A Match to the Heart

by Gretel Ehrlich

  I listened to the healing music of Kevin Volans. A native South African, Kevin studied music in Paris, moved to Ireland, but began returning often to Africa, and his music blends African and European aesthetics. Cover Him with Grass, a collection of pieces resulting from one of these trips, has in it the grandeur and spaciousness of Africa made with sophisticated tonal cadences.

  Every morning after sunrise I crouched by my portable CD player and the tiny speakers that went with it and listened. The music worked on me like whiffs of oxygen. I could breathe; I could gallop across wide vistas without having to move; I could look inward with no blame.

  chapter 11

  Pills can only do so much: they were making my heart beat regularly but they don’t give consolation or friendship. On December 16th Sam came to town—Sam being one of the dogs who was with me when I was struck by lightning and who later proved to be a spirit “helper” who guided me back from unconsciousness to waking life. He’s my favorite of the young dogs I raised, and to have him with me for the winter was Blaine’s prescription for getting well.

  Sam is a kelpie—one of the Australian breeds of herding dogs, short-haired, with a wolf-fox face and short tail—and was born on the ranch in Wyoming. He had barely been to town in all his four years, much less Los Angeles. It was rush hour when he arrived in Burbank. When the freight doors opened, Sam’s cage was shoved forward onto the sidewalk. I let him out and clipped a leash on. In his whole life he had never seen so many people, certainly not in one place, though he’d seen as many cows.

  While waiting for our ride home, we strolled around the airport. Apart from all the cars, now with headlights on, it was children that especially terrified him. Every time he saw a toddler, he rolled over on his back in a posture of bewilderment and surrender. They didn’t quite smell like sheep, so what were they, he wondered. He peed on airport shrubbery.

  An hour went by. No car. The sky grew dark but the headlights were dazzling. I called. The driver, who was the son of friends, had gone to the wrong airport and it would take him an hour to get back across the city. Weary, Sam and I sat on a bench together, dozing head to head until an airport cop awakened us. “Do you have someplace to go tonight?” he inquired. I said yes. He sauntered by a few more times, keeping an eye on us until my ride appeared.

  Up the coast we sped through five lanes of traffic. Sam took in all the sights and sounds he could, then tucked his head under my arm and slept. At McDonald’s we bought him a hamburger. “Everything on it?” When I asked Sam, the girl shook her head in disgust and turned away. “He wants french fries too,” I yelled.

  I raised Sam and nine others in two litters—watched them being born, doctored them through parvo (canine distemper), protected them from attacks by skunks and bob-cats, watched them learn to work sheep and cattle. He is the fourth generation of dogs I have known and worked with and is named after his great-grandfather, a black kelpie raised and trained by a sheepherder named Grady. The original Sam was the father of Rusty, Sr., a three-legged dog who was one of the best sheep handlers around (a sheepherder, mistaking Rusty for a coyote, shot the leg off), and Rusty, Sr., sired Rusty, Jr., born at sheepcamp 10,000 feet up in the Big Horn Mountains on a snowy August day and given to me so I would have a working dog.

  In Rusty’s and my sixteen years together, we endured hard winters and daunting months of solitude. Through it all he developed a quality of peacefulness and dignity, befriending wild rabbits and birds, chickens, horses, and pigs. He was a lover of all creatures except cats, which he hated, and mice, which frightened him. He loved music, favoring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on Sunday mornings, certain operatic arias, and, most of all, Ravi Shankar. The movie Gandhi seemed to entrance him, and he watched it sitting up in a chair all the way through.

  Rusty was “tuned in” also to the movements and problems of the animals at the ranch. In the fall and spring, when migrating herds of elk came through and bedded down in our upper and lower meadows, he clawed our arms, whined at the door, and led us to an overlook where we could see the animals, just so we knew they were there.

  Once, during calving, his favorite cow was having trouble giving birth. She was half a mile away, the light was going, and it was beginning to snow. Unaware of her problems, we went into the house for dinner but Rusty didn’t follow. This was most uncharacteristic. I called for him but he didn’t come. Then I saw his silhouette on top of a hill of manure in a sorting corral, where he stood looking toward the lower field. Finally, my husband, Press, went out to see what the problem was. Rusty led him to Spot. By then the calf had been born, half under a barbed-wire fence, and a coyote was gnawing at its frozen back legs. Press chased the coyote off, wrapped the calf’s chewed legs in his own socks, and carried him a half-mile to the warming room in the barn, which was piled thick with fresh straw. Because of what we called “Rusty’s ranch ESP” that calf was saved.

  Too much has been made of evaluating animals’ intelligence by their ability to learn human language. Is language the only tool we have for abstract thought? There must be other symbols, ideas, and images that have no names; there must be ways to retrieve them from memory: a smell, a texture, a color, a form, a need flung telepathically across a ranch. Theirs is another alphabet, another string of sounds used to express intuitions and feelings or whatever a dog knows. Just because we can’t hear, smell, feel what they do and have failed to decipher their codes doesn’t mean they are stupid and we are smart. I’m sure they know the opposite to be true.

  I sent for a mail-order bride for Rusty. She was fancy and black and, like all thoroughbreds, too high-strung and smart for her own good; but Rusty didn’t mind, he loved her unconditionally. Their affair went on for ten days, during which Rusty was a tireless suitor, gazing at her, even as she slept, with adoring eyes. In the middle of ardent and frequent lovemaking, he’d look back at the house, as if to say to me, “You humans think you have fun—look at me!”

  Soon enough she had a litter of six: two blacks, two browns, two blonds—an ecumenical assortment—something for everyone. Sam was one of the brown puppies. We gave his brown brother to Grady, who named that pup Sam too, after the original grandfather who started this dynasty. My Sam’s spiritual bent was less devout than his father’s and his intellect less astute than his glamorous sister’s, but that’s what was charming about him: from the beginning he was footloose and fancy-free, with a casual, “What, me worry?” look, not because he was disengaged, merely confident that all problems had a resolution.

  I watched his mother wean the pups: she turned weaning into a game. Fending the six pups off was the way she taught them how to be aggressive, when to be submissive, how to use their paws and to roll. In all his chasing, rolling, and jumping, Sam stayed on top, not out of toughness but charm and a disdain for repeated failure. Even his anxieties manifested in curious ways: once, while moving cattle off the mountain into the valley for the winter, he stopped in the middle of town and started howling. For five minutes he couldn’t be moved as if to say, “I’ve never been to town before, and I’m not quite sure about it, but I just wanted everyone to know that I’m here!”

  Herding and attentiveness came naturally. All those dogs really wanted to do was work and please us. There were no yelled commands, but rather, soft-spoken discussions. “See those cows over there on that hill,” I’d whisper, pointing to a few strays. “Why don’t you go get them, take them down the creek to a crossing and meet us at the bottom,” and off they’d go. All we ever had to teach them was to come back, a kind of self-control that, admittedly, in the first year seemed a hopeless task, but by age two they knew how to move cattle and come back.

  Coming from a long line of workers, Sam earned his keep most of the year—except now, during this winter vacation with me in California—so if he wanted a hamburger with french fries, he got it, as all the others before him would have, if there had been a fast-food place nearby.

  The beach house was dark when we arrived but the moon was brig
ht and we could hear the surf. I called to Sam to follow me out to the deck and down the stairs to the sand. This he did happily until he saw a wave. As it crested, the foam brilliant in moonlight, he ran backwards, terrified of the white water racing toward him, then gave me a hurt look of betrayal. That was enough for one night: he ran for the house and wouldn’t come out until morning.

  We slept peacefully, his head on the pillow beside mine. Under us, the house shivered with each breaking wave. In the four months since my injury, no one had held me. Now one of my saviors was here at my side: we had both been struck, we had both survived, and I knew that if during the night I fell unconscious, he would bring me back alive.

  In mythology, animals are most often the messengers of divine power, and dogs have always had a place in the geography of death. Women are said to be the domesticators of dogs, and in European myths dogs were the companions only of goddesses, guarding the afterworld and helping to receive the dead. In Iran, dogs were allowed to gnaw on corpses before burial. In fifth-century Greece, there was a canine god featured in the Osirian mysteries. He marched in religious processions, standing on his back feet like a human, and when acting as the messenger between heaven and hell his head was sometimes gold, and at other times black. In Asia, the dog was a god called Up-Vat (meaning “opener of the way”), who was said to have started out as a wolf but developed a face like a greyhound, then merged with a jackal, and fed on the dead, swallowing their hearts.

  The role of supernatural helpers—guides, ferrymen, or harnessed dogs—stands for the guardian who carries the human spirit forward, whether from death back to life or the other way around. Did my unconscious choice of dogs to aid me come from the intimate living situation I had with them, or was it linked to some collective memory of a time when dogs were associated with funerary customs? In an old Norse myth, the goddess Hel gave birth to wolf-dogs who ate the flesh of the newly dead, then ferried their souls to paradise. I’m not sure if Sam would care to dine on my flesh—he prefers rack of lamb—but he is my guide, my Virgil through these never-ending gaps, these bardos that seem to lie before me.

  In the morning after toast and coffee, outside, Sam followed me timidly onto the sand. Nothing smelled right. Where were the horses, dogs, and cattle? He explored, never venturing far, and when he tried drinking seawater, the same look of betrayal came over his face. Can’t we even find a camp with decent water? he wondered. He watched the incoming tide carefully, never daring to get his feet wet: these dogs are fastidious, everything has to be in working order at all times, just in case there’s a cow to catch. The seabirds went unnoticed.

  I knew how he felt. The day I came out of the hospital on my father’s arm, the world kept collapsing. There was too much of it, as now for Sam: too many new sights and smells to be taken in. We retreated to the known world of the dog dish and deck chair, like refugees huddled between two strange countries:

  the country-of-the-sea-without-cattle and the country-of-too-many-people, and under cloudy skies slept hard and dreamless as the dead.

  The next afternoon, at the time of day when lambs and calves gambol and dogs play before the lid of night snaps down, Sam let loose on the beach. His short tail tucked under, back feet wheeling up almost to his ears, he ran in great loops and wide figure-eights. Finally, far down the coast, he veered off to chase a sanderling, then, turning and running in my direction, he leapt full tilt into my arms. Home.

  chapter 12

  The French call the relationship between doctor and patient “un couple de malade,” meaning paired-up, yoked together by illness, like a marriage. It is so. There is chemistry between the healer and the one being healed, and those who minister to the heart evoke a profound and tender connection. To be “yoked” like a pair of oxen is an image I liked, because it implies the dual effort it takes to get well or else die properly.

  If your heart stops, you have four minutes to get help or resume spontaneous rhythm before the brain stops functioning properly. Who is going to get the gift of the next heartbeat, wonders anyone whose heart has stopped. As Blaine’s patient, I was hooked to him and he to me by that exhilarating urgency.

  We argued about whether or not he saved my life. I said he did. He said I just needed someone who took the time to see what was going wrong. But the healing has been chemistry. He sat on my hospital bed when he talked, shooting a million questions at me, not from the pathological premise of illness, but from the sane ground of surviving well. He asked about work and love, as well as about dizziness and chest pain; he charted a course for how I could live given my disabilities, and the course was vaster than what I could have achieved just then—it was something to aspire to. “Do anything you want,” he said, “as long as there’s no chest pain. You can always lie down if you start to pass out. That might be a little awkward sometimes, but who cares?” Death did-n’t daunt him, nor did the inconvenience of injury.

  Two thousand years ago Hippocrates said: “A patient who is mortally sick might yet recover out of belief in the goodness of the physician.” About the patient-healer relationship Blaine said: “If you care about your patient, that caring will dictate your behavior; you’ll listen, ask questions, listen again, and ask again. The patient will tell you what you need to know.”

  The thickness or thinness of a doctor’s armor determines the distance he can see into a patient, the intimate ability to touch the vital force surging somewhere through the body, undetectable by MRI, CAT scan, or angiogram. Blaine put his stethoscope down on my heart and listened to forty-six years of thumping—joyful detonations and solitary longings—just like everyone’s. When he lifted his head and opened his eyes I thought he must already know a great deal about me—the flawed toughness, nicked by fears and loneliness, and the excesses of passion—and that he could see if Death was still in the corner of the room, or at the end of my bed, but he said nothing.

  Above and beyond the drama of cardiac arrest, or the threat of it, is the metaphorical territory of the heart: if love desists, if passion arrests, if compassion stops circulating through the arteries of society, then civilization, such as it is, will stop. When I looked up at Blaine from my hospital bed after my heart rate and pulse had dropped out of existence, he appeared to be some kind of all-American bodhisattva, someone who travels the middle way that is the human realm of the heart, not because he holds some tantric mastery but because he is so thoroughly human: bumbling and precise, brilliant, corny and sane, optimistic and ordinary. Perhaps the tenderness I felt toward him—which he allowed to happen because he knows that a doctor who is arrogant and thick-skinned will heal his patients only as well as the technology works—was also a tenderness I was able to feel toward myself.

  After a slump, I felt almost maniacally exuberant. One asks, “Is this really me, alive?” as often as, when on the brink of death, “Is it really me dying?” In the examining room, Blaine took my blood pressure. It still dropped twenty points when I changed from a supine to a standing position. I was taken to a room where a stress-echocardiogram would be performed—a test in which the heart muscle is looked at by means of a sonogram immediately after strenuous exercise.

  When Blaine put me on the treadmill my feet almost flew out from under me and he grabbed me around the waist. The nurses howled with laughter: “Dr. Braniff, you’ve got the treadmill going about eighty miles an hour!” one of them exclaimed. His face reddened with embarrassment. “So much for confidence in your doctor,” he said. “Do you do this to your ninety-year-olds?” I asked. After ten minutes on the treadmill at a greatly reduced speed, I lay down and the echocardiogram was taken, while I was still sweating and puffing. He looked at the image of my heart working hard. “You have a wonderful heart!” he said. “Great contractibility. A twenty-year-old’s ventricle.”

  Is that as good as having great legs?

  Doctors can mete out death sentences as surely as they give medicine. If they say “you have six months to live,” you believe them, and sure enough, you die. One o
f Blaine’s gifts is a belief in the resilience of the human. His ardor is contagious: it’s made of his cockeyed optimism and our own vital force. However weakened by illness, a thread of vitality pulls through: his vitality becomes ours and we revel in its presence, no matter how long it lasts: an hour or fifty years.

  We are elaborate biochemical, electrical, emotional organisms with message systems so intricate no computer could begin to track what happens to the body when even a single thought registers there. Feelings change the chemistry of the body as surely as physical traumas do. We blush, we faint at the sight of blood. Cells are constantly sending messages and reacting to messages from neurotransmitters. The mind-body split is a meaningless, laughable idea. Neurons are strung along electrical paths like Christmas tree lights, dancing and blinking, tiny intelligent beings that illuminate the dark continent of flesh. Neuropeptides and hormones are released, chi flows, surfacing in points of electrical resistance, where needles are inserted and vibrated to unlock obstructions. Each nuance of emotion makes its mark and every physical shift is met with a homeostatic adjustment. We sweat, change our heart rates, urinate, vomit; we mend bones, keep our kidneys working, alter heart rate and blood pressure, pursue enemy viruses, change our blood-sugar levels, and respiratory rates.

  In 1859, a French physician, Claude Bernard, said: “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie.” Perhaps homeostasis is the body’s greatest accomplishment: its mastery of maintaining a constant internal environment despite constant and drastic external changes. From it we learn what the great spiritual teachers have already tried to teach us: that stasis is achieved through dynamism; that constant change is à form of equilibrium; that to be ordinary is an outrageous extreme; that limitation can be freedom.