Part 2: Eleven Bikers In Cuts Pulled Over On A 112-Degree Stretch Of Arizona Highway To Untie A Pit Bull From A Stop Sign — That Was Four Years Ago, And We Have Pulled 416 More Dogs Off The Side Of Roads Since
The woman in the Odyssey was named Carmen Diaz. She was forty-three years old. She was a registered dental hygienist from Surprise, Arizona. She was driving her sixteen-year-old son Mateo back from a college campus visit in Las Vegas. She had not slept much the night before. She had a thermos of cold coffee in the cup holder of her van and a husband at home in Surprise who she had not yet called to say they were on the way back.
She told me all of this much later. We are friends now. She comes to our annual fundraiser every March.
In the moment, on June 19th, 2021, on the shoulder of US-93, what she was was a woman who had thought she was watching a dog get murdered by a biker gang and had figured out in about ninety seconds that she had been wrong.
She and Mateo carried the case of water across the gravel.
We poured the bottles slow. I kept dabbing the dog’s tongue. Tanker held one of his big calloused hands cupped under the dog’s jaw to catch the water that ran down so we could see how much he was actually swallowing. Trooper had his cut still folded under the dog’s body, holding him off the asphalt. The other eight brothers were taking turns standing over us with their own cuts spread open to block the sun.
The dog drank.
Slowly at first. Then more. He swallowed. His tongue came back toward something closer to pink. His breathing slowed from the fast shallow panting to something deeper.
His eyes opened.
I want to tell you what those eyes looked like, because I have seen a lot of things in fifty-six years on this planet and I have not forgotten what those eyes looked like.
They looked at us. He looked at me. He looked at Trooper. He looked at Tanker. He looked at Carmen. He looked at her son Mateo. He looked at each of us, in turn, one at a time, the way a person looks at the people who have just walked into the hospital room when he had been alone for a long time before that.
He did not get up. He could not have gotten up. But he laid his head down on Trooper’s leather cut and he closed his eyes and he took the first deep breath we had seen him take.
Trooper started crying.
I have ridden with Trooper for fourteen years. I have buried two of our brothers with him. I have not seen him cry.
He cried into the dog’s neck for about two minutes.
The other brothers stood in the semicircle and did not say a word. Carmen and Mateo stood with the case of water at their feet and watched.
After Trooper got himself together, we lifted the dog. We carried him to my truck — Tanker had radioed back to my old lady Tanya, who was running the chase truck behind the formation that day, to pull up. Tanya pulled up. We made a bed for the dog out of all of our cuts piled in the back seat of the truck. I called the closest 24-hour emergency vet I could find on my phone — a place called Wickenburg Animal Hospital, about fifteen miles south.
The vet was a woman named Dr. Iris Calloway. She was sixty-one. She had been practicing in Wickenburg for thirty-four years. She took the dog in immediately when we got there. She said his core temperature was 107.4 when she got him on the table. She said he had been within an hour, maybe two, of dying.
She put him on IV fluids. She kept him overnight.
He lived.
I named him Highway that afternoon, sitting on a metal folding chair in Dr. Calloway’s waiting room.
I want to be straight with you about what kind of men we were before June 19th, 2021.
We were not a 1%er club. We are not officially a 1%er club. We are what is called a support club in some configurations — we have ties, historical and ongoing, to other clubs that have rougher reputations than ours. Some of our patches read in ways that make law enforcement look at us a certain way at the side of any road we pull over on. Some of our brothers have prior records. I have three felonies from my twenties. Trooper has one. Tanker has zero — he was Navy his whole adult life until he retired in 2009.
We were not, on June 19th, 2021, a club that had ever done anything that anybody outside of our families would have called a good deed.
We did the charity poker run every June for our own widows and kids. We had been doing it since 2003. That was the extent of our charitable activity. We did not visit children’s hospitals. We did not do food drives. We did not run any kind of public-facing fundraiser. We rode. We drank — most of us. I was already sober. We took care of each other. We buried our brothers when their time came.
We were not bad men. I want to be clear about that too. We were not running anything illegal. We were not hurting anyone. We were just — a club. A bunch of guys on Harleys who loved riding and loved each other and did not give a damn what anyone outside our cuts thought of us, because most of the people outside our cuts had been crossing the street to avoid us our entire adult lives, and we had stopped expecting otherwise.
On June 19th, 2021, on the side of US-93 north of Wickenburg, eleven of us became a different kind of club, and we did not know it yet.
Highway came home with me a week later.
The vet had wanted to keep him for follow-up care. We had paid the bill — fifteen hundred and forty-three dollars, which I had put on my personal credit card without checking with my old lady, which was the only marital fight I have had with Tanya in fifteen years, and which she dropped immediately when I drove the dog home from the vet and she met him on our front porch and he laid his head against her thigh.
He never left our house after that.
He is alive today. He is somewhere between seven and eight years old now. He sleeps at the foot of our bed every single night. He has gained back his weight. He still has the scar around his neck from the yellow nylon cord — a thin pink line that runs almost all the way around. The fur grew back wrong over it. You can see it if you part the fur with your fingers.
He is the dog this whole story is about, in the way that one dog can be the door that the rest of a story walks through.
About three weeks after we brought Highway home, Trooper called me at the shop on a Tuesday afternoon.
He said, “Razor. I been thinking.”
I said, “That can’t be good.”
He said, “Razor. I been thinking we ought to do something. About the dogs.”
I said, “What dogs.”
He said, “All of them. The ones we see on the side of the road. The ones tied to things. The ones dumped in the desert. We see it. We have always seen it. We see it more than anybody because we are on those roads. We’re the ones out there. I have ridden past dogs in worse shape than Highway. I have ridden past them and just kept going. I do not know how many times I have ridden past dogs in twenty-two years. I started counting in my head the other night. I stopped counting at forty-six.”
He was quiet for a moment.
He said, “Razor. I want to start pulling over.”
I said, “Trooper. We are an MC. We are not an animal rescue.”
He said, “Razor. We can be both.”
Three weeks after that phone call, we had a chapter meeting at our clubhouse — a small concrete-block building on the south side of Phoenix, with an office in the back where I run club business and a main floor with a bar and a pool table and walls covered in patches and photographs of our brothers who have passed.
I put it to the chapter.
Twenty-six of us were there that night. Trooper presented the idea. He had thought about it for three weeks. He had a written plan in a small notebook he had brought to the meeting.
The plan was this. We would form a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a federally recognized charitable organization — operating under the legal name Highway’s House. We would be a sister organization to the MC, not officially part of the club, so that the nonprofit could operate cleanly within IRS rules and not be entangled with the club’s other activities. The nonprofit would have one mission: pulling abandoned and abused dogs off the roads of Maricopa County and the surrounding Arizona desert highways, and getting them into rescue, fostering, or veterinary care.
We would do the work as bikers. We would do it on Harleys. We would do it in patches and cuts. We would not soften ourselves to make ourselves more approachable to suburban donors. We would be what we were. We would also be doing this.
We would call ourselves, on the nonprofit side, the Highway’s House Recovery Crew.
The patches the brothers would wear when they were doing rescue rides would have one small additional rocker on the bottom. The rocker would say PAWS.
We voted on it that night.
Twenty-six voices. Twenty-six yes votes. Unanimous.
Trooper was elected president of the nonprofit. I was elected vice president. Tanker was elected treasurer because he was the only one of us who had ever balanced a checkbook in his adult life without help.
We filed the 501(c)(3) paperwork in September of 2021.
We were officially incorporated in February of 2022.
I am writing this post in November of 2025.
Highway’s House Recovery Crew has, as of last Saturday’s count, pulled 417 dogs off the sides of roads in Arizona, southern Nevada, and southeastern California since June of 2021.
Of those 417 dogs, 389 have survived their initial rescue. The other 28 were too far gone when we found them. We hold a small remembrance for those 28 every January on the anniversary of the first dog we lost, a Doberman mix named Joker who we found on I-10 in February of 2022 and who died at the emergency vet six hours after we got him there.
Of the 389 survivors:
311 have been adopted into permanent homes — most through partner rescues, some directly through brothers and brothers’ families.
47 are currently in foster care with our network.
22 are long-term residents at a partner sanctuary outside Florence, Arizona, that we help fund.
9 live with brothers as personal companion animals (Highway is one of these 9; Trooper has a German Shepherd mix named Patch; Tanker has a one-eyed pit mix named Saint).
We have a budget of about $340,000 a year now. We are funded entirely by donations — annual fundraiser events that bring in about $80,000 a year, a monthly donor program with about 1,400 monthly donors, and individual donations that come in through our website and Facebook page. We have one part-time employee, a 28-year-old veterinary technician named Maribel Vasquez who handles intake coordination and medical scheduling.
Carmen Diaz — the woman in the Odyssey — sits on our board.
Her son Mateo is twenty now. He goes to Arizona State. He volunteers at our fundraisers every year.
Dr. Iris Calloway, the vet from Wickenburg, retired in 2024 — but before she retired, she trained five other veterinarians across central Arizona in the rapid-intake protocols we developed for heat-stroked dogs found in roadside conditions. Those protocols are now used by veterinary clinics in seven Arizona counties.
I want to write down a few things, because I have been asked about this story by reporters and podcasters about a dozen times in the four years since it started, and there are things that do not come across in the news articles.
The first thing is that the eleven brothers who stopped on June 19th, 2021, did not stop because we were good men. We stopped because Trooper had a feeling about something he saw out the corner of his eye, and Trooper’s feelings have always been listened to in this club because Trooper is a careful man and a quiet man and when Trooper says something it has weight. If Trooper had not seen what he saw, we would have ridden past. I want you to know that. The men who started this rescue are not different from any other group of bikers you have ever seen on a highway. We are just the ones who happened to have a Trooper.
The second thing is that we are still the same men. None of us has gotten softer. None of us has shaved a beard. None of us has stopped riding. None of us has given up our patches. Trooper still has the diamond on his cut that some of our patches imply. Tanker still wears a Navy rocker that has gotten him pulled over twice in the last two years for no other reason. I still have my three felonies and they still come up on background checks and they still make landlords nervous.
We have not pretended to become the kind of bikers you can take home to your mother. We have just become the kind of bikers who pull over.
The third thing — and this is the one I want you to take with you — is that the dogs do not care what we look like.
Every single dog we have pulled off the side of a road in the last four years, we have approached the same way. Cuts off. Folded as a barrier. Hands open. Voices low. Water poured slow. Tongue dabbed first. Cradled in cuts and laid in the bed of a chase truck. Driven to a vet. Paid for out of donations.
The dogs do not care that we are 1%er-adjacent. The dogs do not care that we have prior records. The dogs do not care that we are the kind of men suburban moms move their kids away from.
The dogs care that we stopped.
They care that we got off the bikes.
They care that we knelt on the asphalt in the heat.
They care that we cradled them on our cuts.
The dogs have, every single time, looked up at our beards and our sleeve tattoos and our scarred-up faces and recognized us for what we are when we are doing this work, which is the only thing in the world they need us to be.
That is the lesson I learned at fifty-two years old on the side of US-93 in June of 2021, and that I have been learning every Saturday since.
Highway is asleep at my feet right now.
He is eight years old. He has a small graying patch on his muzzle. His back legs are slower than they were three years ago. He still rides with me, in a sidecar Tanker welded onto my Heritage Softail in 2022. He wears doggy goggles and stares forward through them like a co-pilot. He is the unofficial mascot of Highway’s House. His face is the face on our 501(c)(3) letterhead.
The yellow nylon cord we cut off his neck on June 19th, 2021, is in a small wooden frame on the wall of our clubhouse, above the bar.
Under it, in black Sharpie on a small white card, Trooper wrote one sentence the week we opened the nonprofit.
The sentence says: The next dog is already out there. Ride.
We ride.
If this story moved you, follow the page — there are more like Highway and the Hounds I haven’t told yet.
