The Searchers

Do you familiarize yourself with the idea of walking through crowded boisterous pathways filled with your typical chattering crowds, whether they’re talking to themselves or to others around them? What about the occasional yet somehow frequent number of dog barks and car honks? Well, forget about it all and call it a memory. Erase it all. You are now in the exact landscape that the film, The Searchers, introduces right from the bat – your typical portrayal of the western scenario. There is nothing in the surroundings other than the land itself. It’s just man and horse against a land that Tompkins defines as not only “created by God”, but a land that “is God” (70). The cowboy can taste freedom in one of the truest ways imaginable. He can go anywhere, “in any direction, as far as he can go. The possibilities are infinite” (75). It’s all about the land. Not just any land, however, but a land “defined by absence” (71). It’s a land where you’re not really anywhere specific at any particular time; where you can get lost physically or even mentally, like the rocking-chair obsessed drunk in the movie, The Searchers.

Ultimate survival skills are essential in this “landscape of death” (70). For instance, in The Searchers, Ethan and Martin manage to get water out of the scarce yet prodigious rock walls. Now that’s what I call desert savvy. The cowboy needs to be prepared for anything, whether it be thirst, hunger, sleep, or the occasional attacking Indian herd that burn down Yankee houses and kidnap little girls. The immeasurability of the land is exemplified throughout the entire film with scenes depicting the desolate yet perfectly integrated natural beauty of the wild west – I mean, seriously, it took them about five years to successfully locate the aforementioned kidnap victim.

By surviving in the land, roaming and living in the land, and endlessly exploring the land is how one becomes stronger in the Western world. You begin by being young and restless, like Martin, the younger cowboy, and ultimately (if you’re lucky) end up like Ethan, John Wayne’s character in the film – whose expressionless face somehow manages to manifest all the pain and loneliness that the desert may bring you, yet simultaneously exhibiting fearlessness and courageousness at its finest. It may take time for the relationship between land and man to consolidate – but it must happen, and it must be quite a good relationship, before anyone can call themselves a true cowboy.