Some years ago, I was visiting Tulsa on business.  Tulsa is a gorgeous city in northeast Oklahoma.  A large river winds through it and it was one of the first cities in America that had walking, jogging and biking trails.  On a whim, I decided to return to Oklahoma City along a different path.

It was mid March, much like today in Oklahoma, and there was still a nip in the air left over from a recent snow storm.  Most of the snow had melted and now there was a warm breeze blowing in from the south as I followed the rural highway toward the little town of Red Rock.

Despite the recent snow, trees and flowers were beginning to bloom on both sides of the road.  Northeast Oklahoma is almost in the western foothills of the Ozarks, the terrain rolling and large boulders often appearing in the tiny streambeds that dissect the rolling terrain.

Red Rock is a small town, nay, a tiny town, I learned as I took an excursion off the highway.  Then I saw something quite out of the ordinary.  It was a very large building surrounded by acres of parking lots, filled with tour buses with licenses from all the surrounding states.

"They're here to play Indian bingo," a local told me.  "They give away thousands of dollars every week."

That morning in the Daily Oklahoman, OKC's newspaper, I had read about an old man that had disappeared in a snowstorm. As best as I can tell, he was never found.  That gorgeous morning, driving from Tulsa through Red Rock, I concocted a story about that old man to set it straight, at least in my own mind.

Why did he run away from home?  How did he survive?  Who might he have met along the way?  What was he searching for and what did he ultimately find?  I answered all these questions in my book Prairie Sunset and to this day, when I re-read it, the story still feels as real to me as that wonderful drive that I took from Tulsa to OKC that day, many years ago, just off the beaten path.

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