Life with my Dad was many things, but one thing it wasn't ever was dull. The man lived for excitement and adventure. To hear him tell it, he grew up wrestling alligators and handling water moccasins in the Bayou Teche. He played championship-winning basketball as a teenager, jumped out of airplanes in the 82nd Airborne Infantry, fought Germans like mad during his time in Europe (when the War was a 20-year-old memory), and joined the police force to work undercover narcotics in the roughest parts of town. He ate monkey fingers and fermented fish dip with Laotians, drank homemade ale with Russians while they sat in homemade saunas and beat each other with handfuls of twigs, loved hot peppers, and sucked the fat out of crawdad heads. He rode motorcycles and shot guns and played yard football and walked the rivers of Texas and the deserts of New Mexico looking for arrowheads, stone tools, and pottery left behind by ancient Americans. He went to Mexico often when we lived on the border, traveled to Russia three times to preach the gospel to those who had never heard, substitute taught in the Reservation schools around Albuquerque, worked as a bank security guard, and took on four troubled churches as a pastor and set them on a good course. There weren't very many things he wouldn't try...at least once.
But as long as I live, there is one tale I will never tire of telling, Dad's last big adventure on this terrestrial sphere.
When he was forty-nine years old, having two bad knees and a history of strokes, Dad came to my place for a weekend visit and early on Saturday morning determined to conquer the Florida Mountains. Taking a canteen of water, a .22 revolver, and his trusty Spaniel Sugar as a companion, Dad drove out to the acreage he owned south of Deming, New Mexico, navigating a rocky county road to the base of the mountains below Spring Canyon, and there embarked on a climb that took him up the east side of the Big Floridas to a place they call the Eye of the Needle, a rock-arch formation on the heights. Sitting in the middle of an old eagle's nest, from which he could see for sixty miles in any direction, he called us on the cell phone, exulting in the glory of God's creation and his own conquest of the mountain peaks.
The rest of the afternoon passed with us sitting at home waiting for his return. He kept calling us with progress reports of his return trip, but we could tell he wasn't making much. Daylight turned to dusk, and still he wasn't home. And then nighttime fell and finally he called again with these words, "Well, I'm all wore out, and Sugar is all wore out. I guess we're gonna spend the night on the mountain."
An unsheltered October night in the desert? I don't think so! "Where are you?" I demanded, and he told me where to find the car. "I'm about a hundred yards from the car," he said, and I told him, "We're coming for you." I called my right-hand man and closest friend, a former sheriff's deputy from Arizona who had done search and rescue before. We loaded into his Blazer and drove to the mountain. We found the car quick enough, and Dad was no where in sight. We started hollering, and way off in the dark distance, we heard him shouting back. I thought it might help if he fired off his gun, but my friend took off in the dark, walking a straight line to my father.
A hundred yards my foot! That man was a quarter-of-a-mile up the side of the mountain...completely exhausted and looking a little worse for wear. And then we heard the story. On his way down the mountain, the trail had collapsed under him, sending him in a downward tumble midst rocks and dirt that left him slightly bruised and did no favors for his bad knees. He coaxed the dog into jumping off the ledge to him, found an eight-foot yucca stick to use as a staff, and set off in the direction of his car. Then his dog AND his legs gave out completely.
Determined not to let a little thing like the inability to walk stop him, Dad got Sugar on his lap and started scooting down the trail. That would explain how he tore the seat out of his britches and got cactus thorns in his butt. He did his very best to get off that mountain before dark, but he didn't make it.
So there he sat, waiting for us. Sugar came down the trail to meet us, her little fat body quivering and shaking with both exhaustion and excitement to see us. She led us back to him, and when he saw us, up from the ground he arose, maneuvering that long stick around in such a way as to nearly take our heads off. He was going to walk the rest of the way by himself! But after falling twice, we got on either side, wrapped his arms around our shoulders, and together we got my Dad off the mountain.
Back home, Mom got him bathed and in bed, and the man slept for about fifteen hours. But what a story he told! He had even brought feathers back from the eagle's nest, and that stick remained on my porch till the day I moved.
That was Dad's last big adventure. He died three months later following a simple procedure on his knee, passing from this earthly existence into the adventure of eternity...which is where he'd been headed all along. From the day he met Jesus Christ as savior and Lord, Dad had been on his way to heaven. For twenty-two years he served the Lord with every ounce of strength and ability that he had. He brought in my Mom, and me, and countless others, to the saving grace of Jesus Christ. And for the last eighteen years he has been with the Lord.
My wife and sons know him only by the pictures I have and the stories we share. With Son Number Three on the way, I wish more and more that he was around to love them and show them the way. But I'm thankful that he showed it to me, and I pray that I'm as good a guide as he was. I may never climb the Florida Mountains to the Eye of the Needle to sit in an eagle's nest, but I know one day I will sit beneath the shade of the Tree of Life on the banks of the eternal river that flows from the throne of God. And there I will join him with my boys in the reunion that will never end.
Happy Father's Day, Dad. We'll see you soon!
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