Correspondence #19: Don Michael Sampson
Southwest US troubadour, recording artist and Beat compadre drops us a New Year line and shares another song set in the upper heights of the American northwest with Kerouac very much in mind
Last August New Mexico-based singer-songwriter Don Michael Sampson sent a Ginsberg tribute song to Rock and the Beat Generation. Now he follows up with a pertinent composition in the light of our coverage in the last couple of months of the recently-released Jack Kerouac title Desolation Peak. Read his message, link to a sound file of the song and check out his lyric below.
Email, January 18, 2023
Dear Simon,
First I hope all is well with you in these crazy times and that
collectively we are able to keep the spirits up and the golden wheels rolling.
I just saw your insightful review of Jack Kerouac's Desolation Peak, a
book that looks like it contains what we all like to find. I must tell you I spent several years in the Cascades in a small cabin with a wood stove, no telephone and heavy gray clouds holding a lot of darkness.
I hauled an old wood rowboat out of the landfill patched it up and rowed
across the Hood Canal several times. Also I got lost on a road up in the mountains looking for firewood and spent the night in the VW hatchback with my dog Sam who knew we were in trouble.
The reason I mention these few things is that there is a definite ominousness to the Cascades. Being there focuses you and makes your senses aware of the difficulties and dangers.
To earn a living I took pictures of the local merchants for the ‘Visitor's Guide’ section of the Shelton-Mason County Journal and taught English in a prison, Washington
Corrections Center in Shelton, Washington.
I was about the same age as most of the inmates – many ex-Vietnam vets – who brought their cheap drug habit home and had to knock over a gas station, etc. to buy dope.
One inmate was older and had done time at Alcatraz and was one of the
best guitar player singers ever.
Years later I had heard about Kerouac's time at Desolation Peak though
not in detail. I wrote and recorded this song ‘Fire Watcher on Desolation Peak’ at that
time when I was living in a cabin in Tennessee prior to moving here to Taos, New Mexico.
It seems like it fits into the cosmic narrative of the moment. So, from out here in the Southwest high desert I send it your way.
Are we not all fire watchers on desolation peaks in some way...
Onward Mi Amigo,
Don
Taos, New Mexico
