Perhaps there is no greater image than that of the train. In it's colorful history, the train has been used in many motion pictures and stories as a metaphor, some good and some not so good, and was the wonderment of many children dreaming about a day when they too would climb aboard these giant metal beasts and depart for new adventures in unknown lands. There is hardly a young child that does not desire a model train set as many of us had when we were young.

In my new novella, "Desert Rain," one of the main characters, a rodeo cowboy drifter named Jack Carlson, embarks on his own odyssey of self-discovery as does the heroine, Cynthia Ryan, a documentary filmmaker whom he encounters later in the story.

The difference between my two characters is like night and day. While Cynthia travels to America's great southwest in a huge RV with all the ammenities, Jack decides to hop a train from Laramie, Wyoming to Indian country, namely, Tuba City, Arizona located near the Hopi reservation and the famed mesas. It is here that he will confront his half-Hopi daughter, Mary, whom he has not seen in nine years.

For Jack, the train takes him to his ultimate destiny and one cannot help but wonder what that will be as the great Santa Fe diesel train snakes it's away through the great American desert and hopefully into my reader's hearts.