Excerpts from High Lonesome:

To Stop or Not

Coming over a rise
a great sweep of land,
empty, rolling away,
snow-swept and chalky white
beneath a milky haze diffused
under a cold winter moon,
not a single light anywhere,
the road straight ahead,
a black line in whiteness,
miles of this;
rolling along,
occasionally drifts of snow
blowing across the road,
distant mountains
lonely and cold,
twenty below --
get out to piss,
cloud of steam
blowing away,
a man could die
out here pretty quick;
some did, a pile of rags
under drifting snow,
found rotting in the spring,
a mound of nothing in emptiness.
Back in the truck,
more miles and lonely thoughts,
thinking of Lake George
and the cowboy bar,
the only place for miles --
why not?

Windmill spinning
in the prairie wind
Commanche grassland
stretching beyond vision
towering thunderheads
a vast emptiness
always wind.
A man standing
by his pickup
on a dusty road,
watching something
waiting for something
remembering something?
The wind, the grass,
the sky,
some plan.

Introduction to High Lonesome

There's an old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." In our time , that curse has come true with a vengence. If the present were any more damn interesting, we'd all be dead, probably. And one of the ruses we Americans have adopted to deal with the frightening uncertainties of the present is to look back on the past with moist eyes and yearning heart. The myth of the American West is almost everybody's favorite, because it's so fluid: was it a place, a time, a memory, a dream, a hallucination? It doesn't matter: As Americans, the West is a big part of our collective unconscious, making us feel heroic, mythic, and ultimately connected to our heritage -- even if back in 1870 our own particular ancestors may have been fleeing eastern Europe or quietly running a drugstore in Illinois.

Dayton Lummis comes out of that myth, somehow. Like his relative Charles Fletcher Lummis, who walked to Los Angeles from Ohio in 1884, Dayton Lumis served time as a museum curator but -- also like Charles Lummis -- came to realize that "the museum by the side of the road" held more promise than stately edifices with burly security guards and red velvet ropes. When I met Lummis a few years ago, he had just finished a stint as a caretaker in the East Mojave Desert and was heading down to Bisbee, Arizona where his compadre "The Doctor" and a shadowy gang known as "Los Hermanos de la Bala de Oro" (either "The Brotherhood of the Golden Bullet" or the "Weak Bales of Paper," depending on how bad your Spanish is) were plotting "small wars and demolitions" across the border in Sonora.

Although Lummis will admit, after a few Negra Modelos, that he majored in Western History at Yale, he avoids academic deadfalls and official entanglements. Bouncing around in his Chevy Blazer from Santa Fe to Cripple Creek, he leaves a trail of written observations behind him on doors, wall, and the backs of truck stop menus. A number of the poems in this collection were inscribed on a kitchen door at the Rocking L Ranch (now just another memory) in the East Mojave; the rest had simiar origins. The poems reflect this transience: in Lummis's West, the maps have shifting boudaries, and the traveler who sets out for a seemingly well-marked location (Nowhere, Arizona) often finds it to be a ghost town, a mirage, or both. "How can it be/that this map can fail/to show where you are/ or where I am?" he asks; and later, being a practical sort, concedes, "The only thing to do/is strike a match,/light a seegar,/drink a beer,/and follow the wind into the Western night,/the map folded away,/tiny figures like ashes/left behind."

The poems in High Lonesome reflect a longing for the vanishing American West that never was and come paradoxically close to recognizing where the West begins -- in the dream state where the pavement, and the maps, end, and your own private universe commences. This is "cowboy poetry" with a difference.

--Nigey Lennon
January 1994
Author of
The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California