White Ash

A tale built around truth, well seasoned with fiction, in the era from 1929 to 2004, about a man named Jack who was born on a small ranch in the desert canyon country of the southwest to Anglo parents with the light of their dream on the horizon in their eyes. He became orphaned at the age of nine months with no public record of his birth. He was discovered in the desert and raised by illegal Mexicans, (wetbacks, a loose term of the era), and thus was renamed Joaquin. It is about the people that he encounters, both directly and indirectly, which shape the conditions of his life from his birth through his days as a Vaquero out on the wagon (a base camp used by cowboys to facilitate open range grazing) in the Great Basin, until he reaches an age where he and his buckaroo skills are no longer considered of any value. Unbeknownst to him, he goes full circle back to his beginning in the canyons of the desert of the southwest and there meets his mysterious end. It is a tale of love, life, death, and superstition.