TULELAKE, Calif. – The small farming town of Tulelake is in far northern California is in mourning after 52-year-old Fermin Cisneros Nava, a lifelong resident and quiet pillar of the community, passed away Friday evening at Fairchild Medical Center in Yreka due to sudden heart complications.
Fermin was harvesting potatoes on the family ranch he had worked since childhood when he told coworkers he wasn’t feeling well.
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He drove himself to the clinic, but his heart gave out shortly after arrival. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.
Known simply as “Don Fermin” around town, he was the man who never missed a sunrise in the fields, yet still found time to fix a neighbor’s broken irrigation line after dark or slip an extra $20 into a struggling family’s grocery bag at Mike’s Market.
“He worked like the land owed him something and loved like he owed the land everything,” his son Jose said Sunday, voice breaking. “My dad never raised his voice, never turned anyone away, and never let a single potato go to waste.”
Fermin and his wife Maria raised four children and helped raise half the town’s kids too, always keeping the gate open for anyone who needed a meal or a place to stay. His battered white Ford pickup, still parked behind the house with the keys in it “in case someone needs to borrow it,” has become an impromptu memorial covered in flowers and handwritten notes in both English and Spanish.
A rosary will be held Wednesday at 6 p.m. at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Tulelake, followed by a funeral Mass Thursday at 11 a.m. Burial will be at the Tulelake Cemetery, where Fermin already had his plot picked out next to his parents “so I can keep an eye on the fields from above,” he used to joke.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to the Tulelake Volunteer Fire Department, Fermin was one of the first to show up with his tractor whenever the alarm sounded.
The potato harvest has stopped. The town feels smaller. And every sunrise over the lava beds looks a little emptier without Fermin’s silhouette against the sky.
Descansa en paz, Don Fermin. The fields will wait for you. 🌾❤️ #FerminCisnerosNava