Someone Else's Call

by Rosson Richardson

There is a training facility in Colorado where the dining tables are plastic and loosely arranged in a U, and in the summer of 2022, a student I had been coaching all weekend stood up at one of them to give his high and his low. His low was that he had dropped his bike seven times that day. He thanked me, by name, for helping him pick it up each time. The room laughed the gentle way people laugh at each other when nobody is in danger. Then he started in on his high. He started, and he stopped, and what came out of him eventually made the room stop laughing, and what he could not have known was that the year of my life was about to be answered by a stranger across the table.

My cardiologist is a friend of mine. Six months before that table, in early 2022, he had stood at the foot of my hospital bed with a piece of paper in his hand. He had told me, the way a friend tells you something you do not want to hear, that I needed to step back from the life I had built. The specific medical detail of why is not the point of this essay. The point is what he said next, which was that I needed to figure out how to reduce the stress in it. He did not tell me how. That part was on me.

The life I had built was a long run that began in finance and investment banking and moved through oil and gas, technology startups, private equity, and the kind of capital raises that look like a line on a résumé and feel like nothing of the sort. Some of those years were successful. Some were not. All of them were stressful in the way that consumes a person in proportion to what it pays him. I had been through family struggles I am not going to write about here; nobody who has lived to my age is special in that regard. I had been carrying great failures and great successes for longer than my body was willing to keep carrying them. And what my cardiologist was telling me, more plainly than my pride was willing to hear it, was that the engine I had been driving on a closed loop for thirty years had decided it had had enough.

I had ridden motorcycles privately my whole adult life. By that point I had ridden in more states than I had not, plus a handful of countries, and almost always I had ridden alone. The few people I shared the road with were a small group of friends I trusted to a degree I would have been embarrassed to articulate. I did not think of riding as community. I thought of it as the thing I got a taste of when I could get away, the place where I was finally alone. What I had not yet understood, because I had been doing it in stolen pieces, was that the same hours that gave me the quiet also handed me a bill on the other side. Alone has its own price. I had been paying it for a long time without naming what it was.

What I actually did with the cardiologist's instruction was not deliberate. I started looking for a new motorcycle. Somewhere in the looking I landed on a website offering instruction and training in Colorado, and it looked cool. I decided to ride out there and be around people who ride. I did not go to learn, though I learned plenty once I got there. I went to be around riders, because what I had been told to find was something other than my own thoughts, and another bike, by itself, was not going to get me there. I went up with my BMW R1200 GSA. I sat at the plastic tables with the rest of them at night. I listened. I rode. The bonds that form over a weekend of that kind of riding are not unique to that place or to ours; they form across the adventure community wherever the activity is the activity. People who have been through that kind of country together stand differently around each other afterward. I had not known that yet, because I had been riding alone. At the end of the weekend I was asked whether I would consider coming back as an instructor. I said yes immediately and was a little surprised at how readily the word came out of me.

I spent the summer of 2022 at that facility. I coached riders I had never met before that morning. I sat at the plastic tables with them at night. I came to know the other coaches and like them in the way men sometimes only like other men when there is hard physical work between them. I felt, for the first time in I do not know how many years, that I was inside a community rather than passing through one.

On a Saturday evening in August, after a full day of training, the students stood up one by one to give their highs and lows, which is a tradition in the adventure motorcycle community. The student I had been coaching all weekend took his turn, and what I have already told you about his low (seven dropped bikes, my name, the gentle laugh) is the easy part. The high was harder for him to get to. He started to speak and stopped. He started again and stopped again. What came out of him on the third try was that earlier in the evening, after his last fall and before dinner, he had walked back to his tent alone and called his wife. He had told her, he said, what he was telling us now. The exact words were "I'm not alone. I found my people. I found my tribe." He said them through tears running down his face that he did not wipe and did not apologize for. They hit me like a sledgehammer. The room went still around him. I do not remember whether anyone else gave a high after that. What I remember is that before the night was over, every person in the room had been over to him, and every one of them had put a hand on his shoulder or pulled him into a hug, and most of them did both.

I was sitting across from him with a beer I had forgotten I was holding. And I realized, all at once and without theatrics, that I had been working for thirty years inside what I can only describe as a closed loop. Startups, finance, the next deal, the next ratio, the next valuation. I had been working hard. I had been making money. The numbers I had been measuring my life in had meant nothing to anyone outside the small room of people who used those numbers to measure each other. The wallet, in the end, has no purpose. It has a function. The function is to keep you alive long enough to do something with your life. I had spent thirty years confusing the function for the purpose.

My wife is a physician. Brynna changes the course of a person's life on a Tuesday afternoon and is home in time to walk the dogs. She has done this every week of the marriage I have been lucky enough to be inside, and I had loved her for it, and I had also envied her, quietly, for years. She had purpose. The thing my cardiologist had told me to find, she had had since she was a medical student. And there, in the high country of Colorado in the summer of 2022, watching a stranger cry over the fact that he had found his people, I realized the door I had been looking for had been propped open by other people the entire time. I had been walking past it because I did not know what it was.

I made the decision that night. Not the decision to start a company. The earlier and more important decision: that my next chapter of work would matter to people in the way Brynna's mattered to her patients, or it would not be work I would take. The company was downstream of the decision.

The next step was the conversation I had with the owner of the facility. I went to him and asked, plainly, whether he was interested in selling the business. He told me he would sell forty-nine percent of it but would not open the books. I am not going to elaborate on what that combination of offers means in plain English; anyone who has ever bought a business already knows, and anyone who has ever had a lick of common sense knows too. I asked him a second question, which was whether he would mind if I started a version of his program in Texas. He told me there were no adventure riders in Texas. At least half of the students who had come through the training that summer were Texans, a number of whom had driven up with their bikes on trailers because they could not wait to do it again. He did not seem to know it.

I came home. I found the land. Before I signed a lease, broke ground, or moved a single fence post, I called him one more time. I told him I was going to do this. I told him that he had been the man who gave me my start in the activity, and that the honest and courteous thing to do was to discuss it with him before I broke ground. He said no, he was not interested in being involved. I was not sorry to hear it. I was, if anything, relieved. I am almost certain he did not believe I would do it. I will not pretend that did not motivate me either.

I talked to Brynna. I told her what I was going to do and why I was going to do it. She listened the way she listens, which is the way a doctor listens when the diagnosis matters more than the doctor. And then she told me the truth I had been waiting for somebody to tell me, which was that she believed in it, and that the world was a better place with adventure motorcycle riders in it, and that if my mission was to make more of them, then she was in. That is how Austin Moto Adventures became a thing.

It has not been easy. It has been expensive in ways I had not understood would be expensive when I signed the lease. The industry of adventure motorcycling, like most industries built around a passion, is populated by big personalities, some of whom are extraordinarily generous and some of whom are extraordinarily not. There is conniving in it. There is backstabbing in it. There are also some of the most genuine, hardest-earned friendships I have ever had outside of the ranch and outside of Brynna. I have learned, slowly and at cost, that the right move in those waters is to keep your head down, do what you are best at, and do the work the day in front of you is asking you to do. The rest of it, I am told, comes together.

The joke I make at my own expense, when somebody asks me how the business is going, is that I started an adventure motorcycle training and touring company so I could ride all the time, and the consequence has been that I almost never ride. There is a man somewhere who runs this kind of business and rides every day. I have not yet met him. The rest of us are at our desks. I will also admit, without ceremony, that it would be a fine thing somewhere down the road to start drawing a paycheck again from this work. I have not been above admitting it for some time.

I am still here. My cardiologist who told me to step back from my life is pleased with what I stepped back into. I am still a person under stress; I have not solved that part. But the stress I am under now is the stress of building something I believe in, in a place I love, with people I would not trade. There are still falls. There are still scares. There is still no quick way to stop being a person who lived hard for a long time. But the wallet has stopped being the point. The students around the fire, nestled amongst our cabins, have become the point. The one who called his wife from his tent that night had no idea what he had done for me when he said it. I never wrote his name down, and now I cannot recover it. That sits heavier on me than it should. He was the moment I stopped working for a buck and started working for the door he had walked through, propped open for the next rider to find.

Brynna was right. The world truly is a better place with adventure riders in it. My mission is to make more of them, and to give them the support they need to be better. To build the tribe.