The Eagle and the Dragon

by Chris Duffin

  Toward the start of summer, we moved into a tiny fifteen feet by fifteen feet cabin. Although our landlord owned several cabins, only one was initially available. It was an upgrade from the trailer, but still an extremely small space for six people. It, too, had no running water or electricity. I think it was an old hunting cabin, where people came to hang out while they fished or hunted, so there wasn’t much need for amenities.

  Over the course of the year, as new accommodations became available, we moved to progressively larger cabins. The second was a little bigger and offered electricity, but no hot water. Just like in Paulina, I bathed by heating up a pot of water and pouring it over my head. I only did this about once a week and, by this time, I was entering my teenage years, so I was more vulnerable to body odor. In Prineville, the kids were standoffish, even cruel. La Pine, by contrast, was a friendlier environment. Even so, I was still harassed at school on occasion for not washing more frequently.

  I reconnected with friends I’d left behind when I moved away in fifth grade. This was also when I discovered that the friend who had done my writing for me when I broke my arm had died in a car accident while I was in Paulina. Other kids asked me whether I remembered him, but I couldn’t picture his face. This was at a time when I was old enough to generate vivid memories—I have a clear recollection of breaking my arm—yet I have completely forgotten someone who did all my coursework for much of fifth grade.

  My school grades were consistently good during this time. I received As in almost every class. In Paulina, I had already done all the work we were supposed to do in seventh grade, so I was bored most of the time.

  We ended up moving again, this time into a cabin that was large enough for me to have my own bedroom—even though it was so cramped there was barely room for a bed. My sisters shared another bedroom. The bedrooms where my sisters and I slept were extensions of the original structure. The main cabin consisted of a living space and a kitchen, with the bedrooms housed under a secondary roof. Even this third cabin was too small for the entire family, so my parents lived in the trailer. Although this cabin had electricity, running water, and a wood stove and was definitely an improvement, it was still quite basic. The interior was unfinished, with raw insulation visible.

  It was here that I began to make necklaces out of porcupine quills. It was also where I started my own landscaping business.

  One of several cabins where we lived in La Pine. Few had electricity or running water.

  Working, Lifting, Making

  The owners of the cabins introduced me to several older couples who wanted help taking care of their lawns. Soon, I was booked solid all weekend long, riding my ten-speed bike from house to house and mowing lawns. I didn’t have my own mowing equipment, but all the couples I worked for did. There were many retirees in the La Pine area, and they were more than happy to pay me to take the work of maintaining their gardens off their hands.

  I loved riding my bike and often went out on long rides—as long as twenty miles—for the sheer pleasure of exploring different areas of the town. I also began to train and lift weights during this time. At first, my only access to weights was at high school. Soon, however, I found a pair of ankle weights at Goodwill and supplemented my training by strapping them to my ankles and going out for runs. I also did jump squats until I was exhausted and did hundreds of push-ups. I had no real idea what I was doing. I simply picked up a few basic moves and repeated them until my muscles were so fatigued that, over the following days, I could hardly move.

  Flexing during a visit to my father in Sonoma, California. I was about sixteen years old and getting more serious about weight training.

  Turning natural materials into art had become something of a theme in my family by this time, and we had a burgeoning collection of art pieces made of rocks and other things we found in the woods. Pat loved carving, particularly when he could get hold of tree burls. A burl is a section of tree that has grown in on itself, forming a big, solid knot. Burls polish up well and make interesting art, because the grain of the wood forms intriguing patterns. I went for long hikes in the woods seeking out burls. When I found good ones, I broke or cut them out of the trees they were in and brought them back for Pat to carve.

  Those first months back in La Pine, I spent most of my time making necklaces, foraging for burls, and managing my fledgling landscaping business. When I wasn’t doing those, I trained until I dropped or went on long bike rides around the local area. Although this was a relatively settled time in my life, with few major episodes, there were occasional moments of drama.

  It’s Raining Ants

  On one occasion, following a protracted rainstorm, I was sitting in our cabin and I heard a sound like a thousand raindrops hitting the ceiling. “Why does it still sound as though it’s raining?” I said. I walked outside to check that the rain had ended. It had. Then I walked around the house in search of the source of the noise. It sounded as though it was coming from above my sisters’ bunk bed.

  I called Pat and my mom and explained what I could hear, and we all went into the bedroom to explore further. The cabin didn’t have a proper ceiling, only raw insulation, so I peeled back the edge of the insulation to investigate. Suddenly, millions upon millions of ants rained into the room. Imagine tipping a five-gallon bucket, full to the brim with ants, into your bedroom. The floor was thick with them.

  Naturally, my sisters were freaked out by the massive numbers of ants pouring into their room. As we pulled back the edge of the insulation, they were sitting on their bunk bed, so they had a front row seat for a scene that looked like something out of an extreme nature documentary. Even today, they still laughingly recount the event.

  Clearly, the ants had chosen our roof as a nice warm space to live during the rains. There were so many of them that, as they moved around inside the roof cavity, they made a sound like rain. It took a long while to make sure that we had removed them. We even pulled out all the insulation from the roof. Afterward, we couldn’t afford to replace the insulation, and the landlord lacked either the money or the motivation—or both—so it remained bare, uncovered plywood for the rest of our stay.

  A Sense of Belonging

  For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt part of a consistent group of friends during this second stint in La Pine. When I returned, I reconnected with a few people I had known the first time I lived in the area, but at that age, a couple of years felt like a long time. People had begun to move on and develop new friendship networks. As I started at a new school once again, I didn’t have any friends who I hung out with on a consistent basis.

  With no one to shoot the breeze with during the gaps between classes, I used to go directly from one lesson to the next. I picked up my books, walked to the location of my next class, and simply sat there, waiting until class started.

  One day, while I sat alone at lunchtime, a tall, red-haired kid named Greg approached me.

  “Hey, come sit with us.”

  “Okay, that sounds good,” I said without hesitation.

  I walked over to a table where Greg introduced me to a couple of other guys named Matt and Curt. They were a group of oddballs. Greg used to hang with the stoner crowd, smoking weed and listening to heavy metal. Curt was a Jehovah’s Witness, and Matt was a nerd who loved reading and video games. I soon discovered that Greg had made a conscious decision to break away from the stoner group and pull together a new crew. He felt that he was at risk of making some poor life choices and he wanted to change direction.

  “We’re friends now,” he told me.

  “All right,” I said. “Sounds good.”

  And we were. We rolled together the rest of the time I lived in La Pine.

  When eighth grade started, Greg suggested that we started doing track together. His older brother was a track and field star. I liked being friends with him, so I was willing to go along with his suggestion to sign up for track and
field. This was when I discovered that, for low-income families, the school waived the costs of getting involved in sports.

  Although I was smart and nerdy, I already had a distinct interest in physical activity. Getting involved in track and field cemented this interest and started me down the path toward further involvement in sports.

  Running track and field as a freshman in high school. During this period, my interest in sports and physical development really took off.

  Lesson: Exercising Proactivity

  It’s incredibly easy to attribute your situation in life to external circumstances. This is particularly true if you’re in a negative environment. Perhaps you’ve lost your job or you’re struggling in some other fashion.

  It’s true that you can’t control everything in your life, but you can take ownership of elements of your reality and take action. At times, the changes you can make may be small. You may find yourself thinking that it’ll be ten years before you work yourself into a better situation. Even if that’s the case, don’t succumb to despair. Start doing what you can to improve your life. Who knows what will happen in the future. Maybe you’ll carve out an unexpected opportunity for yourself a couple of years down the line. As much as you can, take control of your life.

  I attribute a lot of my current success to the habit of proactivity I started developing in seventh grade. I earned money from my landscaping business, for example, which also enabled me to contribute to the family household budget. I took an interest in sports, which gradually led to some outstanding athletic achievements. Even prior to this period, I proactively studied every page of every textbook in the two-room schoolhouse in Paulina, meaning that by the time I got to La Pine I was mostly repeating material I already understood. That made school easy for me and meant I had more energy to dedicate to other pursuits.

  In the following chapters, you’ll begin to see where proactivity led me. I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I knew I could develop the habit of moving the needle a little bit. If you’re not sure how to move forward, recognize that proactivity is a form of preparation. It prepares you for a better future. Yes, you’ll need to have an idea of where you’re going. Nonetheless, remember that not everything will turn out the way you anticipate. Even if you encounter setbacks and things aren’t working out as you hoped, retain your motivation and keep doing the work.

  A Settled Home

  Years before we moved back to La Pine, Pat put in a disability claim relating to his broken arm. It seemed that nothing would ever come of it, which is why he continued to work for so long with a broken arm. Eventually, however, he won his disability case, receiving a small amount of back pay. He had an operation to fix his arm, and he and my mom made a down payment on a double-wide mobile home.

  Pat’s surgery felt like a big deal. The capacity to purchase our own home felt like an even bigger deal. In Paulina, we had tried to buy the cabin where we had lived for a time, but even in an area where property prices were rock bottom, we couldn’t afford it. In La Pine, we finally had the money to settle somewhere of our own.

  Admittedly, the money came from a court case rather than directly from labor, which might initially seem to go against my parents’ values. On this occasion, however, they felt that the windfall was deserved, due to all the hard, physical work Pat had done over the years with a broken arm. My parents were excited, and they transmitted their excitement to the rest of us.

  It wasn’t a luxurious place to live, but it was secure. When we moved in, the whole yard was strewn with trash, along with the rusted-out chassis of a Ford Courier with no engine. We filled the entire truck with the debris from the yard, almost burying it.

  Despite these limitations, I loved this new home. We hung old sheets in the windows and built a countertop so that we had somewhere to install a sink. For perhaps the first time in my life, I knew that I had a safe, stable home base to serve as a foundation. I saw it as a platform for future success in business and training. While we bounced around from place to place, it was challenging to sustain my fledgling business and my training regime. The trailer felt like a stepping stone from which I could leap to greater heights.

  Chapter Five

  7. Discovery

  1992–1995 (Age Fifteen to Eighteen), La Pine, Oregon

  After sports, in the evenings, I did shift work in Sun River. I hitched a ride with friends and put in a shift as a busboy or a dishwasher. One particular evening, I was sitting downstairs in the break room hammering out an essay for the local newspaper, the Bend Bulletin.

  I had applied for several scholarships at Oregon State, the largest engineering school in Oregon, none of which were awarded to me. In an effort to raise money to go to college, I started applying for smaller, local scholarships. Unfortunately, these were too small to make a major contribution to college costs. I was becoming frustrated.

  I knew my parents didn’t have the financial resources to support me through college, so I was beginning to wonder whether I would be able to go at all. I was contemplating finding a place in Sun River and continuing to work.

  These thoughts were rolling around my head as I composed my essay, an entry into a competition run by the Bend Bulletin with the prize of—you guessed it—a scholarship. I wrote about my childhood experiences, how hard I’d worked to get to where I already was, and how frustrated I was that I couldn’t see a way to fund my further studies.

  The tone of my writing was very emotional. The first two paragraphs read:

  “A family of six lives in a sixteen-foot trailer by a mountain stream. The oldest of their children sleeps in the back of their truck through a 20-below winter. Both parents are unemployed, the father disabled.

  They move from town to town looking for housing that is affordable, while the mother works at odd jobs. Sometimes during the summer they set up tents and pretend that they’re just on a camping trip. A camping trip that lasts for years. This family is my family.”

  I submitted the essay and, a few weeks later, I received a call from the Bend Bulletin. They called me while I was at school, because they didn’t know how else to get a hold of me. I walked into the office, picked up the phone, and the guy on the other end of the line told me he had some bad news for me. He told me I hadn’t won the scholarship. It was awarded to a kid from Bend who was a valedictorian and was going to MIT, and barely beat me out. In lieu of a scholarship, on the other hand, the Bend Bulletin wanted to run an article about me.

  At the time, I didn’t go to school in the mornings. Instead of studying in my morning block, I got credit for the job I did in the evenings, because I was supporting my family. Some people advised me that, if I wanted to go to college, working a job wasn’t a great move. They suggested that I take as many advanced placement classes as I could, which I did, but I balanced that with working and bringing in income. That decision probably played a role in causing me to miss out on the scholarship. The kid who got it had a better academic record. He was going to a bigger school. By the numbers, he looked more qualified than me. Fortunately for me, someone at the newspaper wanted to help me out by telling my story.

  I agreed and the newspaper sent a writer and a photographer to take some pictures of me. The shots show me standing with my parents in front of the mobile home where we lived. The Bend Bulletin published a piece based on my essay on the front page, and the story was picked up by all the major cities in the Northwest. It ran in the Seattle Times and the Eugene Register-Guard, and I think also in Portland. Following its publication, I was pulled out of class several times to be interviewed on the radio. Soon after, donations began to roll in. My high school wrestling coach, Rusty Zysett, set up a trust fund that enabled me to buy a computer and, later, some supplies for college.

  Then, I received a call from the Oregon Institute of Technology (OIT), in southern Oregon, a highly technical college with a strong engineering focus. I had been set on studying at Oregon Stat
e, so I hadn’t considered OIT, let alone applied. When they called, however, I agreed to visit the college. My math teacher stepped in and drove me and my parents down to southern Oregon, because we didn’t have a vehicle capable of making the trip at the time.

  I checked out the college, spent some time with some of the teachers and administration staff, and they offered me a full-ride scholarship. They pulled together a number of grants and scholarships, factored in my financial aid, and put together a package that covered all my expenses. I accepted their offer. My parents were delighted that I was going to college. I’ve mentioned previously that they had strong feelings about charity, which they saw as stemming from pity. This was different. I had worked extremely hard to secure opportunities, and they felt I had earned the advantages I received.

  I had imagined that most people at school were aware of my living conditions, but apparently that wasn’t the case. When my story was featured in the newspaper, it was an eye-opening experience for a lot of people. Friends from school suddenly looked at me differently. People from all corners of the state walked into the restaurant where I was waiting tables and said, “Hey, are you that kid from the newspaper?”

  The exposure I received from the article in the Bend Bulletin was my first experience of being in the public eye. I went from feeling isolated and struggling to get to college, to suddenly having a scholarship at OIT.