When the Horizon Stops Moving

My father, William Bradley Hafford, worked throughout the state for 25 years as a civil engineer with the Arizona Department of Transportation and later as a field taxonomist, collecting plant pollens used in allergy research. He pursued only two hobbies: hunting and fishing. He knew of trout streams far back on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. He knew the ideal deer ranges and the best wild turkey country. As a boy, I accompanied him on most of his treks.

Once, in his later years, I asked him how many miles he walked through Arizona. He took his well-worn engineer's slide rule and made some calculations. "Probably near a quartermillion miles," he said. I don't think he was far off.

What follows I wrote one evening during the last weeks of my father's life. What it offers is not a biographical sketch. Rather it is a mixture of memories and moods experienced during those final days when my father's body was leaving this earth faster than his mind.

An era is like a horizon. As you walk toward it, it moves away, unfolding the era, its moods, and all of its events.

When it is time for the era to end, the horizon stops moving. You continue to walk, and when you reach the point where earth and sky meet, the era is finished.

The horizon has stopped moving. He is 83. His 84th birthday is two months away. It is likely I will reach the horizon before that event arrives.

He has suffered two strokes in the past eight weeks. His speech is soft and slurred. difficult to understand. Paralysis afflicts his right side. He has lost use of an arm, and it takes concentration for him to coax even a slight movement out of his right leg. But his mind is as sharp and keen as it was a half-century ago.

His era, by all odds, should never have occurred. Yet, it did... and it is also my era. Beyond it, there will be another one for me, but not like this.

On a November day in 1917, he took flight from Corpus Christi, Texas, on a routine training mission. I don't recall the type of aircraft. Perhaps he never told me. The airplane carried either two or three crew members...three, I think. A Navy plane. Somewhere, far out over the Gulf of Mexico, it crashed. He was the only survivor.

His throat was slashed, and he bled profusely. Before the plane sank, he managed to release the homing pigeons. (The aircraft had no radio.) Then, he lashed himself to a piece of floating wreckage and passed out. Thirty-two hours later rescuers arrived.

Ponderable, that my existence should hang on the weakest threads of circumstance. If he had not released the pigeons. If he had not located the cord which held him to the debris of the plane.

But those were not the only threads of fate and circumstance. He was shuffled from hospital to hospital. The last was Fort Whipple Veterans Hospital in Arizona. His injuries had healed, but his strength did not return. Tuberculosis, the doctors said.

I'm not sure they ever told him, outright, he was going to die. Probably not. Yet, that was the diagnosis he finally accepted. He didn't like the idea of dying in a ward. So he got dressed, retrieved his belongings, and ran away.

He went to the government land office in Phoenix, Arizona, and signed up for a homestead parcel in the flat desert near Casa Grande. No automobile, no tools, no supplies. An old rancher, who was in the land office that day, saw him coughing blood into a handkerchief. The rancher took him along in his truck... put him up for a while... hauled his lumber...helped him build his little frame house. There, in the desert, my father recovered his health.

Once neighbors thought he had blown himself up with dynamite. That incident is my earliest recollection of my father. It is my earliest recollection of anything.

I don't remember hearing the explosion. My mother heard it, late in the afternoon. When he hadn't returned by nightfall we walked to Floyd's place, another homestead perhaps a mile or two from ours. I heard coyotes yipping and howling in the brush. "They won't hurt us," my mother said. She had been a secretary at my father's last hospital stop... a very gentle member of an old Tennessee family. An unlikely candidate for homesteading in the Arizona desert...as unlikely as the threads which determined our being here.

That evening comes back to me with an unaccountable precision. I was somewhere between three and four years old. A woodburning stove sent patterns of dancing light against the ceiling. A very old woman, wrapped in a lavender shawl, sat rocking in a chair. I recall the Sunday funnies which kept me busy during the evening. The year was 1933. Floyd and my father had a gold mine, or what they hoped would become a mine, in the rugged hills just to the north. If they did not return by morning, my mother and Floyd's sister, would walk to Gunderson's place for help. That's what I overheard. It was deep into evening when they brought the car into the yard. In a moment, the front door opened and he walked in. "Got stuck in the sand," he said. He was wearing a faded plaid shirt and a smile, and his safe return from the mine that night will forever remain my oldest mem-ory of my father. Before the strokes, he had looked perhaps 15 years younger than his actual age, but no longer. Someone must feed him now. He cannot leave the bed without help. For exercise, he walks a few steps with someone on each side. He insists on it, even though it is an overwhelming effort. He says he will

WHEN THE HORIZON STOPS MOVING

There are hardships that nobody reckons; There are valleys unpeopled and still, There's a land-oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back, and I will....

WHEN THE HORIZON STOPS MOVING

When springs run low, and on the brooks In idle golden freighting. Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush Of woods, for winter waiting....

He driving his car within seven months. I wonder where he got that figure? It will never happen, but he says it will. The horizon has stopped moving.

I was five when Jack died. He was a black Australian shepherd. A rancher in the area put out poison for the coyotes. Jack got a piece of it. I cried most of the day.

The next morning my father put Jack in the trunk of the car. My mother made sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs. We drove north then east of Phoenix to a place of wildly eroded red conglomerate rock. Today, the area is known as Papago Park.

We stopped on a hill near a pyramid of white stone. My father dug a small grave. While he worked, I walked to the pyramid. It was 12 or 15 feet tall and had a bronze plaque affixed to it.

After we buried Jack, I asked about the pyramid. "That's where the first governor of Arizona is buried. George W. P. Hunt," my father said.

That made me feel better. If the hill was good enought for the first governor, it was surely good enough for Jack. Today, 44 years later, I wonder why he felt it necessary to drive nearly 60 miles to bury my dog on the governor's hill. Maybe I'll ask him sometime.

The conversation has been going for less than five minutes. "Are you tired?"

"Yes," he manages, the words coming slowly and with difficulty. "But, not tired of you." He is getting thinner with each passing day, and it is hard to hold back the tears, even though I am 49. My youngest son, Bart, and I go out of his room. Bart, who is nearly 10, says, "I hope he doesn't die, poor old guy." But, he will.

We left the Casa Grande homestead for Arizona Highways Magazine/23 To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts unexpressed that can make of this world a garden.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goëthe

WHEN THE HORIZON STOPS MOVING

Have you heard The voices Whispering on the desert winds? They whisper, "Silence," Whisper, "Stay." They whisper, "Peace." -J. A. Christensen Tucson, where my father started a civil engineering course at the University of Arizona. He was 39, and the country was in the grips of the Great Depression. He worked at various jobs while he attended school. Soon after, a little sister arrived. After he finished college, he went to work for the state highway department. Our family took a trip to Oak Creek Canyon to celebrate the event. In those days, the Canyon was a wild and beautiful place. As it does today, sparkling Oak Creek ran its course between towering sandstone bluffs. Just south of the Call of the Canyon Lodge I caught my first trout. At least, I thought I did. Years later, he confessed, he had placed one of his own fishes on my hook while I wasn't looking. I remember running up the trail to our cabin, shouting: "Momma, I caught my supper! I caught my supper!"

I tell him the story. He nods his head and smiles. Then I see a tear fall from his left eye and course down his cheek. "Ready for a nap?" I ask. He nods again. Now, all of our visits are short. I leave him so he can go back over the chronicle of his life in privacy. That's what he is doing now. "Daydreaming," he calls it. Not many more steps I think. I'm moving up the last long hill to the point where sky meets earth.Fathers can do anything, can't they? He had friends out there on the Apache reservation where he was surveying for a new highway. They would know. He could find out from them. "I need to learn how to build a fire with sticks," I told him. In two weeks I would be going to Boy Scout camp in the Graham Mountains. I decided I would win the fire-building competition. "Haskay told me it was a secret only for

WHEN THE HORIZON STOPS MOVING

I cannot say, and I will not say That he is dead. He is just away. With a cheery smile, and a wave of the hand, He has wandered into an unknown land.... - James Whitcomb Riley Thus. I promised him I would keep the secret." I nodded. He laid down a flat piece of dried yucca with a cup scraped out on its face and a notch cut from the edge to the cup. The kit included a shaft of hardwood, mesquite, I recall, about 12 inches long. Then, a small bow, strung with a leather thong. Father poured carefully shaved juniper bark into the cup. "And now the secret ingredient," he said, as I watched him open a small pouch and pour a pinch of fine sand into the cup. "That's for added friction. That's the secret. Now, watch for the glowing coal," he said, spinning the shaft rapidly. A plume of smoke rose. Then, I saw it...a tiny red coal near the notch in the piece of yucca. Did I win? Of course, I won. Fathers can do anything. I was the only Scout in camp who succeeded in building a fire with sticks. The counselors wanted me to demonstrate it again. I told them I couldn't, that it was an Apache secret. They smiled.

That night I slept with the tools under my bedroll. The next day, I tossed them into a brushy draw. I was 12 years old. Haskay's secret would be kept until now.

I have two sons. One is William Brad-ley Hafford II, named after his grandfather. The younger is Bart. Bart has a learning disability. His grandfather is concerned about it. "He's doing much better," I say. "His reading is fine, but he is still having trouble with math."

"That new math is hard," my father replies, speaking slowly. He murmurs his words, but I would wager that the old engineer could still do a tough calculus problem, if he had the need.

For as far back as I can remember I always wanted to play football. Not just sandlot football, but football on a real team, with real uniforms. I started my sophomore year of high school in Prescott, Arizona. It was not a good time for me to go out for football. The summer previous, I had contracted a mastoid infection in the bone behind my left ear. I spent five weeks in the hospital, and when I came out I weighed 119 pounds. I stood six feet two inches and looked like some kind of concentration camp survivor.

My father attended my every home contest. I was the only member of the team who never entered a game...never got to play a single minute that season. At the end of the school year, he told me he had obtained a position for me as an axman on a crew that would be surveying for a new highway. For three months, through some of the roughest mountain and canyon country in northern Arizona, I cut pine, juniper, and heavy oak brush. I spent most of that summer near exhaustion.

In the fall I returned to the game with 35 pounds of new muscle. After that, I played in every game. He never said, "Wasn't it a good thing I got you that summer job." He didn't need to say anything.

When he was 73, he was living alone. My mother was in a nursing home near downtown Scottsdale. He was going to work in the yard that morning, but something told him to go to the nursing home first. He did, and just inside the front entrance he was driven to the floor with a heart attack. Within three minutes he was in a hospital emergency room. Two weeks later, my mother died.

When he was 75, he married a lovely woman 10 years his junior. When he was 80, they replaced his veins with plastic tubes, from his abdomen down into his legs. "I don't know how the hell he made it," his doctor said. Six weeks later, father was spading a back yard garden.

She feeds him now. Cranks up his bed...washes his face. "How were you able to get out of the water and back up on the plane?" little Bart asks, recalling the story as I had told it to him.

"Too mean to die," he replies, slurring the words. He smiles and winks in my direction.

Together, in memory, we pass the old logging bridge across White River, near the place where Trout Creek joins it. He sits on the edge of the bridge watching while I feed the line out, letting the salmon egg drift back under a fallen pine. It is the biggest stream trout I ever caught, a rain-bow nearly 18 inches long.

I pass the place where the Gulf of California rolls against the west coast of Mexico. Father laughs as he holds up the big pompano just pulled from the waters of the bay.

Farther on, we walk softly through the snow, newly fallen across Mingus Mountain. He stops and points to fresh deer tracks. I grip my rifle more tightly, and we move on. We hunt quail in the rugged hills around the old mining camps of Mayer and Humboldt. Dove in the flat farms between Phoenix and Gila Bend. Duck and geese on the lakes and ponds near Taylor and Shumway. Soon I will be there...to that place where the long line of grass and sky meet. I see the smoke of a campfire on top of the hill. I smell the aroma of beans in a pot and fresh deer liver cooking in onions. He is stirring the beans. He raises his arm and beckons. Only a few steps more. There, at that place where the beans are cooking in the pot, the era ends. William Hafford's credits include scripts for TV and movies plus articles in True and Sports Illustrated. He works for a Texas ad agency.