He Caught the Westbound

By Dayton Lummis

He caught the westbound is an old American hobo expression for someone who has departed from this life. In the case of this book it is employed to be symbolic of a passing American way of life and the people who created that. We live in troubled times, and the author often uncomfortably reminds us so. Yet positive travel experiences relieve the pessimism wherein the author says, It could be worse. But not much . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532020568

Dayton Lummis

Dayton Lummis is now of that advanced age where there is a confusing amount to look back on, and a frightening current scenario to confront and evaluate. His education and experience (Yale University and various Museum directorships), plus informal degrees from “The University of North Beach” and “The Cripple Creek School of Hard Knocks,” have enabled him to navigate through “The Sea of Sorrow and Regret.” He lives in a casita in Santa Fe, NM, with his pet armadillo “Crusty.”

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Copyright © 2017 Dayton Lummis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-2055-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-2056-8 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 04/18/2017

CONTENTS

PART I Scapular Slice

PART II Transitional Complexity

PART III Pendantual Light

PART IV Bromide Occlusion

PART V Hydrothermal Thrust

PART VI Trocar Interruption

PART VII Applicational Drift

PART VIII Interdicted Acceptance

To Lesley North,

without whom

none of my books

would have been possible!

and

To my dear friend Jim Hughes,

who departed this earth

17 March 2017.

Haverford and Yale classmate

with whom I shared an

adventurous trip to Mexico in

the summer of 1956—and

a few explosions!

INTRODUCTION

Ah, the title of this book: He Caught the Westbound is an old (American) hobo expression for someone who is no longer with us. Some used to say, simply, He went West…, but I think that the previous expression—He Caught the Westbound—is a bit more poetic and perhaps mysterious. Conjuring up the image of a train, perhaps drawn by a steam engine of times past, chugging West across a wide and empty prairie toward a range of distant and unknown mountains beyond which lies a country of nothingness, an empty void into which persons vanish never to be seen again, not in the living world. Swallowed up in that mysterious country of nothingness, from which they never return to us except in memory. And, of course, in whatever writings or art works they leave to us to read, view, and perhaps puzzle over. That is the eternal way of things. The Westbound is waiting for all of us. The precise time and place for us to be catching it are not generally advertised or predicted. But there is no doubt that the Westbound is there, somewhere, waiting. As are those mythical, mysterious Western mountains and the country of nothingness that lies beyond them. It is all a great mystery… Herein I am not suggesting the imminent demise of the author, although in reality that may not be far off. What I am trying to suggest is a sort of parable for what I perceive as the vanishing American. A sort of Gary Cooper type of man who faced up to adversity with stoic dignity and got the job—whatever it was—done without a lot of yakking. A regular American (Anglo) sort of guy, maybe from a rural background or small town middle-America. The sorts who won WW II. Who went ashore at Normandy on D Day. The sorts who are now disappearing from our culture, who have perhaps Taken the Westbound… And in musing on this, and all the other calamities, political, social and economic that are confronting us today, I wonder about the future of America. And, as is said in the old blues song: Ah got a bad, bad feeling, I have been watching some YouTube videos of the D-Day invasion. They are most impressive, the great number of ships, and equipment going ashore. The soldiers, too, from landing craft. 150,000 U.S. soldiers took part in the landing, under ferocious defensive fire. Many did not survive, but those who did established a solid beachhead and the invasion mainland Europe was under way. Of course, American industrial might made all that possible. On D-Day the Allies put 2,500 aircraft in the skies over Europe. One German general, looking up at that endless swarm of aircraft, thought, We have lost this war! He was right. The post-war period was, for Americans, a time of great prosperity, confidence and belief in the future. When a working man could support a family and buy a modest house in the suburbs. Then came Korea and the dark specter of war once again. Americans dying in battles that were increasingly difficult to understand. And finally a stalemate. The Cold War, fear of communism and atomic attack eroded the confidence of America. Then came the sixties, when young people figured out they did not have to work but could just get high instead and dance around to incomprehensible music. Viet Nam was, I think, was a big nail in the coffin of America. Everything started to slide downhill from that point. Loss of confidence in government, authority, big business, higher education. That is when the country started pulling apart, until reaching the fragile point where it is now. Trump ain’t gonna fix it, can’t. Pie in the sky. But a lot of frustrated and angry Americans have believed in his simplistic outbursts. And the new President will be faced with a fragmented America, mired in overseas military quagmires, inequality and a serious faltering economy on the home front. It is not going to be easy or pretty. We plunge into this book with four pieces previously published but presented here because they represent something, a progression both in time, mentality and geography. The rest of the book is my usual hit and/or miss style, with a large portion taken up with an account of the trip to Europe, probably my last extensive travel of any kind. We end with the usual visits to New York, Tucson and Marfa. And are left staring into that void known as the future, in this case the year 2017 and the administration of President Trump. (If by monstrous and totally unpredictable events things turn out badly, well then, so be it. Will be interesting…) Ah jest wan’ some sugar in mah tea…

PART I

SCAPULAR SLICE

We associate the phenomenon involuntary memory with Proust and his monumental book (in English) Remembrance of Things Past. I say we rather sardonically, because I am sure that most Americans have never heard of Proust, and would not be interested in him if they did. But, involuntary memory is something they might understand, because it is a frequent if not always understood phenomenon. Today there was a paving project in downtown Santa Fe, and as I passed the newly laid asphalt with its strong petroleum smell I was, as is usually the case with that particular odor, taken back to 1951 and the California oil fields around Newhall, Castaic and the Santa Clarita Valley just northeast of Los Angeles. What was my connection there in 1951? I was riding with my Dad and his stock broker buddy, Chester Guzeil, as they were driving to the low, forested foothills of the Tehachapi Mountains of the Los Angeles National Forest to the northeast of the oil fields, and it was the strong smell of petroleum from this oil fields that has stayed with me since that time. It was a quite warm August day and we and gotten an early start to hunt deer. That was Chester Guzeil’s idea—also to bring me (Take the boy along, he should know how we knock down, gut a buck…) We never saw any deer during that day of tramping around in the hot, dry Tehachapi foothills. Boring. But the smell of the oil fields—that is what impressed me. Chester Guzeil was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch in Beverly Hills. He was an OK guy, if a bit of a bullshitter. He sometimes showed up on weekends at the Malibu ranch with his fancy, expensive deer rifle for an afternoon of hunting in the hills above the ranch. Nothing! But I guess that he did get a buck or two somewhere, because once he brought some venison steaks which we cooked and ate. Quite good. Maybe he bought them at the Fairfax Farmers Market? In spite of all this my Dad liked Chester, or Herr Guzeil as he called him, but not to his face. He always took me and my Dad to fancy restaurants in Beverly Hills, pointing out a few film stars whom I did not recognize nor did my Dad. I have a photograph which I took with my old Brownie Hawkeye of Chester and my Dad standing in front of the Beverly Hills Merrill Lynch office in suits with cigarettes. Chester has what I might characterize as a sly grin. I wonder how much he was making off my Dad, with all that trading—the profits of which probably, as said by cynics, would have been exceeded by throwing darts at The Wall Street Journal pages of stock quotations.

On the way back from the day of deer hunting, which my Dad was not at all enthusiastic about, Chester Guzeil drank beer after beer from a cooler while my Dad drove Chester’s truck. Finally the man fell asleep while my Dad shook his head in disgust. At Guzeil’s house in Santa Monica we parted, Chester saying, One hell of a day, huh? We ought to get out more often. And my Dad just anxious to get in his vehicle and get the hell out of there. No more deer hunting for us, I heard him mumble. He was mostly silent on the drive along PCH and up into the hills to the ranch. I dozed. When he dropped me off at the guest cabin, where I slept, he said, Herr Guzeil is no hunter. I could have told him that. At the age of fourteen I had tracked many a deer in the hills above the ranch, had found where they bedded down during the day, and what paths they always followed when the afternoons faded. You don’t hunt deer in the dry heat of an early afternoon. No. That much I reflected on during the long drive back to Santa Monica. Passing through the oil fields in the heat. That smell…

The paving project in downtown Santa Fe today—and the strong petroleum odor. It took me back to that long ago August day in 1951. Involuntary memory. Yeah…

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Sitting in, or on, Buck Hanford’s lap at the December 1988 party that she had arranged at the Rocking L Ranch out in the lonely East Mojave desert to showcase her paintings to the few renegade residents of The Lonely Triangle (the mostly unpopulated region east of Barstow between I-40 and I-15), Meredith lit up a joint. Buck said, somewhat disgustedly, Ah, Merry, don’ be doin’ that. Yoh know that stuff is illegal. Buck was a cranky old desert rat who lived in a broken down trailer in Carruthers Canyon up north to the New York Mountains. Meredith let out a big puff of smoke which Buck angrily fanned away. She then laughed slightly, got up off Buck’s lap and went outside to the porch of the ranch house to finish her joint in the clean, still desert night. Inside, in the big room where the fireplace was, some of the kids from the OX Ranch, in their buttoned up white shirts and western hats, were playing country/western music, not very well. Buck just sat there, looking puzzled, perhaps somewhat disoriented from Meredith’s illegal behavior. Then he smiled at me, said, Ah sure do like yore hat. (Which I had fashioned from a felt western hat into a sort of WWI trooper’s hat.) I told him, untruthfully, Ah, Buck, it’s jest a souvenir of my old days on the Border Patrol. He brightened, and said, Ah jest knowed you was a lawman. We all, out there on the desert, had our roles to play, most of them not at all true or accurate in one way or another. A man in that country often had things in his past that he did not like to remember or talk about. Like the old song that the 49ers used to sing in the mining camps of the Sierra foothills Gold Country—What was your name? Oh, what was your name back in the States? What was your name?

The party did not end so well for old Buck. He got roaring drunk and sometime after everyone had retired, in one form or another, he evidently staggered outside to relieve himself and tumbled over the small stone wall that formed a sort of terrace in front of the ranch house. He lay there until dawn when someone discovered him and revived him. He had been injured and had to be taken to the hospital in Needles 72 miles away. Nothing serious, evidently, and soon he was back in his broken down trailer swilling beer. Meredith commented, Smoking a joint is illegal, but old Buck can drink himself into a stupor, fall over a wall and injure himself—and that is perfectly legal? What hypocrisy! Well…

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A quiet October night here in the casita in the South Capitol neighborhood of Santa Fe, and for no reason a long ago vignette of this neighborhood pops into my head. The time when I had just parked the Ford Ranger on a warm summer evening and was about to enter the casita when I heard a shout from the direction of the casita of my neighbor Gilbert Chavez. It was Felipe, who often crashed in Gilbert’s small yard, waving a beer can and calling out, Come on over, have a beer, bro! Felipe had always sort of liked me, ever since he had seen me carrying my Winchester .30.30 lever action rifle into the casita. And a couple of times I have given him a ride over to the liquor store where he always bought a suitcase of Bud. One time I bought a couple of six-packs of Coors Extra Gold for myself and on the way back Felipe said, So, bro, you jes’ a regular guy like me, drinkin’ beer? I nodded and when I dropped him by Gilbert’s casita he punched me on the arm saying, You OK, bro… Nice to be accepted in the neighborhood.

So, when Felipe beckoned me over to have a beer, I ambled over and accepted a cold Bud he handed me. He asked, So, what’s up, bro? You jes’ gonna stay home, drink beer by yourself in your casita? Thin’s jumping, downtown, lotsa tourist pussy around. I think I’m gonna git married tonight! I looked at him a bit puzzled, then caught his meaning and took a swig of the Bud. We stood there for a moment in the silence of the early evening in our quiet neighborhood. Then Felipe suddenly asked me, Hey bro, could you drive me downtown in your truck? Not a good idea I thought, but said anyway, OK, come on. We walked over to the Ford Ranger, Felipe carrying his suitcase of Bud. When I turned onto Galisteo Street headed downtown I told Felipe, Keep the beer down, bro, out of sight. He punched me on the arm, said, Sure, bro, we don’ wan’ no trouble. I jes’ got outta jail yesterday, for being drunk in public. No problem, bro!

When we got downtown, which was crowded with tourists, Felipe asked that I drop him off by Cathedral Park, saying I’m gonna hide the suitcase in the park, take a cold one an’ cruise around the Plaza. I’m gonna git married tonight. I had by then understood that by married he meant laid. Well, OK. I dropped Felipe off with his suitcase at the park, declined his invitation to join him in cruising the Plaza, and headed home. Felipe gave me a cold one, For the ride, bro!, which I did not drink from on the drive back to the casita. There I relaxed with Felipe’s cold one and some Coors Extra Gold, a seegar and a book. I was thinking that Felipe’s night might not end so well, no marriage but another night in jail for being drunk in public. When I had dropped him off he was well on his way to that. But the next day he was out in front of Gilbert’s casita drinking a beer. He waved the can at me and smiled, a bit drunkenly.

Felipe did not live long after that episode. He was found comatose in Gilbert’s yard, a drug overdose. I felt bad about that. Felipe always had added bit of local color to our little neighborhood although my uptight Anglo neighbor was scared of him, said that he had threatened to attack him. (That was because of the Lycra bicycle outfit and helmet that my neighbor often wore!) Who really knew what Felipe thought? He was at heart not a bad dude—just FUCKED UP! Terminally, it seems. Passed by, by a changing Santa Fe that he couldn’t understand or relate to.

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New York City can tear the heart out of an iron dog!

That is what I said to the young woman I had met at the bar of La Fonda in Santa Fe one fine October evening when she told me she was visiting from The Big Apple. She looked at me curiously, my Western hat and colorful Mexican-style shirt, and said, with concern, Why do you say something like that? All my friends in New York are doing very well. What do you know of New York? Have you ever been there? She seemed surprised when I said that I had been to that city at least a dozen times, including just last June. Dressed like that? she snorted. You’d be taken for a clown and a fool! Of course not, I assured her. I wore a nice dark blue pin-striped suit that I bought here in downtown Santa Fe. People were very nice and most deferential. Had a real good time.

After she calmed down and took me bit more seriously she told me she worked at The New Yorker magazine, as assistant to the editor. I was impressed. She asked, a bit condescendingly I thought, if I was familiar with the publication? I told her that I surely was and that when I was a youngster my mother read the magazine regularly and tore off the covers to keep them to paper the walls of a powder room, if she ever got a proper house. The young woman laughed and asked if that was ever done. I told her no.

I went on to tell her that now retired I did some writing as a hobby, and had even once submitted what I thought was a pretty good Western story to The New Yorker. It was rejected with a short note saying, Good story but not for our readership. Whatever that meant. I told her that I was somewhat insulted. She said that she would like to read my story—could I leave it at the front desk so she could find it in the morning and look it over? We could discuss it over a light lunch here at the hotel. My shuttle to the airport leaves at 2 P.M., she said. I agreed to meet her for lunch at noon.

When I left La Fonda at 10 P.M. I hurried back to my casita, 10 minutes away, and printed out copy of my story and brought it back to the hotel and left it at the front desk for Lorraine—which I thought an odd name for an editorial assistant at the prestigious New Yorker. But what do I know?

At a leisurely lunch the next day in the La Plazuela dining room the hotel she told me that she was very moved by my story. She said, That’s just about the saddest story I have ever read. Very well written. I’d like to take it back with me and show it to the editor. He’s a real good friend and I’ll push him to publish it. I felt she meant that. I stood up and said, Let me walk you down to the shuttle—it’s about a ten minute walk. Before she boarded the shuttle she gave me brief kiss on the cheek. I wished her luck with the story. She smiled and said, Don’t worry. I’ll email you. And was off.

I never heard from Lorraine, and of course the story was not published. No explanatory note this time. Maybe Lorraine wasn’t putting out for the editor and he just trashed the story. You know, New York can tear the heart out of an iron dog!

So I include the story here for your (I hope) enjoyment and your (again, I hope) thoughtful consideration. I call it: The Hallucination of Mister Moore.

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The Hallucination of Mister Moore

Mister Moore arrived in Spokane in the early evening. It was cold and gray and piles of snow lay everywhere. The sky looked leaden and damp. It was not an auspicious arrival. Mister Moore had endured a long and not very comfortable bus ride and he was tired. He took a room downtown, near the bus terminal, in a seedy hotel—well, not quite seedy but threadbare and shabby, barely clinging to a sort of diminished respectability. He had supposed that Spokane would be a clean sort of mid-western town, but the evident reality of the downtown surprised and depressed him. But, he told himself, any place looks sort of dismal in a gray, cold and snowy evening. But there was no ignoring the ill-clothed, dispirited and vaguely threatening looking people he saw shambling around the downtown, or huddled in doorways. He imagined that all the respectable people, the ones who had their lives together, fled downtown at the end of the working day for safe and comfortable suburbs. That was the way it was today in declining America, he thought.

Mister Moore decided there must be a sizable Mormon population in Spokane, given the direct lines of travel and communication to Salt Lake, the citadel of the so-called Kingdom of Zion. The Mormons were self-reliant and disciplined people, Mister Moore reminded