- NOW AVAILABLE -
RIMROCK TRAIL Prepublisher Edition (c) Rocky Ireland Publishers 2005
Rocky Ireland Publishers in conjunction with IMPRESS are pround to announce the release of Jeffery Fleming's short story book RIMROCK TRAIL
(opening page)
The desert is a place where a man can measure his being, weigh his spirit. He came into this desert world with time to think, to observe, and to absorb it's way of life.
As I parked I saw the first glints of sunrise cutting through coloring the clouds and falling almost like confetti; or like an attack squadrons participants as it moves across the desert, dodging and climbing over the rocks, like the advance guard of the attack upon the darkness chasing away the ghosts of the night past. Could it chase away that dark place within my own soul?
The sun arrived next to the trail just as I unloaded my bike from her rack on the Jeep. Which one made for the trail first is still in question in my mind. But without question is the need for a change, for a renaissance of the man, for I never knew anything that I didn't have to leave behind.
He had been incomplete and anguished, yet he had not recognized the true source of the pain. He had friends of course, with whom he spent time, but there had been almost nothing of genuine emotional significance that he had been able, or willing, to share with anyone else. So much of what mattered most to him lay unformed and sealed off. It lay behind a door with a strong guard at the gateway, heavily protected so that it would not be revealed; and he be found lacking or worse, empty, and be shamed. This guardedness protected him, but at what cost? The cost of being lifeless and unknown.
How much of another can a man really know? Should they know? One must first know oneself. And what he knew of himself, his dark old inside self, he didn't like. This, fortification, hindered him from reaching out to others and knowing them. But could he, above all: be true to himself?
It would require a massive personal storm for him to face it, to find and express himself fully.
The storm had come, and as was his way, he kept his distance from all others, for in the desert to be alone is to be safe... to live. For in the desert there is no danger of suffering from lack of food and water if one stayed his distance.
So survival is based on distance. But his whole life had been based on this principal and this caused the storm , or did it?
Now, after that storm he was laid out naked and raw before mankind.
Through it he had come to realize that he had settled for a diminished existence. Could he find a way to know others? The others who face that same wasteland of scarcity every day, others who live in that desert of life? What could they teach him?
He stepped up onto the pedals and the bike took him...