Turn Left at the Trojan Horse

by Brad Herzog

  Funny thing is, I am wholly satisfied with my surroundings. How many people can say that? I lucked into an adorable and compassionate wife, two precious sons, loyal friends, and a fine house in a charming town. What I can’t figure out is why, amid so much external contentment, I can harbor so much disillusionment. Lately, my angst has coalesced into a bit of a black cloud over my head, and it has begun to permeate the small world that means everything to me.

  I used to write from the heart—experimentally, enthusiastically. But in recent years my grand literary dreams have softened into moderate ambitions revolving around paying the mortgage. Whereas once I was inspired by a shifting view of the big picture, now I constantly find myself sweating the small stuff, micromanaging my family like a retired guy who hangs around the house and annoys everybody—only I may never be able to afford retirement. I have bouts of irritability, periods in which I have difficulty living in the moment, times where I notice my innate cynicism evolving into a sort of nihilistic grunt.

  I don’t want to be that guy. My wife doesn’t want it either.

  Amy is always the optimist, impossibly sunny—a Pooh to my Eeyore—and she has taken on the tiring responsibility of bolstering my sense of self-worth. But when I begin to cross the line—when my unreasonable expectations are thrust on my life partner and two little boys, who, after all, will be boys—her exhaustion turns to exasperation. The last thing I want is to unravel my near-perfect universe because I can’t come to grips with my own imperfections.

  “Go take a drive,” Amy insisted. “I’ll meet you in Ithaca.”

  I might have taken this to mean simply that I should light out after the kind of self-knowledge that only a journey can provide, that I should clear the existential cobwebs by crafting a unique itinerary through a nation’s nooks and crannies, figuring it would take me to places I had not yet explored. But when she said it, she held my gaze for just a half-second longer than usual, a moment dripping with subtext.

  Go away. Figure it out, she was saying. Don’t come back until you do.

  She looked at the calendar. “You have thirty-one days.”

  It was a Greek philosopher, Socrates, who believed, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And it was the son of French Canadian immigrants, Jack Kerouac, who opined, “The road is life.” Some combustible combination of the two notions is the spark of my mission.

  I have decided to let Homer ride shotgun. It was he, a supposedly blind minstrel nearly three millennia ago, who crafted the original hero’s journey. Odysseus’s was a practical quest—return home to his beloved isle of Ithaka after twenty years of war and wayward travel. But at its heart, the voyage of Odysseus represents an intellectual adventure. For all the gods and monsters he encounters, his is a pilgrimage toward an understanding of humanity.

  In fact, much the same could be said about all ancient myths. “Society’s dream” is how they were characterized by Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, who described myths as stories of man’s constant search for meaning. The heroes are archetypes, replicated in many cultures over various ages. Their tests and ordeals are the wrappings of truth, a sort of collective unconscious, a vehicle for the communication of universal insight—all in the guise of a good yarn. In other words, we were not made in the image of gods; gods were made in our image—our fears, our foibles, our fantasies. In my journey, I am not aspiring to the deeds of ancient heroes; rather those ancient heroes are manifestations of the symbolic expression of my psyche.

  I don’t claim to be Odysseus. It is simply the other way around.

  So Campbell will be a key companion of mine too, sitting in the back, occasionally looking over Homer’s shoulder. Our ride is a cushy little house on wheels—a twenty-six-foot Winnebago Aspect, which is the perfect name, given my quest. It suggests a facet, a part of a whole—a component of the big picture. Campbell, an atheist’s icon, will have to share space back there with a pastor-turned-philosopher because I brought a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays along—treatises on concepts like Power, Truth, and Experience, just in case I need a dose of nineteenth-century self-reliance. So this is my traveling band—Homer navigating blindly, while a mythologist and a transcendentalist try to help me determine exactly where his tales should lead me.

  My goal: Visit with other lives. Explore other places. Find coherence in the diversity I am sure to encounter. Accumulate the knowledge of journeys past and present as I rumble toward an under standing of the heroic ideal. Locate exemplars of that elusive concept. Court adventure and epiphany and insight. Then come home in one piece, and possibly at peace with myself.

  I descend the Space Needle and spend an hour wandering around Seattle’s trendy Belltown neighborhood, past assorted sushi bars and billiard halls and jazz clubs. Nothing much catches my eye until I reach…the single eye. Here it is, on the corner of First Avenue and Wall Street—blue-irised, red-lidded, rimmed in neon orange. It hangs over the sidewalk, three-dimensional and hypnotic, protruding from a red brick building. I have stumbled upon the Cyclops Café.

  Seattle’s Cyclops Café

  The menu sounds appealing, in an ocular sort of way—a Greek-tinged Cyclops Omelette, a two-egg meal called the Bi-clops, drinks with names like Eye Caramba and Pink Eye—but it is midafternoon, too early for dinner. The door is locked, the lights dim, the chairs stacked on tables. This is one Cyclops lair that will have to remain unexplored.

  I consider this a good omen. Odysseus would have been wise to skip it himself. Early in his journey, when he and his twelve ships catch sight of the Island of the Cyclops—a race of precommunal cave dwellers—Odysseus’s prudence loses out to his curiosity. He takes a handful of men to the island, enters a cave, and starts feasting on the food there, only to be somehow surprised when the resident one-eyed giant, Polyphemus, returns. The Cyclops places a massive boulder in front of the cave entrance to trap his uninvited visitors and proceeds to cannibalize a few of them.

  Odysseus utilizes his famed cunning to extract himself from the situation—first getting the Cyclops drunk and then, when he falls asleep, using a fire-sharpened pole to destroy the creature’s single eye. In the morning, when blinded Polyphemus moves the boulder so that his sheep may graze outside, Odysseus and his men, who have tied themselves to the animals’ undersides, are able to escape.

  But this scene is really a tale of Odysseus’s flaws. Hubris book-ends the story. First, he deems his personal curiosity more important than the safety of his crew. Then, after their escape, his excessive pride puts them at even greater risk. When Polyphemus first asks his visitor’s name, Odysseus calls himself Noman. After being blinded, Polyphemus cries out to his fellow Cyclops that Noman has hurt him. So they don’t intervene. Clever move. But as Odysseus sails away, he stoops to perhaps history’s first account of trash-talking, shouting, “If ever anyone asks you who put out your ugly eye, tell them your blinder was Odysseus, the conqueror of Troy, the son of Laertes, whose address is in Ithaka.” Bad move. Turns out Polyphemus is one of the sons of Poseidon, who will take vengeance on Odysseus by constantly driving him away from his home and happiness, precipitating some ten years of wandering.

  This is why I can identify with this ancient king of Ithaka. Although he claims to be Noman, he is essentially Everyman, in the sense that he is far from perfect. In the course of his adventures, Odysseus lies, steals, and schemes. He can be clear-minded and determined and remarkably courageous, but at times he is also distrustful and devious and hypocritical and merciless. He is not a particularly successful leader: His men often ignore his warnings and pay dearly for doing so, and he loses every single one of his ships and crew. His wife, Penelope, a daughter of Spartan royalty, is the very paragon of fidelity, yet he certainly isn’t faithful to her during his long journey home. And when he finally reaches Ithaka, he murders the dozens of unarmed men who have been courting her, thinking her husband long dead.

  Even physically, Homer describes Odysseus as unimposing. In the Iliad, an ol
der man points to him and asks who the fellow is “who is shorter by a head than Agamemnon.” Later, another admits, “No other man alive could come near Odysseus. But then we did not think him so very much to look at.” By the time of the Odyssey, he is probably well into his forties, maybe with bags under his eyes from his constant travails, possibly out of shape. Even one-eyed Polyphemus calls him a “short worthless-looking runt.” You know you are no physical marvel when you are dissed by a Cyclops.

  So Odysseus is the prototype of not only the hero but also all flawed fictional heroes who followed. He is why Superman falls prey to kryptonite and Sherlock Holmes prefers his 7 percent solution and Indiana Jones hates snakes. And for a guy like me—somewhat vertically challenged, battling a paunch, not always taking the high road—his is a template to which I can relate.

  Come to think of it, my imperfection has been immortalized. You see, there is one final addendum to my Who Wants to Be a Millionaire tale. A few weeks after the silliness subsided, the phone rang. It was a fellow from Grolier, the folks who publish The Encyclopedia Americana. They were putting together The Americana Annual, a six-hundred-page recap of the events of the year 2000. Could I write 800 words about the history of quiz shows and the current craze? Sure, I said, only a tad reluctantly. At least it’s one way to get into the encyclopedia. The lesson: When revealing aspirations, be specific.

  Several months later, the volume arrived, a handsomely bound yearbook with Al Gore and George Bush awkwardly shaking hands on the cover. Squeezed in between an account of “Monkeys in Peril” and a spread about tall ships was my summary of quiz show history. To my surprise, the article began with a half-page color photo of my final moments on the Millionaire set. So in perpetuity, anyone can turn to page 90 of the 2001 Americana Annual and catch the forever frozen image of me sitting in the hot seat, smiling wanly at my old pal Regis, having just failed a test of courage.

  II

  family plots

  The original Encyclopedia Britannica, published nearly a century ago, described suicide as “an act of cowardice disguised as heroism.” It is a fascinating perspective, and it may have its origins in the ancient Greek myths, which are rife with dozens of tales of men and women who find death preferable to a troubled life. They hang themselves, stab themselves, drink poison, self-castrate, leap into the sea, and hurl themselves into the mouths of dragons. Usually, the gods are to blame.

  At about the time of the inaugural Britannica, my great-great-great uncle took an easier route than most of the ancients. He simply shot himself—after shooting someone else. I am on a mission to find him and perhaps figure out why.

  I have made this my first task because I have decided that I cannot examine the parameters of a heroic life without first considering the phenomenon of personal expectations. How does one’s course compare to one’s potential and, more important, to one’s aspirations? If the decision to end it all may be oversimplified and described as an extreme reaction to an existence unfulfilled, doesn’t it boil down to expectations? What society expects of us. What we expect of our world. What we expect of ourselves. And if the expectations are so unreasonable that they are all but impossible to meet, what is the source of such high standards?

  So I am making my way toward a cemetery in eastern Washington, but first I am lunching in Paradise, a thin-aired hamlet at the foot of massive Mount Rainier that receives nearly seven hundred inches of snowfall annually. It is midday in mid-May, and the sun has turned the blanket of snow around me into a billion crystalline wonders. As my companion Emerson once put it, on “one of those celestial days when heaven and earth meet and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once.”

  The mountain as holy place is a notion present in nearly every culture, of course, and in every era—whether it be Mount Fuji to the Japanese or the Smoky Mountains to the Cherokee or Ararat and Sinai in Judeo-Christian teachings. We celebrate them as an opportunity to rise above humanity, literally and figuratively. Really, they are metaphors for aspirations.

  Alpinists seem to find the climb itself—the challenge—to be a sort of stairway to the realm and the revelations of the gods. In 1950, when Maurice Herzog (no relation to my decidedly earth-bound family) reached the peak of Annapurna, at the time the highest mountain ever summited, he returned with the conviction that “in touching the extreme boundaries of man’s world, we have come to know something of its true splendor.” Those concerned with the big picture—the philosophers and photographers among us—tend to find a glimpse of immortality in the view. If one accepts the contention, articulated even in ancient times, that gods are heroes glorified over time, then these two perspectives of the mount might represent the dichotomy of the Hero, of what constitutes heroic attempt—ascent versus awareness, effort versus insight, the challenge of overcoming man’s limitations versus the possibility of actually understanding them.

  The story of Odysseus embodies both. His is a search for both Ithaka and illumination. Joseph Campbell’s blueprint for all myths, which he called the nuclear unit of the monomyth, is simply the following: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” The last part, while it may be least exciting, is actually most important. It implies that one falls short of the heroic ideal if there is achievement without understanding, forces overcome without lessons learned and dispersed—that is, if you climb the mountain without absorbing the view.

  But while this might be paradise after all, someday it will be annihilated. Mount Rainier is an active volcano, one of more than a dozen in the Cascade Range. Volcanologists keep an especially wary eye on it because a large lava eruption would melt the white sheet covering its massive dome—more snow and ice than all the other Cascade volcanoes combined—and send a flood of mud and rock rushing toward the river valleys that radiate from the mountain.

  Less than fifty miles south of here and almost exactly twenty-five years earlier, a tremendous blast blew the top off Mount St. Helens. An ash column rose more than fifteen miles and dumped volcanic dust across the Northwest. A hundred-mile-per-hour landslide covered twenty-three square miles and left debris and ash as much as six hundred feet deep. Fifty-seven people died. By contrast, Rainier’s environs are far more populated than those surrounding Mount St. Helens; more than three million people live within one hundred miles of the mountain.

  The ancient Greeks knew nothing of magma reservoirs, of course. To them, the rumble and steam from volcanoes were the hammer and forge of Hephaestus, the blacksmith of Olympus, god of fire and metallurgy. Unlike the other gods, who were usually portrayed as having exceptional beauty, he was short, fat, and, most remarkably, disabled—the result of being tossed from Olympus by either his mother, Hera, or his father, Zeus, depending on which version of parental rejection one prefers.

  His is a mythos of great contradiction. He was a god, but he actually worked tirelessly, sweating over his fiery forge, wearing a smudged face and a sleeveless tunic. He was lame and ugly, yet he hammered out great power (Zeus’s thunderbolts, Apollo’s arrows) and unmatched beauty (the thrones of Olympus, Dionysus’s golden cup). He was married to lovely Aphrodite, but her unfaithfulness led him to act on his vengeful desires, and so he tried to rape virginal Athena.

  It was the three women in Hephaestus’s life—Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera—whose I’m-prettier-than-you contest was judged by the Trojan prince Paris. Athena and Hera tried to bribe Paris with power and victory in battle, but Aphrodite promised him the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. She was Helen, wife to the king of Sparta and daughter of the king of the gods, conceived during one of Zeus’s frequent adulterous endeavors. But it was her own adulterous elopement with this Trojan prince that led to a god-squabble played out on an epic human scale, launching a thousand ships, one of them captained by the reluctant O
dysseus, amid the ten-year Trojan War.

  Both mythographies—Hephaestus the unwanted god and Helen the wanted woman, he the repulsive creator of beauty and she the beautiful seed of ruination—share similar, almost paradoxical motifs: ugly attractiveness, blighted purity. The existence of a Mount St. Helens, bearing the forge of the god and the name of the woman—or a Rainier, even grander and deadlier—would seem to be a lesson in moderating expectations. The ability to both inspire and obliterate is a reminder that, however heroic we may deem ourselves, we are earthbound and at the mercy of something greater. They are monuments to the impossibility of perfection.

  A few hours later, I have come upon a high desert mirage for the atomic age. In the distance, out past the sagebrush, beneath an armada of cumulus clouds, a cluster of smokestacks and boxy buildings rise from the flatlands of Benton County like rows of Montecristos and packs of Marlboros. It is what John Steinbeck used to call the “yellow smoke of progress.” The forested mounds of western Washington have flattened into the dry grasslands of eastern Washington, and I am driving along the fringe of a 560-square-mile region over-seen by the Department of Energy—the Hanford site, an anti-oasis if ever there was one.

  Two centuries earlier, when Lewis and Clark arrived at this curve in the Columbia River, they found the remains of Indian villages dating from prehistoric times. Today, more than 120,000 people reside in the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick. Most of them are here because a few scientists discovered the devastating potential of nuclear fission.

  With the launch of the Manhattan Project in January 1943, Hanford, a tiny farming community here in Benton County, was chosen as the nation’s first large-scale plutonium production site. The area was selected for its distance from major population centers, its accessibility to railroad transportation, its semi-arid climate, and the fact that the Columbia River offered plenty of cold water to cool reactors, while nearby dams made abundant and inexpensive electricity available. As for the folks who lived there, the War Powers Act allowed the government to buy the land and force all the residents to move within a month. By March, more than fifty thousand construction workers were living in makeshift housing (Hanford immediately became Washington’s fourth most populous city), and only a few dozen people knew what the hell they were building.