TWO WHEELS NORTH: 1979

Calgary, Alberta. 1979. The Calgary Stampede is about to open and a traveling carnival has just arrived — and they are hiring. I had no idea how to set up a carnival ride. But I needed money and they needed workers. So I hired myself out. My assignment was the Wild Mouse — the first roller coaster. What followed was two days of hard physical labor, several days working the ride as a ticket collect...

"I want to talk about preparation. Specifically the gap between the things I prepared for brilliantly — and the things I prepared for badly. On this journey that gap was wide enough to drive a motorcycle through. Mount Rushmore. Yellowstone. Famous things that arrived smaller than the postcard suggested. And then — without warning — the Lewis and Clark National Forest. One road. Evergreen tre...

There are moments in a life that divide everything into before and after. This is one of them. A mountain road with no headlamp. A deserted road in rural Missouri. A blue light at the end of that road that turned out to be the most dangerous kind of relief. And four words overheard through a bar door that changed everything. "In 1979 I was a Black man alone on a motorcycle, several states fro...

A crash on the first night. A bad shoulder. Two days at a Pennsylvania campsite. Then Ohio. Then Terre Haute, Indiana — and a sister who almost rode with me to Chicago. Every incident, every sign, every close call was connected. I just didn't know it yet. The light at the end of the tunnel was always going to be a train. And I barely got off the tracks in time. Two Wheels North — A Documentary...

In 1979 Denver was a city where a determined man could find work if he was willing to take whatever was available and ask no questions about the hours or the conditions. I was very willing. I found two jobs. But before the jobs — on my very first day in Denver — I rode through a park and encountered a group of Black motorcycle riders who would challenge everything I thought I knew about bikers. Th...

I knew I needed a fishing license. I also knew there was a risk. I went fishing anyway. He who knows, and knows he knows, is wise. I was wise enough to know what I was doing. I just wasn't wise enough to get away with it. A game warden. A jail cell. A calculated decision. And a sheriff who told me to get the hell out of Missouri. 13 episodes. All from memory. This is Two Wheels North.

"I knew I needed a fishing license. I also knew there was a risk. I went fishing anyway. Episode 4 — The Game Warden — drops tomorrow on Two Wheels North."

A war changed everything before the journey even began. Miles Dean had one plan — ride south to Costa Rica to visit a friend he played chess with in silence and ate Spanish food with at his table, a man he couldn't speak a single word to and yet counted among his closest friends. When the Contra-Sandinista war closed that road, he looked at a map, pointed north, and decided on Alaska instead —...