I Rode a Horse From Mexico to Canada. 2,650 Miles, Five Months, One Horse, One Mule and No Plan B. I Was 45, Single and Everybody Said I Was Running Away

I didn’t answer it.

Not because I was angry. Because I didn’t need to.

There’s something about riding two thousand miles that empties a man out. All the things you’ve been carrying, the arguments you never won, the version of yourself you thought other people wanted. By Oregon, it was all gone. There was just me, a horse, a mule and the next ridge.

Oregon was volcanoes and lakes and endless forests. Washington was rain, more rain, glaciers, wildflowers higher than Scout’s chest, and the hardest climbing of the whole trail.

On September 14th, five months and two days after I left Mexico, I rode around a bend in the forest in the North Cascades.

And there it was.

A small wooden monument in a clearing. A strip of cut trees running east and west through the forest as far as you could see.

The Canadian border.

There were people waiting.

I didn’t expect that. The German hikers. The father and son from Oregon. Bev the trail angel, who’d driven up from the desert. Six or seven others I’d met along the way. And a woman from the Instagram page who’d driven down from Vancouver with a sign that said WELCOME HOME, HORSE GUY.

They were cheering.

Scout lifted his head. Pancho brayed so loud a bird fell out of a tree.

I rode up to the monument. I put my hand on it.

Then I raised both my arms in the air like a fool and let out a yell that probably scared every elk in British Columbia.

My mother called that night when I got a signal.

“Well,” she said. “Did you find whatever you were running away from?”

I thought about it.

“I wasn’t running away from anything, Mom,” I said. “I was riding toward something.”

“What?”

I looked at Scout and Pancho, grazing side by side in the last light, and the long line of mountains going south toward home.

“I’ll let you know,” I said. “When I get there.”

She laughed.

“You’re still single, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said. “Whoever she is, she’d better like mules.”