop. Just hit reply.