Turn Left at the Trojan Horse

by Brad Herzog

  “This used to be called the Lesbi Inn,” says Dean, stretching his arms toward the rafters. “It used to be run by two gals and a guy. He was gay and so were they.”

  “Remember when that he/she pulled into the RV park?” Sharon asks. “We spent days trying to figure it out. We kind of determined he/she was male. He was strange.”

  Here, our waitress, a curly-haired woman named Mary, who has been hovering around the edges of the conversation, hands me a muffin and interjects a recollection. “He had a set of legs I’d kill for, though. That was what pissed me off.”

  “It’s interesting,” I say, as the laughter subsides. “As isolated as this place is, as hard as it is to get to, as much as you may come here to get away from it all, once you’re here everybody knows everybody’s business.”

  Everyone nods, and Dean speaks for the bunch. “We have a little saying here: You can’t fart at one end of this canyon without someone knowing about it before you get to the other end.”

  I cross a footbridge over the Grande Ronde and make my way to a one-story building painted periwinkle. A red one would have more satisfied my expectations, because here is the proverbial one-room schoolhouse. I walk inside, where a woman named Marilyn is tidying up, and we chat for a while. It is a Sunday, but Marilyn picks up the phone to dial the teacher, who says she will be right over. She lives just down the road.

  There are actually two rooms here, each connected to a narrow hallway in which the students’ names are taped above their lockers—Jesse, Clint, Luis, Sophia, Karina, Emily, Big Salvador, Little Salvador. That is the entire population—kindergarten through eighth grade—of the Troy School.

  One room is Troy’s library, brimming with books. The garbage truck drivers, my breakfast companions had informed me, volunteer to transport boxes of books to the canyon on their regularly scheduled pickup days. Posted throughout are the fruits of the students’ scientific labors—poster board summaries of experiments about exploding vinegar and a hypothesis that noncarbonated drinks freeze faster than carbonated drinks. Several dozen books sit on a cart, ready to be reshelved. I can’t help but notice that one of them is a volume about mythology.

  Through a doorway is the single classroom, anachronistically adorned with eleven computers—more than one per child. There are drawings on the walls to accompany haikus created by the students. A poster of the solar system implores them to “Reach for the stars!” Through the window, I can see a playground and a couple of basketball hoops, each set at a different height, and a couple of grazing cows.

  “The good thing about this being a one-room schoolhouse,” says the teacher when she arrives, “is everything is a science project. Everything is history. Everything is an event. If I cook something, I’ll make everybody try it. I’m making sushi at home right now. Or we have killdeer eggs hatching out on the playground, so we’re turning it into a hypothesis of the eggs—when they were laid, how many do they think will hatch, how many will survive…”

  Like the computers in the classroom, Stephanie Haggard upends expectations, and not only because she is making sushi in rural Oregon. Only a few years older than I, broad shouldered, with her blond hair drawn tightly back from her face, she cuts an imposing figure. She is no matronly schoolmarm. Indeed, she tells me that she didn’t set out to be a schoolteacher at all; back in Texas, she wanted a job with Border Patrol. But the children of Troy can thank whoever left some Betadine surgical scrub bottles on the steps of a medical clinic at Yellowstone National Park.

  “I was working at Mammoth Clinic in Yellowstone, and I went downstairs to get some insurance papers. I stepped on a bottle, hyperextended, and fell down on concrete. I was in tremendous pain. I went to the Texas Back Institute in Plano, Texas,” she says. “I had some surgery. I’m titanium from the bellybutton down.”

  Which, of course, makes her even more imposing—the bionic teacher, the Terminator educator.

  “I got hired by Border Patrol, and I was hoping my back would be well enough for me to take the position. But the doctor said, ‘You can either go in for the operation or take the position with Border Patrol. Not both. It’s just going to get worse with Border Patrol.’ And I wanted to go into the FBI. I had all these high hopes for a life of grand adventure.” She lets out a barely audible sigh and shrugs. “So I figured I’d go to school in the meantime. I got my gifted and talented certification—differentiating the curriculum and customizing it to specific students. So actually, this fit in perfectly for what I was trained to do.”

  Stephanie’s husband remains in Texas, where he coaches high school football. Her five-year-old daughter is finishing the school year with him there, while her eleven-year-old daughter is the “Sophia” I saw on one of the lockers. She and her husband aren’t separated, Stephanie explains. “After being a coach’s wife for thirteen years, I don’t see him anyhow during the school year. So this is no big deal.”

  “So…is this an adventure?”

  She grins. “Absolutely. The best. And it’s good clean living. Sometimes it’s surreal. I have to pinch myself. I don’t hear ambulances. I don’t hear cars going by. I open my window at night, and I hear the Wenaha River. I don’t lock my door. I know everybody. I went to high school in California, and I swore I would never raise my children there. I love Texas and the people, but I really wanted to get back to my roots. I lived in the town of Jardine, Montana, which is population twenty-four.”

  “Which makes Troy about twice as big.”

  She nods. “I’m used to this type of situation—a very rural community with a certain small-town etiquette where you have to both go with the flow and be your own person.” She leans forward to make a point. “It took me one year to get my bearings, to knock down walls. But you know what? Parents today don’t know who their children’s friend’s parents are. They don’t know who their kids are playing with. I do. I know all the parents real well.”

  Stephanie points out the potential for boredom, but I can only envision the pressure. There is no comfort in the support system of fellow teachers and administrators, other than a teacher’s aide who primarily focuses on the younger students. Stephanie’s pupils range in age from near-toddlers to near-teens, so she doesn’t have the luxury of focusing her attentions on one subject or age-group curriculum. She happens to be fluent in Spanish, which must be a godsend to the families of her four Hispanic students. So it is essentially a bilingual, multilevel classroom with nowhere to hide any missteps or conflicts. I imagine it is like trying to play eight instruments at once.

  From Troy, the students will go on to normal schooling, if it can be considered normal to take a two-hour commute to high school or to board with a family that houses students from rural areas for four hundred dollars a month. Meanwhile, in only her second year of her first teaching job, Stephanie claims to have learned how to make this system work: Explain the why of things, not just the what. Carve out a routine, especially at the beginning of the year, but be flexible. Let the children help. Allow the more athletic ones to lead a PE class. Let a creative student lead an art class. Take advantage of the maturity of the oldest kids, as most one-room schoolhouses do, but don’t go overboard—they have their own learning to do, too.

  Stephanie Haggard and the school in Troy

  “You can get a good education from one room,” she says. “For these kids, my goal for them is to graduate, to be productive citizens. That’s why I got into teaching—because I got tired of the way schools were going. It honestly depends on the district policy. Who’s making the red tape to cut through? See, they’re teaching to a test now. Real learning is not taking place. They’re cramming the children for finals. It’s starting in kindergarten, and it’s making me sick. Children are graduating and passing a test, and they can’t diagram a sentence. America is raising idiots!”

  She laughs, and then seems to think she should tone down the rhetoric. “That’s what I see, and it scares me. That’s why I said I would only work for a certain type of school that wil
l allow the children to be creative and grow as much as they need and help where they need it. Our kids will take a test, and they’ll pass it. But if you’re doing real teaching, learning will take place.”

  I notice that Stephanie refers to them as her children, rather than her students, and it isn’t necessarily just a semantic distinction. She takes them camping and kayaking. She drives all eight kids to Idaho for a week of skiing and to the central Oregon coast for a tour of an aquarium and a lighthouse. The students don’t bring an apple for the teacher; they bring a bag of apples because they know she’ll bake a couple of apple pies—one for her, one for them. Maybe they’ll enjoy a bite or two while they’re playing at her house.

  “At home, I’m still Mrs. H. I’m not Stephanie. The respect is still there,” she says, “but I’ll be down on the floor playing games with them.”

  It is at this point that I hear various voices in my head, my own personal Greek chorus. I suppose I should explain:

  A few days earlier, on my way out of Seattle, I drove south for an hour to the state capital, Olympia, and an appointment at the Mud Bay Coffee Company. On the second Wednesday of every month, a group of Olympians gather there to sip exotic coffees and teas and ponder mankind’s most vexing questions. They call it a Philosopher Café, and it is one of many such open forums for inquiry that have sprouted up around the country—actually, around the world—in the past decade. People meet in bookstores, libraries, community centers, even homeless shelters and airport terminals. They aim for intellectual honesty by participating in critical questioning, as Socrates famously did. They ask questions like: What is patriotism? When is violence necessary? Is human nature constant throughout history? What’s wrong with cloning? They talk with each other, not at each other. It is a philosophical jam session—conceptual jazz.

  Having discovered Olympia’s version, I asked a favor of the participants. Would they be willing to consider the question that propels me toward Ithaca: What, exactly, is a hero? In contemporary America, what is a heroic life?

  We gathered at the coffeehouse in a small conference room, its walls the color of hemlock. Most of the Mud Bay Philosophers were in their late twenties or early thirties, but they were an ethnically diverse bunch—John, who has a job at a blood center as he prepares to return to school in pursuit of his masters in philosophy; Kristy, his girlfriend, who works at a day-care center for elderly people with Alzheimer’s and dementia; Pasha, an Iranian-American computer systems administrator; Rebekah, a first-grade teacher of Swedish descent; Maki and Keiko, fourth- and fifth-grade teachers who emigrated from Japan; and Ben and Roz, a retired engineer and his wife.

  My initial questions begat many more: What is the purpose of the hero? Is it something we strive for? Is it a standard we can’t possibly reach? It is an overused term? Is it about physical courage or moral courage? Can a hero still be morally flawed? Can there be a heroic act without heroic motivations? What if you have heroic motivations, but fail terribly? Does it taint the effort to call attention to your own heroic act? Is the hero defined by the actor or by the perceiver? Is each of us the author of our own criteria? Is there such a thing as a universal hero?

  Of course, the questions were easier than the answers. Trying to zero in on an absolute definition of heroic achievement is like trying to find your way to the exit of an unworkable maze. Every supposition leads to more possibilities, so the task becomes exponentially more difficult, and you wind up somewhere near to where you began. Still, for a couple of hours I reveled in the nobility of the attempt.

  In discussing the spectrum of the heroic with my Greek chorus in Olympia, we worked our way to the subject of heroic professions. One of the group asked, “What about those people who aren’t necessarily at risk of death, but they’re constantly, on a daily basis, working toward something greater than themselves? I think when you choose to do something like that, it can be a heroic choice—those things that kind of grind you down, take you piece by piece, that person who gives his or her life away bit by bit until there’s nothing left. Isn’t that a hero?”

  We were talking, in particular, about teachers, and one of the teachers in the group gave a terse reply: “I think we gain more than we give.”

  Stephanie’s dedication to the job in Troy is inspiring to me, and not just on an educational level. It instills much the same warm feeling I get on those rare occasions when I encounter a doctor who takes phone calls at home or a contractor who puts in overtime but doesn’t charge for it. For some people, a job is merely a means to an end; for others, it is a means of achieving self-actualization. Call it what you want—conscientiousness, commitment, dependability. But I am convinced there is a heroic quality to not just doing something but doing it to the best of your ability. Individually, it is an affirmation of spirit. Collectively, it furthers humanity. Karma, and all that. It is a driving philosophy of mine, but one to which, I must admit, I don’t always adhere.

  The students of Troy put on a play last Christmas—The Legend of the Poinsettia. It is the story of a poor Mexican girl who had no gift to present the Christ Child at Christmas Eve services. But her cousin tells her that surely even the most humble gift, if given in love, will be acceptable in His eyes. So as she walks toward the chapel, she kneels by the roadside and gathers a handful of common weeds, fashioning them into a tiny bouquet. As she lays the bouquet at the foot of the nativity scene, the weeds suddenly burst into blooms of brilliant red—a Christmas miracle.

  I wonder if the actors in the drama—or even their teacher—fully appreciated how the story applies to them.

  After returning along the footbridge, I stop by the lodge and notice a flyer on a bulletin board: WANTED: DEAD, NOT ALIVE…JOIN THE INVASIVE WEED PATROL. It implores folks to get rid of a particular weed that crowds out native plant species. Its name is the medusahead. More irony.

  Moments later, I am confronted with an equally impressive coincidence when I stop and chat with another local couple, who overheard me explaining the premise of my journey over breakfast. The man, a fellow named Ralph, informs me that his father was a native of the Aeolian Islands, off the north coast of Sicily. The islands were colonized by the Greeks about two hundred years after Homer’s day and named after the mythical figure Aeolus, who kept the winds bottled up in a cave on an island and released them at the bidding of the gods.

  When Odysseus happens by on his long trip home, Aeolus offers him hospitality for a month and then a farewell gift consisting of the blustering breezes tied up securely in a leather bag. But he leaves the west wind free to blow, so that it may carry Odysseus’s ships home. And home the weary travelers go, actually to within sight of Ithaka, only to be undone by their own covetousness. Odysseus falls asleep, and his men get to talking. Suspecting that the leather bag must contain a gift of treasures, they open it. Immediately, the winds rush out, driving the ships all the way back to the isle of Aeolus.

  Astonished at their return, Aeolus is in an unforgiving mood. “Get off this island at once, you miserable sinner!” he shouts at Odysseus. “It is not permitted to comfort the enemy of the blessed gods!” Odysseus and his crew are to sail on, disheartened, with no wind to help them now.

  If the scene is to be taken as a sort of fable within a legend, the moral might be that while no man can control the winds, we are the authors of our own decisions. Our choices point us in one direction or another, for better or worse. And, to echo Robert Frost, that can make all the difference.

  At some point, Ralph’s father decided it was time to set off from a Mediterranean isle toward a new world. Sometime, perhaps during a mortar attack in Southeast Asia, Dean E. Dean came to some conclusions about where he wanted to spend the remainder of his days. Somewhere along the line, maybe even at the bottom of a stairway in Yellowstone, Stephanie came to realize that she had it in her to climb higher. They opted for the road less traveled—a life-changing decision for all. And is there not a heroic element to seeing it through?

  Odysseus had no d
esire to leave his wife and family for war, but he remained true to his word, fought valiantly, even conjured up the idea for the Trojan horse. Then he wanted nothing more than to leave Troy and go home.

  The folks in Troy, Oregon? They seem to want nothing more than to stay. THANKS FOR VISITING TROY, says the sign, as I set off on the next leg of my journey. Y’ALL COME BACK AND VISIT US SOON. DRIVE CAREFULLY.

  CITADEL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2010 Brad Herzog

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Quotations from The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, copyright © 1949, 1968, 2008; reprinted by permission of Joseph Campbell Foundation (jcf.org). Excerpt from “Ithaka” by C. P. Cavafy (Aliki Barnstone, translation), copyright © 2006; reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  CITADEL PRESS and the Citadel logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008054495

  ISBN: 978-0-8065-3481-7