Seven weeks out of open heart surgery: The heart of a cowboy

Today marks seven weeks since I had open heart surgery.  I continue to improve, rapidly.

I will need another surgery to correct an abnormal heart beat--what is called an Atrial Flutter, but the worst that can happen is that it isn't successful and I have to take Warfarin the rest of my life.  I hate the stuff because it limits our activities somewhat, but it's also a life-saver so I can forgive it.

The doctor who will perform this surgery is a specialist in the electrical system of the heart.  Within the specialty of medicine there is a specialty of cardiology, and within the specialty of cardiology there is a specialty of what he does.  Can you imagine the years of training he has needed to be able to enter the operating room for me?

Now, I need to admit, what I am going to have isn't officially a surgery.  Instead, it is termed a "procedure."

Here is what he will do.  At 2:30 in the afternoon in a few weeks he will stick a couple of tubes into a vein in my groin and through there will wind its way up to my heart.   With one of them he will penetrate the upper chamber of the right side of my heart and will inflate the hole.  What he explained, to our amazement, is that he will actually be able to see the electrical impulses in that chamber and can see where they go awry.

I would love to see that myself.  I can't imagine being able to actually see this.

Then what he is going to do is create some scar tissue in one place in that chamber, which he called an isthmus.  Then when the signal comes from my sinus node it won't just keep going round and round in that chamber but instead will be blocked and will shoot back to another node that activates the lower chamber.

I will rest awhile, and then go home.  Puncture my heart, burn it, and it's safe to go home within a few hours.

And I don't care what they call it, Vicky and I think this qualifies as surgery, don't you?

In my world of miracles, this is another.  I have a piece of plastic in my ascending aorta that fixes the aneurysm that was there, and a valve made from artificial material and a cow, and now I will have my heart punctured and will have scar tissue created that will fix my abnormal heart beat.

If it is fixed, then no Warfarin!  And Vicky and I could get a few more years of having our adventures free of the worry of falling and bleeding profusely.

As all of the people who know me know, I am a huge fan of 1950s western films.  Not only was television in those days filled with westerns, but so were movies.  And my father liked to take me to them, so we went quite often, in Stillwater, Oklahoma (of all places) which 100 years before had been the heart of the Comanche empire.  I remember many of those westerns from that experience.

I had a six-gun, a Davy Crockett musket, the hat, and all of the trimmings and played being a cowboy a lot.  I had a huge set of miniature cowboys and Indians that I played with inside.  All boys did.  We traded pieces with each other.

The best western film I ever saw with my father was The Searchers, with John Wayne.  I remembered it vividly as an 8-year-old, and even had one of my miniature figures that represented Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne).  Over the years, this film has grown in stature, to the point where now it is rated by the American Film Institute as the 12th best film of all time.

This film also happens to be my favorite film, by a long shot.  It is different from other western films in that it was brutally honest about the hatred and racism directed toward the Comanche Indians of Texas.  The Comanches were the most powerful of the tribes, having driven first the Spanish, then the French out of Texas.  They also drove the Apache tribe into New Mexico and Arizona.  They were the real deal.

One way the Comanches excelled was their horsemanship.  A Comanche boy was put onto a horse before he could walk.

In fact, contrary to what is seen in most movies, the Comanches were (as I recall) the only Indian tribe that actually fought from horseback--they were the only Indians with a cavalry.  Other Indians tribes used horses, but when they fought other tribes they were basically mounted infantry.  They would dismount to fight.  Comanches were renown for their horsemanship, being able to fire arrows from under the neck of their horses in such a way that if their horse was shot they could quickly dismount at a run.

They also took captives and either kept them or ransomed them.  They were a fearsome force to the settlers of Texas.  That the settlers in Texas weren't invited there is certainly a valid point, but that part of things doesn't trouble me as much as it does some.  The settlers had no other place to go.  They would find a few barren acres that looked like they weren't being used, and farm and ranch them to feed their families.  None of them could see the bigger picture of what was happening and what was to happen.  They were just desperate, poor, short-lived folks trying to provide for their children.

Additionally, the land did not originally "belong" to the Comanches anyway.  The Comanches are an off-shoot from the mountain Shoshones.  They basically ruled a huge swath of central and southwest Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado by driving out other Indian tribes.

It's how the Indians were treated later, and currently, that troubles me.

The Texans, understandably, hated the Comanches because they stole their cattle and their children and wives and killed many settlers.

The Searchers is the only film of that era that shows this hatred and racism.  In most westerns, Indians were portrayed as one-dimensional.  The typical western needed a battle with a (historically inaccurate horse mounted) tribe of Indians, and typically the reason the Indians were on the "warpath" was because some bad white people violated the terms of the treaty.  In other words, the Indians in those films were not just seen as marauding bad people, but as victims of white aggression and betrayal.  They were just the back drop to whatever the real story of the film was.

There are a few goofy parts to The Searchers, but it is necessary to remember that the film is brutal and hard, so the director (John Ford) and writer (Frank Nugent) likely introduced those goofy parts to offset the violence and hatred. 

And John Wayne is awesome in it.  He plays an embittered man in love with his brother's wife--a woman who likely chose his brother over him because Ethan is such a hard man.  There is nothing civilized about Ethan.  It is all understated, unlike films today, so you only catch glimpses of the feelings between Ethan and his brother's wife.

Here is the critical part of the film.  It is a stunningly beautiful scene, well-acted, moving, and sad.  That's it.  That's all you need to see to understand what drives John Wayne's character, Ethan Edwards.  Martha, his love, handing him his coat--the same coat he will later wrap one of Martha's daughters in to bury her after the Comanches kill her.  The last scene shows Martha and Debbie watching Ethan ride off, knowing nothing of the tragedy that will befall them that evening. 

The music by Max Steiner is awesome.  He uses a civil-war song called Lorena as the base for the sound track.  Watch it:

The Leaving:  Scene from The Searchers.

The shot of Ethan when he realizes they have been tricked into leaving their homes and families unprotected is acting at its best.  You can see the anguish in his face:

So, Ethan embarks on a 6-year odyssey to find the only survivor of the massacre--Martha's daughter Debbie.  This search has historical origins.  It is based upon a real search by an uncle of Cynthia Ann Parker whose family was slaughtered by the Comanches and who was taken captive by them.  The author of the book the movie is based upon (Alan Le May) did extensive interviews with this uncle before writing it as a series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post called the Avenging Texans.  I have the entire series--a prized collection I have never seen anywhere.   The uncle searched for years for her, unsuccessfully.  She was "found" by other people and "returned" to white society, where she lived a miserable and short life.  She did not want to be "rescued," and did not want to leave her children.  Some "rescue," huh?  After all of the searching, the uncle never saw her after she was "rescued." 

But, in the film and book the film is based upon, Ethan's search isn't really for Debbie.  Instead, it is to kill the Indian chief (Scar) who killed his Martha.

This film does something that no other western I am familiar with does.  It is set up in such a way that you expect a showdown between Ethan and Scar, but it doesn't happen.  Instead, Ethan meets Scar in a teepee and Scar talks to Ethan about his hatred for white people--a hatred he has because they have killed his children.  Scar is a bitter, angry, revenge-seeking Comanche.

In other words, after a six-year search, Ethan finds that his enemy is just like him--both dealing with loss in the only way they know how.  By revenge.

Scar and Ethan never have that showdown.  Instead, it is the young boy who accompanies Ethan on the search who does---very unexpected.  This boy uses six years of his life on this search to protect the daughter from Ethan, who wants to kill her because she is the "leavings of Comanche bucks, sold time and again to the highest bidder."  Harsh, brutal, and vile language, especially for a film of the 50s.  But it was how people felt and talked, and probably how the Comanches talked about the settlers.  John Wayne's character is not a "hero" in any sense of the word, and the quest by Ethan is not heroic.  It is for the ugliest of motives--racism and revenge.

Told you it was brutal, honest, and powerful.  It is a modern movie that doesn't make the Indians into victims but instead portrays them as ordinary people, with human feelings and motives, just like the settlers. 

So, where am I going with this?  The family was slaughtered when John Wayne and the other men were out looking for cattle that had been stolen.  The character who was engaged to Martha's daughter who was killed was played by Harry Carey, Jr.  He also dies at the hand of the Comanches in the film.

Harry Carey Jr. later wrote a book titled A Company of Heroes, and in it he tells stories about the filming of The Searchers and other John Ford westerns in Monument Valley, Utah.  The area is a Navajo reservation, and the Indians apparently loved John Ford because he frequently cast them in his westerns and gave them work.  The Indians in John Ford westerns weren't a bunch of white guys dressed up with warpaint. 

I bought this book over 20 years ago.  Today, Vicky was looking through it and found where he autographed it.

I had been telling the (admittedly bad and silly) joke that since my heart valve was made from bovine tissue that I can finally, after dreaming about it since I was a young boy, be a legitimate cow-boy.

The heart of a cowboy.

For the past seven years, Vicky and I have spent two and a half of them (in total) wandering the same desert southwest where Ethan searched for Debbie.  In our camper, hiking everywhere, and occasionally visiting areas that had been Comanche strongholds.

In Nuestra Casa (our new home in Mesa) we have a room where we have hung a number of reminders of our childhoods, Vicky came up with the idea to have one section devoted to my life-long interest in westerns and, in particular, in The Searchers.  Hanging there is a poster from the movie, and a facsimile of the type of cavalry shirt that John Wayne wore in the film.   This section also has my "Indian-like" quiver of arrows--something I used almost every day as a child in the fields and woods near my home.  "Hunting" I don't know what, and mostly losing and having to replace arrows.  There is also a bridle that represents Vicky's long history with horse-riding.  It belongs with the other western items.

Harry Carey Jr., an actor from a movie that when I watch it reminds gives me sweet memories of my father, signed a book to me 25 years ago that captured an important part of my childhood (and now my life with Vicky) and which, ironically, anticipated my joke:  "The heart of a cowboy."

The climax of the search is when John Wayne goes to kill Debbie but can't.  Instead, his love for her takes over.

The final line of the film, when he holds her protectively in his arms, is "Let's go home Debbie."

When I was being released from the hospital, six and a half weeks ago, I used this line from The Searchers:  "Let's go home, Vicky."