Whether it was losing his parents or the dissolution of his nearly 25-year marriage, whenever the pain of loss became too great for him to bear, Mirasole looked to the open road for escape. “I’d come home from those roads different in some way I couldn’t name—quieter, maybe, or more willing to be alone with whatever was inside me,” he writes. Such was the case when the author’s troubled brother Dave passed at 61. This time, however, the pain looked like something only a 15,000-mile round-trip journey to Deadhorse, Alaska, on the back of a BMW G310GS could remedy. His adult children, Arielle and Jojo, certainly didn’t want him to make the perilous trip alone. But the ghosts of Mirasole’s past just wouldn’t quit egging him on despite doubts about whether motion still heals, “or does it just outrun the pain long enough to forget you’re carrying it?” Mirasole’s swiftly paced and economical writing puts readers on the road with him. When the wind bites, you feel it. When the herd of massive Yellowstone bison blocking the road ahead threaten to trample him, you’re there. And when Mirasole laments the inscrutability of an older brother who left this life without ever explaining himself, that cuts deep, too: “Cruelty and kindness from the same hands. I kept trying to square them. Couldn’t then. Can’t now.” Mirasole’s soul-searching is just as engrossing as any of the earthbound mishaps he encounters on the road to Alaska. But rather than slow down the journey, the author’s deeper ruminations help propel it ever forward. The miles prove to be meditative and help the author reconnect to those he hasn’t lost: his children. It’s a powerful lesson—and one that just might save some readers from having to make their own 15,000-mile journey on the back of a motorbike.