Odes to Rural Life : Leona Valley: An 86-year-old rancher’s poetry, which sings praises of the high desert, is being used to fight plans for a large housing project.

New England had Robert Frost. The South had Robert Penn Warren. Harlem had Langston Hughes.

And the Leona Valley, a pristine swath of cattle ranches and cherry orchards 25 miles north of Santa Clarita, has Jim Lott.

The 86-year-old rancher with heavily calloused hands has composed more than 5,000 odes to rural life in the high desert.

Although his old-fashioned rhymes (Now don’t be a dunce/You only live once ) are not likely to make many poetry anthologies, Lott has became a local celebrity as his verse has been used in a campaign to head off a large housing development.

If you live in this valley, enjoy it . . .

Some people are trying to destroy it

Only after the anti-development poems were published in a homeowner association newsletter did Lott’s neighbors learn that he had been writing poetry for 76 years.

“I just can’t keep from doing it,” says Lott, whose denim cowboy hat nearly engulfs his bushy white eyebrows and piercing blue eyes. “For a long time, it was an embarrassment. People couldn’t imagine a guy like me being a poet. To this day, my sister claims I don’t write poetry because I never let on that I did.”

For years, he was known locally as an able cattleman and construction estimator for the Sizzler steakhouse chain. If he was renowned for anything, it was the huge collection of Western memorabilia, including old farm implements, saddles, stirrups, saddle horns, cowboy boots and wagon wheels, that decorate his 70-acre ranch.

The collection includes the mounted heads of elk and moose, but Lott himself is not a hunter.

“I can’t kill anything,” he says a bit sheepishly. “I eat ‘em, but I can’t kill ‘em. Lott remained a closet poet until the late 1980s, when developers announced plans to build 7,200 housing units in the eastern end of the 40-square-mile valley, where sagebrush, buckwheat and cottonwoods dot the rolling hills.

Known as the Ritter Ranch development, the 10,625-acre project is bitterly opposed by the Leona Valley Town Council. The Palmdale City Council, which would annex the development, is scheduled to consider the proposal early this year.

To voice his opposition, Lott began publishing polemical poetry in the newsletter distributed to most of the 1,000 or so residents of Leona Valley, a place where the “ladies are real charmers and the men are good farmers,” in the words of one verse.

“He’s the poet of Leona Valley, and we love him,” says Mary Ann Floyd, another rancher and member of the council.

Lott said he wrote his first poem as a child while sitting on a pile of straw on his parents’ farm in Oklahoma. Titled “My Ideal Woman,” it sung the praises of his mother.

The urge to put his thoughts into verse became irresistible while he was in the Marines, Lott said, when he discovered the ballads of Robert William Service, known as the Canadian Kipling for his writing about frontier life. Lott can still recite Service’s epic poem, “The Cremating of Sam McGee,” which he memorized more than four decades ago. In the 1930s, Lott hopped a freight train to Southern California to escape Oklahoma’s dust bowl. Here, most of his verses celebrated cowboys and others, such as himself, who work on the land. One was written in honor of “Trustworthy Ben” Rourke, a local cowhand whom Lott says is so honest:

I’ve seen him time and agin

Workin’ cattle in hard rain and snow

His boss don’t come aroun’

He don’t live in this town

Ben figures a man should earn his dough.

Most of his recent poems urge locals to fight Ritter Ranch. One, “Hang Tough,” scolds the city of Palmdale for seeking to annex the property:

It’s real nice living here

With the raccoons and deer

But someone is giving us a pitch

We’re all going to be rich

He also warns that “the big boys,” the developers, “have weapons that give me a pain:”

They don’t need to play fair

They just have to declare

Sphere of influence or eminent domain.

To Lott, such urban sprawl is disturbing evidence that “this way of life is passing in Southern California.” Soon, he said, “there’ll be thousands of cars on the road, not dozens. There’ll be bowling alleys and picture shows and shopping centers. I don’t want to see it, but it’s coming.”

Although he is in good health for his age, Lott, a widower with three children and many grandchildren, predicts in one poem, “My Swan Song,” that he might not be around to witness the final destruction of the rural life:

I soon will be adding

To dust in the West

I’ve held up my end

I’ve given it my best.