PRESIDIO, TX--The old Presidio County, TX, Courthouse Annex building when it was located on Harmon Street in Presidio. The editor and publisher of the local newspapaper also was the town's only judge, and county commissioners allowed him to use the Justice of the Peace office for his newspaper office, too. Both jobs almost killed him, he thought at one time. (DMT file photo)
By A. Daniel Bodine
'Ya hear more 'n more folks casually talk these days about near-death experiences, the floating beyond the body, etc.--either a personal encounter or a friend's or a love-one's--and it always makes me feel...Well, a little squeamish. 'Ya know? Are we really that prepared to “go home to the Almighty?” Like casually slipping on a new shirt when we prepare to go out somewhere? Without thinkin' about whether or not we've changed our undies, too? Or are we to give in to New Modern and let golden politics take us to a higher level--without pausing to worry about sub-prime obligations?
Hee, hee. Believe me, belief in a mysterious Light of Death and superstitious, mystic or religious symbolism runs deeply in my family; I get tighter constrictions when I hear of such. Baldy (my cousin) and me when young were eye-witnesses to the very reason his family's house back in Cleburne, TX, burned down one night, for instance—his mother and my Mother were out on the back porch together looking at a full moon thru the branches of a treetop, they were. The two admitted it numerous times later, while wailin' and wailin' and wailin'. Tread carefully with full moons!
And many years later, when grown, I even saw that great Light of Death one time myself, or what I was convinced it was then, as it came up on me after suffering what was thought to be a heart attack. Nothing happened from it though, the Light, cause the face of an angry local businesswoman suddenly jumped up there in the picture to snuff it out--screaming at me, “You can't go yet, Dan! You haven't collected that money on that check for me!!” Rose'd been pressuring me for several weeks to collect on a hot check case that was filed in my JP court.
Already'd had that yahoo arrested once, I did. He was a cattle buyer, and one of the deputies picked him up as he crossed over from Mexico at the Port-of-Entry bridge one Sunday it seemed a month or two earlier. Brought him to me. I released him then, after he came up with most of the money he owed. Only lacked covering one check, he did, and he promised me faithfully he'd be back in the office in a couple of weeks to pay for that. Good 'ol boy, he was. But never saw him again! Rose was fit to be tied naturally.
Initially I'd credited her, as bad as I hated the way she pestered me on checks from her restaurant, with actually saving my life then that time with the Light. Came buttin' into the picture at just the right time! Not to mention, of course, the law enforcement officers who'd come into my office just moments after I was hit with the original chest pains. Their arrival and then the quick action to call an ambulance were critical. Call them divinely designated angels.
But upon further study, as for Rose getting into the picture, I've since had second thoughts about it. And here's why. I think it's a value issue we need to look at as a people—Is this what we really want to be? To each other? Valued tormentors? Only too disappear once a performance objective has been met? Which we almost always have to do now if we're struggling with a small business. Here today; gone tomorrow. It's the nature of this new economic beast. Small businesses get the crumbs?
This Light-viewing incident, indeed, was while I was in the ambulance (coming up out of the valley of Presidio, TX/Ojinaga, Chih., MX) in late December '93; staring out the rear window and worrying--yes, fearing death itself. It started out just as a glimmering speck at the long end of a tunnel of darkness, and within seconds came up on me. From the way my body ended up I must've grabbed the ambulance bed I was on, and was holding on for dear life! But Rose's face—bless her heart!--appeared out of nowhere in the nick of time, shaking her finger at me; and with it that light went whiff! and headed off for taller cotton.
Now this was on a Wednesday press day, too, getting hit shortly after noon with what doctors in the hospital in Alpine (90 miles away; the nearest!) believed, indeed, to be a heart attack, there at the old County Annex. So the pressure already was enough. For indeed I still had my little weekly newspaper in there also, The International Presidio Paper. County commissioners had been kind enough to let me use the formerly vacant JP office for it also when they appointed me judge, almost two years earlier. A prior judge had worked from her store. In weekly newspaper parlance, publishing day is known as D-Day! It's when holy hell breaks loose.
And to add to that pressure, this occurred between Christmas and New Year's, when Maria Porras, who was my main assistant on the newspaper side, had dared to take a week off to visit a family member out of town. To say I was simply under job stress could in no way accurately describe the heavy feeling I was under then—JP'ing on one side; attempting to put together and publish a newspaper on the other!
I was sitting at my desk, with the computer in front of me, doing newspaper page layout work on it. The pain of the attack was a shot that sent me bolt upright in my chair. Literally could not move, the pain was so great. And then fortunately Constable Raul Barriga and Police Chief Silverio Escontrias suddenly bopped thru the front door, just routinely checking on business.
“How's it going, Judge?!” Sheesh.
Osvaldo Acosta, a grizzled, veteran Presidio ambulance director, slipped me one of those little nitro pills underneath my tongue when he arrived; paused to read some vital signs to make sure, in fact, my wheels were falling off; and then assisted to load me up; and away we went—up the Chinati mountains! Toward Alpine. And to an encounter with The Light. Never forget it.
After some overnight tests in Alpine to confirm my condition, doctors then sent me via another ambulance to Midland Memorial (2 1/2 hrs. further away—Far West Texas is such a close-knit community of communities!) where I was kept for a week. Stress attack, it was, one heart specialist said. Probably brought on by Maria's absence, I quietly added. Or Rose's persistance.
“You need to turn loose of one of those jobs,” the ol' doc advised me.
So I decided to get out of the newspaper business. After 20 years. Damn paper didn't have any health insurance anyway; I couldn't afford it. The county job did.
But that little building on Harmon Street may have been the only time in Presidio County's colorful history when the community's judge and its newspaper editor and publisher shared the same duties. Guaranteeing a public service process was the game; dragging a far second was the appearance of it. In a far, remote corner of the mountainous Chihuahuan Desert then, legalism with its infinite checklists and concerns was still a weak sister.
But change was in the air, undeniably. A groundswell of Sunbelt transformation sweeping the country was coming. And it came, bringing new faces, new laws and procedures, and new financing instruments—e.g., grants, from everything for a new county annex to new streets for the city. In its aftermath, our economies and processes are more sophisticated now, and we've had to change with them. Or be steamrolled underneath.
We watch each other more closely. Warily. It's the price of Progress--Our nervous systems are being exploited. And the fact you're hearing more and more of these near-death stories in recent years is not coincidental, I truly believe. The Sunbelt's rush-to-riches recklessness changed us spiritually in ways that seem unfathomable now.
Hell's fire's been around forever, of course, but this accelerated lingo about near-death experiences and new, profound descriptions of an AfterLife seen in trips up yonder is the fallout of an inadvertent, scheming yawn—a spurious, new unsatisfied need that goes much deeper. The froth from today's game isn't your grandfather's same gusto, my friends. We're really talkin' peckin' order now; we became so haughty in our Sunbelt greed. That's the anomaly.
That frenzied but subtle, subconscious scheming, about how to plunge deeper into the mix of both social and political wealth circles while still protecting our old life's virtues, has produced within us a commercialized, schizophrenic, bastard child—a marketplace offspring. Who's gonna take care of it? And how? Personally, I blame all this gotta-have-this/gotta-have-that pressure on the social-minimalism dust that radical Republicans stirred up with their rush-to-wealth, consumption-driven lifestyles of the past few decades.
And their “hit lists” to take over politics to facilitate bringing it all about. Corporate-funded campaign chicanery. For, ever since they took over the Sunbelt in1980--and became campaign gatekeepers with this newest but recycled version of how to get into heaven (on the wings of a gilded dove, not a repentant snow white one)--they've had their special place in the clouds reserved above the rest of us. They married lofty thinking to rabid gospel of wealth ministries.. And it's all caused a major fault shift in our way of thinking, our way of looking at each other.
But you gotta smile over it, too. Now, whenever Shall We Gather at the River, indeed, does become a watershed moment, you watch 'em. Hee, hee. Republicans'll will feel hellbent-to-highwater to get upstream some—careful not to mix the waters that wash our feet with theirs. Can you imagine that? But I'm old-fashioned, yes, and whether or not you swim with the dolphins or slog along with the mud turtles isn't going to amount to a hill of beans in the Final Wash, I don't believe.
But these changes in our political and social landscapes are real; something has changed us. The way we see ourselves. And each other. Is it transitory? My guess is yes. In other eras smoke-and-mirror alterations on lasting and meaningful values has always faltered; you wait, it will this time, too. A gold-studded pecking order isn't the Heaven Christ preached!
We have better educated minds to use, for one. Even my young daughter admitted the other day that in recent years, more and more science is taking the mystery out of some of these scary, near-death and superstitious stories. Or at least offering an explanation or two. We're still all just different sides of the same coin.
And beating each other's brows to death on whether or not someone is niggling us over a few hundred dollars, as bad as it seems, isn't going to get us any closer to God. If you want to swim with the barracudas, to give you that emotional high you think you need, then go swim with the barracudas. But be mindful of the risky waters you're getting yourself into, too—and take either the credit or the blame. And don't denigrate me or others for choosing a saner lifestyle. Just coping with the economy can be pressure enough for some of us.
Indeed, look at what's happening now. According to the Near Death Experience Research Foundation, for instance, nearly 800 such near-death experiences (far more enriching than mine) happen every day in the United States. The figure was reported in a 2009 CNN healthwatch story. (see it filed here.) Read what some of those folks say happened to them while “in flight,” if you will. Talk about vibes!
And Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neurologist in Louisville, Kentucky, who studies near-death experiences, said these things are not imagined either. The explanation, he says, lies in the brain itself.
"These are real experiences. And they're experiences that happen at a time of medical crisis and (perceived—my words) danger," Nelson told CNN
.
It seems us humans have a lot of reflexes that help keep us alive, part of the "fight or flight" response that arises when we're confronted with danger. Nelson thinks that near-death experiences are part of the dream mechanism; and that the person having the experience actually is in a REM, or "rapid eye movement" state.
"Part of our 'fight or flight' reflexes to keep us alive includes the switch into the REM state of consciousness," he said.
He explained during REM sleep there is increased brain activity and visual stimulation. So intense dreaming occurs as a result.
And the bright light I saw and so many other people have claimed to see? Dr. Nelson has you on that one also. "The activation of the visual system caused by REM is causing the bright lights," he said.
Then how about the tunnel that people see? The one that leads up to it?
It's caused by a lack of blood flow to the eye, he further explained. "The eye, the retina of the eye, is one of the most exquisitely sensitive tissues to a loss of blood flow. So when blood flow does not reach the eye, vision fails, and darkness ensues from the periphery to the center. And that is very likely causing the tunnel effect."
Hee, hee. Reading that death-encounter story and the memories it stirs brings me a smile--Rose was a closet Republican. Whatever it was that happened to me then, I'm still alive, I've always said thankfully. And I'm sure glad, too, for the “second chance” to make even more friends after that; and to dare share with them my particular philosophy on Life, such that it be.
Hee, hee. When the Roll is Called Up Yonder I think sharing lasting friendship with each other is going to carry more weight than all the static gold bullion Republicans can rustle up between them. So mostly now we just need to hold on tight...And wait for the moment to pass.
Just my humble opinion, of course. Not my wife's. Nor my banker's. Just mine.
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Great story with lots of wisdom. I bet everyone of us that Baldy told the story about the house burning down, still remembers it every time we see the moon through the branches of a tree -- I do. Keep that Bodine wisdom flowing!
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