Some cold you ride through. Some you carry. Sometimes it takes a long time to tell the difference.
Throttle On — Michael Mirasole
Unstuck on the Way to the Arctic Ocean
Fifteen thousand miles. Five months. One small motorcycle, pointed at the top of the map and the far edge of what a person can outrun.
A solo ride from Austin, Texas to Deadhorse, Alaska and back — up the length of a continent to the Arctic Ocean, then the longer road home. What begins as escape becomes something harder to name: grief carried at speed, solitude that stops being lonely, and two grown children waiting at the other end of the silence.
Spare, exact, and unsentimental, Throttle On is a debut about motion as a way of standing still — and about the hardest leg of any journey, which is coming home.
The eBook is now available to pre-order on Amazon — it arrives on your device September 24. Hardcover and paperback to follow. Join the list and you'll be the first to know when they're available.
See the road it came from — photographs and route from the ride →
Michael Mirasole spent a career moving things across the world before he decided to move himself.
He came to the Alaska ride the way people come to most things worth writing about — later than planned, and for reasons he couldn't fully explain until the road explained them. A licensed pilot and a drummer since boyhood, he'd been off motorcycles for years before pointing one north.
Throttle On is his first book. He writes from Austin, Texas, where his daughter Arielle works as a chef and his son Jojo builds software — the two people this book was, in the end, written toward.
No noise. Occasional letters from the ride, an excerpt now and again, and first word when Throttle On is available. That's all.