Turn Left at the Trojan Horse (4 page)

In contrast, I have crafted a career in which I am my own boss but also my only employee. I am instinctively antiauthoritarian, so I have never been much of a follower. But I am also uncomfortable with the idea of giving instructions, evaluating performance, handing down grand decisions that actually affect the lives of other professionals. Not that I wouldn't mind a minion or two, but it is enough of a challenge for me to take responsibility for myself. And I am not sure I would ever feel entitled to such a position.

“This is not an endowment. It's not something that people owe to me. I've been hired by them through the voting mechanism to perform a service. I never take it for granted,” says Bill.

“And what about politics, in general?” I wonder. “What kinds of motivations have you seen?”

“I have found people who have run for office because they really focused on a single issue. I think that's the wrong reason. I've seen people for whom it's just an ego trip. I've seen people who have done it, believe it or not, for the benefits package. And I've seen people who are retired and bored and they think, ‘Hey, I'll run for office.' And sometimes, the people who go in maybe for the wrong reasons turn out pretty good.”

But it is the purpose-meets-poise aspect of leadership that dominates my thoughts—the self-assurance. There is the story of ancient Chaerephon, who traveled to Delphi and boldly asked Apollo to tell him if anyone had greater intellectual powers than his friend Socrates. The oracle replied that no man was wiser. But when Socrates heard of this, he was dismayed. He did not believe he was the wisest, nor did he believe the oracle would tell an untruth. He concluded that it was a riddle of words—that no man was truly wise, only the gods, and that the only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing.

“As much as you may want to help people,” I tell Bill, sounding a bit more cynical than I intend, “it seems to me that it requires a healthy ego—some sort of gene that leads you to say, ‘I can do this. I'm worthy of this. I'm qualified and skilled and intelligent enough to be able to handle it and to be able to lead.'”

“If you're talking about confidence”—Bill smiles—“that often comes with experience.”

During his brief college days, Bill was president of his dorm, fraternity representative on the student senate, and president of his junior class. On the other hand, I can think of only two times in my entire life when I accepted any sort of mantle of leadership. Just two.

When I was nearly fifteen years old and nearing the end of my six-summer stint as a camper at a boys' camp in northern Wisconsin, I was tapped to lead one of the teams during an all-camp competition. Back then, before political correctness reached the North Woods, the event was known as Pow Wow Day. The camp would divide into four tribes—Cherokee, Chippewa, Navajo, and Sioux—and compete in activities ranging from basketball to archery to canoeing relays. I was a Big Chief, which is about as close as I will ever come to CEO. Essentially, my role was to dress in faux Indian garb and convince a collection of several dozen campers that, no, they weren't just a bunch of scrawny suburbanites. They were the mighty Cherokee.

I well recall my first few Pow Wow Days, when I was nine or ten. I would stand openmouthed, marveling at the muscle and command of the big chiefs. They were
teenagers
, for goodness' sake, confident and vaguely heroic and ten feet tall and fully deserving of their lofty titles. Now that I was one of them—a nearsighted, shallow-chested, self-doubting big chief—it was like discovering that the great and terrible wizard was a bumbling oaf behind a curtain.

We mighty Cherokees lost each and every one of our first thirteen preliminary events—nearly a statistical impossibility. Ours was a comedic montage of errant jump shots, missed targets, and tipped canoes. Heading into Pow Wow Day itself, we were already so far behind that victory was virtually unattainable. So I borrowed a notion from the Bill Murray movie
Meatballs
, which had been released a few years earlier, and led a procession of Cherokees through the dining hall at lunchtime: “It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter! It just doesn't matter!” And significantly, it didn't.

I wish I had recalled that sentiment four years later when I was a freshman in college and a fraternity pledge. For some reason, I decided it would be a sensible idea to run for pledge president. It was a “What was I thinking?” moment, not unlike the time when brave Odysseus arrived at the land of the Cyclops and said to his men, “My good fellows, the rest of you stay here, while I take my ship and crew and see who these people are; whether they are wild savages who know no law, or hospitable men who know right from wrong.”

I suppose I wanted instant credibility in my new collective, having been previously acquainted with only a handful of my pledge brothers. So in this, the one leadership position I ever chose to pursue, I was motivated primarily by social panic. And what did I get out of it? I became a target for the slings and arrows of a bunch of upperclassmen drunk on power and Mad Dog grape wine. That semester, I lost ten pounds and earned the only C-minus of my life (in a philosophy class, no less), not to mention the enmity of a few of my pledge brothers, who fancied themselves Fletcher Christian to my Captain Bligh.

Of course, given their series of hardships, it is a wonder that Odysseus's men didn't plan a mutiny themselves. But I suspect that some men simply have the makeup of a leader, while the rest of us are easily revealed as mere imposters.

Bill, the rancher's son, likes to refer to his history working with the animals that populated the family farm. His constituents are smart, he says, more like hogs than sheep. From a farmer, that is a high compliment indeed, and it may well describe life's universal managerial system. But even wily Odysseus puts his trust in Athena, just as Bill often refers to the Twenty-third Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want
.

We all need guidance, one way or the other. Heroic leadership, of course, is another animal entirely.

“Often, we view our heroes in response to a crisis situation and how they react to that—9/11 or Pearl Harbor. You save somebody from drowning. You fight back a grizzly bear. You crash-land a plane to safety,” says Bill. “Most of the time, in the average occupation, you don't have that type of crisis situation. I think politics probably fits into that as well. Even if you make a courageous vote, often the consequences of that aren't evident until years later.”

The phone rings, and Bill answers it. He talks for a while in another room, pacing a bit while I sip my soda. Then he returns and adds a caboose to his previous train of thought.

“And anyway, the people whom I would most want to call me a hero are my children.”

Bill's father was one of five children. His grandfather was one of five children. His great-grandfather was one of five children. Not counting the two foster children they took in and the four exchange students they housed, Bill and Margaret have raised five daughters, as well. They all graduated from college and pursued advanced degrees. They were Dean's List students and multisport letter winners, and one was even an NAIA college basketball All-American. Successful shepherding, no doubt.

But he also has a son, and for a while his son strayed. Bill has never touched a drink in his life. Dry Bill is what they called him in college. He has never allowed beer, wine, or any sort of alcohol in his house. But his son—who, yes, is also named Bill—became an alcoholic and drug addict.

For the better part of a decade, the family dealt with the struggle. The father turned again to the Twenty-third Psalm for explanation and comfort.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for Thou are with me
. The verse, he explains, refers to a practice in Palestine in which sheep were moved from winter quarters to spring and summer pastures, moving through valleys that were both life-giving and treacherous. The father focused on the “through” part of the verse, the suggestion that greener pastures await.

And then one day, the son woke up in a motel room in Idaho, full of self-loathing. He pulled out a Gideon Bible from the bedside stand and randomly opened it, his finger landing on Exodus 30. He interpreted the words according to his state of mind.
Thou shall not offer strange incense…nor shall you pour a drink offering on it….
He stood up, flushed his drugs down the toilet, poured out his booze, and called his dad.

“He just celebrated his first complete year of being clean and sober,” says the father, and I can only guess at the sense of relief that must provide. He smiles. “Do you have kids?”

I smile back.

My oldest son, Luke, was born nine months after my
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
adventure. In fact, he was conceived in a Manhattan hotel room the morning after the show was taped. What can I say? It was a good twenty-four hours. Given the circumstances, we considered naming our newborn Regis.

That is, we considered it a really bad idea.

His brother, Jesse, arrived only eighteen months later. The first child was the result of a carefully orchestrated bit of coupling and timing, following a few months of frustration and worry. His brother's conception, on the other hand, was totally unexpected (although we are now grateful for the accidental miracle). We might have named them Luke and Fluke.

My sons are tiny, all innocence and devotion, energy and wonder. They are best pals who enjoy many shared enthusiasms, but I have grown to appreciate how their personalities have diverged. One is insightful, physical, and somewhat self-conscious. The other is inventive, artistic, and rather blissfully lacking in self-awareness. Two thousand years ago, Aristotle compared a child's mind to “a tablet which bears no actual writing.” But he sorely underestimated human nature. My children are no more blank slates than was Odysseus when he first sailed from Troy.

But at this point in our lives, I am their journey-guide, and I revel in the role. For a few more years at least, they will view me as the ancients viewed Athena—a paragon of strength and wisdom, able to lift chairs over my head and open pickle jars and explain what happens when the toilet flushes.

“It's a heck of a lot easier for a four-year-old to see me as a hero than for a thirty-four-year-old to see you as one,” I tell Bill.

“That's exactly right,” he nods. “But you lay the foundation from which they launch. One of the primary goals of any parent is to prepare our lambs to be independent.”

My sons will experience great lows and great highs. The valleys beckon, as do the tops of mountains. Will their failings and successes be a reflection on me? In spite of me? Will their estimation of their father diminish as their innocence fades and their wonder weakens? On their own hero's journey, will they heed the call for separation? Will they answer the call to return? And will they reach out to me when they need me?

So I have procreated myself into a position of leadership. My sons look up to me, if only because I am much taller than they. Back when I wore a faux Indian costume and led a parade of preteens around a summer camp, I could pretend on some absurd level that I was a molder of men. But now it is the real thing. And if I want them to love and respect me, I think I have to regain a love and respect for myself.

I can't say it just doesn't matter.

I am near Troy, and a fall appears to be imminent.

I have reached the far corner of Oregon—unspoiled and virtually unoccupied Wallowa County. High into the Wallowa Mountains, past snow-capped Sacajawea Peak, along the Hells Canyon Scenic Byway (those are the kinds of names this region seems to engender—Leap Lane, Starvation Creek, Seven Devils). North on Highway 3, past Joseph Canyon, where the Nez Perce Indians used to spend their winters—a breathtaking vista of great green folds of earth with the late-afternoon sun deepening every crevasse. Tradition has it that Chief Joseph was born and died here, despite his forced travels in between, and I can see why he fought so valiantly to stay. A left turn toward the setting sun, and all of the collected debris on my windshield is suddenly backlit and blinding me, so that the handful of turn-of-the-century buildings that constitute the tiny hamlet of Flora passes by me as if in a dream.

And then the peril begins.

I start down. And down. The road tightens; the pavement becomes gravel; the gravel becomes loose, and then looser. I can hear stones pelting the Aspect's wheel rims and an incessant crunching as if I am driving on broken glass. A sign warns, somewhat paradoxically,
PRIMITIVE ROAD: NO WARNING SIGNS
. Here and there, I spot a lonely black Angus chewing absentmindedly by the roadside. Or a tiny, decrepit shack leaning half-hidden in the trees, remnants of a land rush amid land better suited to black bears and bighorn sheep.

For a few miles, I hug a hillside, enjoying a glorious view of a fertile valley below—wide grassy meadows rippling in the wind. Then comes the real descent. The road turns to dirt and the switch-backs curl tightly, so much so that I soon lose count of the twists and turns. The rains have made the dirt soft in spots. I can feel the Aspect pleading for traction. I can smell the brakes. There is no shoulder, and the drop-off is at least a thousand feet. Were another vehicle to arrive, heading in the other direction…I shake away the notion. Instead, I round a curve and come upon a herd of two dozen cows milling in the road. They stare at me with blank expressions, with no intention of moving. How did they get up here? I inch forward, and they scatter in slow motion. Returning to my white-knuckling, I spot a peregrine falcon hovering overhead, circling buzzard-like.

I suppose the situation is appropriate. Troy and death are forever linked, as the plains surrounding the legendary city are the setting for some of the most graphic and horrific descriptions of warfare in literary history. The violence in the
Iliad
is enough to make Mel Gibson blanch. Fifty-three Achaean soldiers and 199 Trojan warriors perish in Homer's epic, and the poet mentions most of the ill-fated by name and manner of death. They are killed by stomping horse hooves, by rocks to the head, by arrows through the jaw, by swords through the neck. Spears are thrust into hearts, and they quiver with the last heartbeat. Bowels gush. Brains scatter. Teeth spill out. Marrow spurts out of spines.

Homer is at his most skilled when describing some of the least desirable means of demise. Peneleos stabs Iloneus through the eye with a spear, slices his sword through the man's neck, and then lifts up the severed head “like a poppy head on a long stalk.” Menelaus drives his sword into the forehead of Peisandros so that both of his eyes fall “bleeding in the dust at his feet.” Soldiers topple “as a mountain-ash is felled on a far-seen summit” and lie “groaning and clutching at the blood-stained dust.” Sometimes Homer extends similes for miles, as when Hector downs Patroclus “like a wild boar killed by a lion, when both are angry and both are parched with thirst, and they fight over a little mountain pool, until the lion is too strong for the panting boar.”

Often, the poet transitions quickly from the brutality of war to the finality of its intentions, capping a bloody scene with words like “death surging in his eyes took him, hard destiny” or “life and spirit ebbed from the broken man.” In the end, the
Iliad
emerges as a sort of existential tragedy in the sense that Achilles, who is at one point almost inhuman in his destruction and desecration, finally comes to realize that his own inevitable death is what binds him to the rest of humanity.

Which brings me back to me. For the past few days, I have been limping. I cannot for the life of me figure out how it happened, but somewhere along the line I injured my foot, so that if I step in the wrong manner I am rewarded with pain sharp enough to make me gasp and nearly collapse. Later, I will receive a diagnosis: calcific tendonitis in the back of my left foot. In other words, remarkably enough, an inflamed Achilles heel.

Of course, I am already well aware of my mortality. I just didn't expect to confront it on the fringes of Troy. Just a few days into my journey, and already I am risking life and limb (all right, not limb—just a sore foot) in pursuit of…what? A better handle on life? If I die in the process, the irony would just kill me. So would Amy.

On the other hand, there are worse places to give up the ghost. This ranks among the most stunning scenery I have ever seen. In fact, there is a story, often told in this part of the country, of a man who dies and rises to heaven, where he is surprised to find a group of people under lock and chain.

“Who are they?” the man asks Saint Peter.

“Oregonians,” is the reply, “and they want to go back.”

Finally, after some sixteen miles and ninety minutes, my world is flat once more. I arrive at a paved bridge over the Grande Ronde River, Oregon's largest tributary to the Snake River, and a sign:
TROY
2
MILES
. Quails skitter across the road as I come upon a handful of cabins leading to a sort of compound with a main building that looks as though it was constructed from the pines around it. The marquee says,
SHILO INN LODGE—CAFÉ—RV PARK—GAS
. Isolation is the mother of diversification.

This remote piece of paradise is the end of the road (as Troy was, too, for Hector and Achilles and Patroclus and the rest, although certainly not Odysseus). I want this place to have profound origins, to have been named by an explorer with a poet's soul—a man who arrived here, where the Wenaha River feeds into the swiftly flowing Grande Ronde, and envisioned the Hellespont along the river Scamander; a man who saw the great hills rising on either side of this three-thousand-foot-deep canyon and recalled mighty-walled Troy; a man who glanced at the lush pine forests clinging to the sides of those hills and conjured up an image of arrows protruding from Achaean shields.

Alas, the place, originally settled by Mormons at the turn of the century, was most likely named for an early resident. His name was Troy Grinstead.

There are hamlets named Troy in another thirty states, from Maine to California, and most of them have equally pedestrian origins. The Troy in North Carolina was named after a state legislator; the Troy in West Virginia took the name of the city's first postmaster; the one in Montana was actually named for a weight measurement—the troy-ounce—during the gold rush. Several of the Troys were named after the most famous Troy with which the settlers were familiar—that being, of course, Troy, New York.

Even when a Troy is named after the legendary city of King Priam, it still smacks of the unrefined American frontier. The story goes that a Greek railroad worker in Idaho offered a shot of whiskey to anyone who would vote for his choice. Troy received twenty-nine votes. Nine people still voted for Vollmer.

The lights are dim inside the lodge, and a woman saunters in from a back room to check me into the RV park. “Red” it says on her nametag, and in the faint light it looks as if the name might fit.

“Well, that was quite a harrowing drive.”

She looks up from her paperwork. “Did you come down from Flora?”

I nod, and she lets out a little chuckle. “It was pouring rain earlier today. If it had still been raining, that road woulda been really slick.” She offers a half-grin. “You got lucky.”

There are twenty spaces in the RV park; two of them are occupied. I choose lucky number 13 and park the Aspect with its rear bumper almost hovering over the Grande Ronde (French for “big roundabout”). From the window in the rear bedroom, it looks as if I am on a riverboat.

The sun has ducked behind the hills, and the sky has morphed from a robin's-egg blue to an aluminum gray. Above me dozens of tiny swallows—almost Hitchcockian in number—are darting and dive-bombing and gliding in grand arcs. They seem to be moving in layers of concentric circles, some flying low and frenetically, others amazingly high and moving in tranquil sweeps of the sky. The birds are hovering, but this time I resist the temptation to think of buzzards. I made it to Troy.

A lonely campground in Troy, Oregon

Morning arrives to the sound of the Grande Ronde murmuring, and I opt for breakfast at the café, where I am greeted by a half-dozen antlered animals peering from their mountings on a wall, as well as the torso of a bear, teeth bared, claws sharp, ready to pounce. Such is the attraction for most of the visitors here—hunting for elk in the hills, fly-fishing for steelhead in the river.

Some locals, all in their seventies, invite me to sit with them at a small circular table in the center of the room. Sharon and Del are my neighbors at the RV park. They have a house about fifty miles south in the town of Joseph, but they spend most of their time in Troy, where Del pursues steelhead. Ginger and Harvey, dressed in complementary flannel, have a home on the mountain, having ranched in the area for many years. In all, the four of them have been married to their respective spouses a combined ninety-nine years.

“I remember my first impression of Troy,” recalls Harvey with a smile. “I said, ‘Wouldn't you hate to live somewhere where you have to drive up and down like that?'” Harvey turns to Ginger. “Didn't I say that?” He leans back in his chair. “We've lived here since 1987.”

I tell them my tale of that very drive, and they all react with groans and raised arms, as if to tell me I don't know the half of it. They recount how frightened travelers constantly have trouble getting in and out of Troy. There was that time a frozen food truck plummeted over the bank, and a fertilizer truck, too. And that day when the pickup went over the edge, but the horse trailer—with two horses inside—stayed on the road, saving the truck from falling…

The door opens, and in strolls a fellow with longish silver hair and a white goatee, looking a bit like a cross between Kenny Rogers and Kid Rock. He is a good twenty years younger than the rest of them, but he pulls up a chair and slips into the conversation without missing a beat. His name is Dean E. Dean.

“My parents thought I was going to be dean of a college or something,” he says, winking. Having retired from the army after two years in Vietnam, one in Korea and a stint patrolling the Czech and German border, Dean is a hunter, fisherman, and occasional river rafting guide. “If I have to work, I work a little,” he admits. “I've lived here seventeen years, and I'm going to die here.”

Harvey perks up and, to general laughter, asks, “When do you want it?”

Which returns the conversation to the harrowing road into Troy. My breakfast mates start listing the fatalities—that Kessler kid, that couple a few years back, those two folks in the yellow pickup…

“And then there's that kid who put that old Pontiac into Horseshoe Bend,” says Dean. “That car's still there!”

At this, I have to interject, only half joking, “Now I'm scared to leave.”

“It's scarier than that staying here,” says Dean, with another wink. His smile stops halfway, and he shrugs, taking the conversation to the other side of the world. “You never think it's gonna be you. We lost twenty-six men once from rocket attacks—from mortars. But it wasn't me.”

Del gives a grunt of acknowledgment. He was a gunner's mate in the navy in Korea.

“So maybe,” I offer, “the lesson is to make the journey slow and easy…”

Dean nods and clasps his hands behind his head. “Down here, anyone who's in a hurry is in the wrong place.”

The banter bears that out, its pace slow and steady, meandering without real purpose, occasionally taking an unexpected turn—just a leisurely drive down conversational switchbacks. There is no destination; the goal is simply to pass time and revel in commonalities.

Isn't that what my wife keeps telling me? She wants me to enjoy the moment. Take pleasure in life's journey. I always seem to be in such a rush to get to an amorphous Somewhere. Maybe that's why she was in such a hurry for me to leave for Anywhere. Good thing she told me to go to Ithaca before she was inspired to tell me to go to hell.

A stooped elderly man shuffles into the café behind a walker. “That's Bud. We call him the Mayor,” Dean whispers. “He's ninety-five, never been married. He's pretty amazing. He's going in for his last chemo treatment for bladder cancer, and he just bought a computer so he can research volcanoes. The man loves volcanoes.”