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
About the Author
Rick Jebb is a neurodivergent 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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