Father's Death
5.19.2010 Alma, New Mexico, general store.  The news of my father's death this morning in a hospital in San Antonio was confirmed by a phone call made to my sister Julie, but I had a premonition of it two days before.  I had been trying to hike from Alma to Reserve through the Gila National Forest, hoping to cover 40 miles in four days. However, the 13-year old Forest Service map falsely indicated abandoned trails which no longer existed. My attempt to cross Lost Lake Mountain was defeated. Then I tried to hike an alternate trail up Deep Creek, a stream about six feet wide and six inches deep winding through narrow clefts and gorges. The trail was mostly obliterated and heavily overgrown. I had to ford the creek repeatedly, more than 200 times, to make discouraging progress. Because of the chaos of an uncountable number of fallen logs and new growth, it took more than five hours to cover four miles. Then I noticed an unnamed tributary entering from the east by a 20 foot waterfall.  Uncertain of my present position, I decided to leave the creek and try to cross beyond a high divide to reach a north-south road indicated on my map. However the tributary was even more cluttered than Deep Creek. When night overtook me I scraped a small platform on a steep 45 degree slope to spend a gloomy night. The next morning I continued slowly upwards.  I reached the source of the tributary stream, then continued climbing beyond it into a region of snow patches. After the tributary steam had been left behind, all sounds and colors faded away as in a dream. The ground was plastered by a drab mat of dead leaves exposed by melting snow. Probably no other human had ventured into this drainage for at least a hundred years since the gold mines played out.  Suddenly without any sound at all a shadow glided over my left shoulder and perched on a tree at eye level, so near to me that I could have touched it with my improvised wooden staff. It was a large owl. Its beautiful plumage of brown feathers with white spots gave it a round appearance which reminded me of the shape of my father's head. I paused and faced the bird which was silently staring at me. "Is this a message from my father?", I wondered. The owl made no movement or sound, just continued staring with a mournful expression in its large black round eyes. Wondering if this might be an inauspicious omen, I continued onwards. A hundred feet later, the owl once again soundlessly swept past my left shoulder and perched staring at me. The multiple layers of its thick plumage reminded me of the folds of loose flesh on my father's corpulent body. I moved on slowly. Then for a third time the owl glided past my left shoulder and perched staring at me, never making a sound. Then I felt surely my father must have died because the sinister omen had repeated three times on my left side in a ghostly scenario. Shortly afterwards, on reaching an impassible barrier of fallen timber, I was forced to turn back. It took the rest of the day to retrace my steps down to Deep Creek, then return to an abandoned miner's cabin containing gray drums for gold ore marked "26% concentrated crush tomato". The next day I back tracked 16 miles to reach the outskirts of Alma at sunset. Early the next morning at the general store my premonition of his death was confirmed by my sister. I believe the last contact between my father and me occurred in that dream time on the mountain, if his silent presence can be called contact. It was typical of the disappointing silence between us all my life. His last moments of consciousness would have been at about that time because he lapsed into a morphine-induced coma during his last days in the hospital. He was probably not conscious of the moment of his last breath. His obituary was published in the local Boerne Star newspaper and in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. My mother's previous death in a Fort Worth hospice on 7/19/2001 was also briefly mentioned in the Star-Telegram without a photo. Their bodies are buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Fort Worth, Texas.   Home Page (jwleaf.org)