Part 2: A Biker Pulled Over on I-70 To Pick Up a Dog Someone Left To Die — 200 Miles Later, a Stranger’s Photo Went Viral. The Reason He Stopped Is Worse Than You Think
Ray Sorenson grew up in a trailer outside Grand Junction, Colorado.
His father was a long-haul trucker.
His mother was a waitress at a diner called the Blue Moon that no longer exists.
Ray is the oldest of three.
In the summer of 1989, when Ray was twenty-two years old, just back from the Marines, unemployed, drinking a fifth of Jim Beam a day and on the third week of a methamphetamine habit he had picked up from a prospect at a clubhouse in Arizona — his father Clyde drove him out to a rest stop on I-70 outside Limon, Colorado, parked the pickup, and told Ray to get out.
Clyde handed Ray a duffel bag with clothes in it.
Clyde said six words.
“Son. Don’t come home till you’re clean.”
Ray got out.
Clyde drove away.
Ray stood at that rest stop for six hours.
He was still drunk from the night before. He had twelve dollars in his pocket. He had no one to call.
Ray told me, in my examination room on the day I met him, that he sat on the curb outside the men’s bathroom at that rest stop and watched his father’s taillights disappear down the access road.
He said, “Doc. I thought I was gonna die that afternoon. Not from the drugs. From nobody coming back.”
He didn’t die.
A trucker named Wilbur — a 64-year-old Black man from Tulsa who had been driving the Denver route for eighteen years — stopped for a piss at 8:47 p.m. and found Ray curled up on the curb.
Wilbur didn’t ask questions.
He said, “Son. You want a ride?”
Ray said yes.
Wilbur drove Ray three hundred and forty miles to his own house in Tulsa.
Wilbur’s wife Ernestine fed Ray a plate of chicken and rice.
Wilbur let Ray sleep on their couch for seventy-three days.
On day seventy-four, Wilbur drove Ray to an AA meeting at a Baptist church on 36th Street.
Ray got sober at that meeting.
He has been sober for thirty-five years as of July of this year.
Clyde — Ray’s father — died of a stroke in 1997. They had reconciled in 1993. Ray gave the eulogy at Clyde’s funeral. He told the whole story about the rest stop. Clyde’s brother, Ray’s uncle, told Ray at the funeral that Clyde had followed Wilbur’s truck in his own pickup all the way to Tulsa that night in 1989.
Clyde had parked across the street from Wilbur’s house.
He had sat in his truck for six hours to make sure Ray went inside.
Then he had driven home.
Ray never knew.
Clyde never told him.
Wilbur is still alive. He’s ninety-nine. He lives with his granddaughter in Tulsa. Ray calls him every Sunday at 4 p.m. without fail.
Linda, Ray’s wife, was a nurse.
They met at the AA meeting in 1990.
She had seven years of sobriety on him when they met. She never made him feel small about it.
They got married in 1991 in a small ceremony at the Baptist church. Wilbur walked Linda down the aisle because her own father had disowned her when she got sober.
They tried for kids for fifteen years.
It never happened.
Linda told Ray, on what turned out to be the last good day before the cancer got bad, that she was okay with no kids.
She said, “Ray. We saved each other. That was enough.”
Linda died on June 9th, 2019.
Ray buried her on a Thursday.
He went back to driving the Denver route on the following Monday.
He has not taken a single day off since then.
He rides on weekends.
He lives in the same house they shared on Pine Street in Arvada, Colorado.
Linda’s toothbrush is still in the holder.
Her reading glasses are still on the nightstand on her side.
Her slippers are still under the bed.
Ray has not been able to move any of them.
He has not been able to make a phone call he’s been meaning to make for two years either.
A phone call to his sister Deborah in Wichita, who had said something at Linda’s funeral in 2019 that Ray couldn’t forgive at the time.
Deborah had said, “Ray. She was a good woman. But at least now you can start over.”
Ray hadn’t spoken to Deborah since.
Two years.
No holidays. No birthdays.
Their mother — who is eighty-four and in assisted living — had been begging Ray to call Deborah for two years.
He couldn’t do it.
He didn’t know how.
On July 16th of this year, Ray was riding back to Arvada from a Horizon Riders rally in Kansas City.
He was alone.
He had taken the route he always took — I-70 west straight across the Kansas plains, two hundred and seventy miles of nothing but wheat fields and sky.
At exactly 1:34 p.m., three miles east of a town called WaKeeney, Ray saw something in the shoulder about a quarter mile ahead.
Small.
Brown.
Not moving.
He assumed it was a dead animal. A coyote. A deer fawn. Something hit by a truck.
He almost kept riding.
At about two hundred yards out, the shape lifted its head.
It was a dog.
Ray pulled over onto the shoulder and killed the engine.
The dog — a heeler mix, maybe twenty pounds at the time, ribs visible, coat dusty — did not run.
It did not approach.
It just sat there on the shoulder of I-70 and looked at Ray.
Ray walked toward it slowly.
He crouched down about ten feet away.
The dog’s tail thumped once. Weak. Hopeful. Terrified.
Ray told me that in that moment — on the shoulder of I-70, in ninety-six-degree heat, two hundred yards from the nearest exit — his brain did something he was not expecting.
He saw himself at twenty-two.
Sitting on the curb at that rest stop outside Limon, Colorado, watching his father’s taillights disappear.
He said, “Doc. I didn’t decide to take that dog home. I just heard myself say out loud, ‘I came back. Okay? I came back.’ And then I was taking my cut off and wrapping it around him.”
He lifted the dog.
It weighed nothing.
He opened the right saddlebag of his Road King. He took out a bottle of water, a wrench roll, a pair of riding gloves, and a small rolled-up object wrapped in a red bandana.
He set all of those things — including the bandana-wrapped object — in the left saddlebag.
He lined the right saddlebag with his folded leather cut.
He lifted the dog into it.
The dog sat down.
It did not whimper.
It did not try to jump out.
It looked up at Ray.
Ray said, “We’re going home, buddy.”
He got back on the Harley.
At exactly 1:42 p.m., three miles west of WaKeeney, on a flat stretch of I-70, a woman named Marjorie Kellerman rolled past Ray in the right lane in her 2020 Subaru Outback.
She looked over.
She saw a dog sitting in a saddlebag with its chin lifted and its eyes closed, smiling into the wind.
She grabbed her phone off the passenger seat.
She took three pictures.
The third one was the one.
Ray rode two hundred and four miles that afternoon with that dog in the saddlebag.
The dog did not move.
It just sat there. Chin up. Eyes closed. Smiling.
At 3:18 p.m., Ray pulled into a Phillips 66 in Hays, Kansas, to fill up.
He opened the saddlebag.
The dog was still sitting upright.
Ray lifted him out, gently. The dog’s back legs were stiff from the ride. Ray set him down in the grass beside the gas pumps. The dog took three careful steps, squatted, peed for what seemed like a full minute, and then walked back to Ray.
He sat down next to Ray’s right boot.
He leaned against Ray’s leg.
Ray filled the tank.
Then Ray did something he had not done in two years.
He pulled out his flip phone.
He scrolled to “Deborah.”
He hit call.
Deborah picked up on the third ring.
She said, “Ray?”
Ray did not speak for about five seconds.
Then he said: “Deb. I pulled a dog out of the ditch today. I’m driving him home.”
She said, “Okay.”
He said, “Deb. I should’ve called you two years ago. I’m sorry.”
There was a long pause on the line.
Deborah said, quietly, “Ray. It’s okay. Just come for Christmas.”
Ray said, “Okay.”
He hung up.
He stood in that parking lot in Hays, Kansas, with his right hand on the gas pump and his left hand on the top of a dog’s head, and — according to the Phillips 66 security cam footage that Marjorie Kellerman’s cousin would eventually get ahold of through a second-degree connection and post as a follow-up to the viral photo — Ray cried for approximately four minutes.
He didn’t make a sound.
His shoulders didn’t even move.
Tears just ran down his face into his gray beard.
The dog sat patiently leaning against his leg the whole time.
When Ray wiped his face, put his wallet away, and lifted the dog back into the saddlebag, the security camera caught one last frame.
The dog licking Ray’s hand.
Once.
Then settling in for the last one hundred and fifty-two miles home.
When Ray walked into my clinic six days later, he told me everything I just told you.
Then he told me the part I did not know yet.
He told me about the object in the red bandana.
The thing he had moved out of the right saddlebag to make room for the dog.
He set it on my examination table.
He unrolled the bandana.
Inside was a small cardboard box.
Inside the box were Linda’s ashes.
Ray had been carrying Linda with him on every ride since the funeral in 2019.
Five years.
Every mile.
She had asked him, on one of the last nights in the hospice, to take her with him when he rode. She had never gotten to ride. She had been too sick by the time they finally talked about it.
Ray had promised.
He had kept the promise in the right saddlebag for five years.
He told me, in my clinic, voice flat, no tears — he had already cried at the Phillips 66 — “Doc. I moved Linda to the left saddlebag to make room for him. First time she’d been in the left bag in five years. I asked her in my head if it was okay.”
He paused.
“She said yes. I know she said yes, because the dog climbed in without me even helping him. He just walked up and got in.”
He looked at the dog on my table.
He said, “Linda always wanted a dog. I never let us get one. Said we traveled too much. Said it wasn’t fair to the animal.”
He scratched the dog behind the ears.
“Now she’s got one.”
The dog’s name is Highway.
Ray named him that on the ride home.
Highway is now officially four years old, twenty-nine pounds, fully vaccinated, heartworm negative, microchipped, and — as of three weeks ago — the proud owner of a custom-made leather riding harness and a pair of Doggles that Ray ordered online.
Highway rides in the saddlebag.
Every ride.
The left saddlebag is still Linda’s.
Ray has not moved her.
Highway has never once tried to climb into the left side.
Ray swears the dog knows.
Ray and Deborah speak every Sunday night at 7 p.m. now.
Ray went to Wichita for Christmas.
He brought Highway.
Their mother, Ray’s eighty-four-year-old mother in assisted living, held Highway in her lap for two hours and cried softly the entire time because, in her words, “This is the first time Raymond has brought home something alive in thirty years.”
Ray goes to Tulsa every three months to see Wilbur.
He brings Highway.
Wilbur — ninety-nine, eyes failing, hands trembling — pets Highway every visit.
On the last visit, Wilbur looked up at Ray and said, “Ray. You picked him up off the road. You know what that is, son?”
Ray said, “Yes sir. I know what that is.”
Wilbur nodded.
He said, “Good. You remembered.”
The photo still circulates.
Marjorie Kellerman’s five-word caption is still the caption.
“I don’t know them. But.”
Every time I see it on my feed — and I see it about once every three weeks, still — I look at the dog with his eyes closed, and I look at the gray beard of the rider just visible below the half-helmet, and I think about what I know that the rest of the internet does not.
That the man in that photo was carrying his dead wife in the other saddlebag.
That he had been unable to call his sister for two years.
That he had not cried since the funeral.
That he had almost not stopped.
That the dog saved him as much as he saved the dog.
Ray rides past mile marker 139 on I-70 every time he does the Kansas City route now.
He doesn’t slow down.
He just lifts one hand off the bars.
A small wave.
He came back.
If this story moved you — follow the page. There are more Rays out there. More dogs. More rest stops. More taillights that one day get followed home.
