It’s 1974. America is crazy about CB radios, and from the way-back of an Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser rolling west toward California, a sharp-eyed girl chooses her handle: Buckskin.

It’s 2025. Buckskin rides her motorcycle from North Carolina toward her aging parents in Arizona — and she should have been there a year ago.

Her mother is asking Siri for directions to the wrong Costco. Her father’s emotional rope is thinning. Her brother has been carrying the load that daughters are supposed to carry. Something is ending. She can feel it from two thousand miles away.

So she rides her BMW. Through Hot Springs and the Ozarks after a tornado-scoured sky. Through the ghost towns of Route 66, the Painted Desert, the copper-colored hills above Globe, Arizona. Throttling and leaning into crosswinds that never let up — because the physical reckoning is the only way she knows to prepare for the one waiting at the door.

Buckskin Rides Again is a memoir about distance — the kind measured in miles and the kind measured in years. It’s about the guilt of a good daughter who kept finding reasons not to show up. About a mother who ran too hot and a daughter who ran too cool, and the decades of silence that grew between them. About a brother who became the anchor while she became the one who left. About what it costs to stay in the room — emotionally, literally — when everything in you is trained to exit.

With 30 dispatches from the road, Tamela Rich maps two journeys at once: the miles out and the miles home, and the interior terrain of a woman reckoning with who her family was, who she became, and what — if anything — can still be set right before the last miles run out.

For readers of Mary Karr, Cheryl Strayed, and Neil Peart. For everyone who has ridden toward something they weren’t sure they could face — and gone anyway.