The Vision Quest of a Modern Day Explorer
Memoir
Date Published: May 26, 2022
Publisher: MindStir Media
After the unexpected death of his thirty-eight-year-old stepfather,
fourteen-year-old Rick embarks on a five-year journey that begins in the
Midwest’s Edenic Driftless Area canoeing a mysterious wild river in eastern
Iowa.
While embracing the idealism of the 1970s counterculture, he seeks to
discover himself in pursuit of his escapism. Amidst the backdrop of
reconstructing his deconstructed Christian faith, sharing adventures with
friends, his interior conversation gives a glimpse into the author’s inner
growth during these years. If anything kept him moving forward, it was the
delusion of his magical thinking: his imagination and wanting, and the
wandering search through the looking glass of his impressionistic mind,
slicing through glacial meltwaters of northern forests in a canoe and other
evocative childhood memories.
On Colorado’s high chaparral, just as he begins to reconcile his
industrialist roots with his curious artist’s soul, Rick falls in love with
a girl from Sinaloa, Mexico. After high school, he hitchhikes back and forth
across the country, visiting old friends before returning to Mexico to find
the girl. Traveling the back roads of Mexico with new friends, looking down
from the top of an active volcano, and taking a dangerous acid trip at the
edge of Cholula’s Great Pyramid, he comes to see his life’s trajectory
reflected in the struggles of his ancestors and buried in the secrets of
Mexico’s past.
Editorial Reviews
“A debut recollection of teenage existential angst and travel in the
Age of Aquarius.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“A deeply poetic book, far-reaching in its complexity, ‘Mexican
Sunset’ is a fascinating look at the connectedness of peoples, nature, and
their origins. It is unreservedly recommended!”
– The BookViral
Review
EXCERPT
INTRODUCTION
Where to begin? I had been born and bathed in the sunrise that spread
across an artist colony on the Florida coast like an impressionist painting.
The first soil I touched was sandy. My childhood memories were the
smell of salt air, exploring undeveloped places, launching out into the Gulf Stream
with my father in a homemade boat, hot chocolate, and predawn fishing off a pier
as the sun broke along the horizon.
My first pet was an alligator, then a stray dog. Then the dog was gone.
Run over by a car. Then the alligator escaped, and my neighbor’s character “Al
Alligator” helped bring the Florida alligator back from extinction. In his eighties,
Pat was my best friend, a political cartoonist, and environmental activist. My
childhood was boats, beaches, and planes, and while I searched for my identity in
these, their sum was something less than the trajectory of my soul. Then, a friend
was hit by a train, and everything changed.
But there was a little more backstory. It seemed important: I was born to a
beautiful artistic mother in her early twenties, the daughter of a Chicago meatpacking
family, and the man she met on the beach at spring break. He had been
compelling enough for her to break off an engagement in their rush to marry. They
had only known each other for a few weeks.
After six years and four kids, she threw in the towel. His insanity had broken
through his charming crew cut, ukulele serenades, and that big Buffalo industrialist
pedigree. So, we moved to an affluent Chicago suburb to be close to my
mother’s family, where my mind focused on almost anything except the present,
on to the next thing before the work at hand was complete. I was a seeker of what I wasn’t sure, if it wasn’t for hope. Preoccupied with the past and the future and
the woods. And I was a weaver of delusions.
But that wasn’t the opening… Then I had it, the story began with a loss: At
fourteen, I came to a place of doubt, my trust in God ironically shattered by death.
And this wasn’t the first time I’d found myself stuck in a dark hole. The question
wasn’t how I would find my way out (I had strategies for that), but why the losses
kept piling up just as I was trying to become my own person?
In the midst of the counterculture of the seventies, my five-year vision quest
spanned the continent of North America; fueled by escapism and drawn by the
magnificence of the mountains and the lakes and rivers where I found individualism,
independence, and confidence. The problem was how to infuse those feelings
with survival in the sophisticated world.
About the Author
Rick Jebb is a neuro divergent author who writes about adaptation:
multigenerational influence, the power of community, art and nature. He has
been called an “artist trapped in a businessman’s body,”
and has striven to transverse the realms of ecology, geography, history,
literature, fine art, neuroscience, religion and business.
His life often focused on the question: how to go-on when you want to quit?
He deals with death, depression, mental illness and love.
Rick’s literary influences include: Herman Hesse, Anthony Doerr,
Barry Lopez, Fredrick Buechner, Phillip Yancey, Christian Wiman, William
Kent Krueger, John McFee, Ray Bradbury, H.G. Wells, Frank Herbert, Ralph
Emerson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson.
An avid world traveler, and wilderness camper, since the age of twelve, he
has led numerous canoe and hiking trips ranging from three to twenty days.
As a canoeist and white water paddler, from age eleven through thirty, Rick
paddled over 2,000 miles on lakes and rivers mostly throughout Ontario,
Canada. He has run numerous white water rivers, and hiked mountain trails
throughout the eastern United States.
He has been seriously writing since 2010, with seven essays published in
The Boundary Waters Journal, Fathom, and Ekstasis magazines since
2019.
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