Turn Left at the Trojan Horse (5 page)

He calls out to the old man. “You still driving?”

“I been drivin' for eighty years without an accident. Couple o' fender benders, but those don't count,” Bud declares. “My driver's license is good till I'm a hundred and two.”

“How about Ol' Man Brown,” says Sharon, eliciting some knee-slapping. She turns to me. “I'm telling ya, he doesn't drive more than five miles per hour. When he comes by here, you wonder how he keeps the motor running.”

This sort of tittle-tattle appears to be a necessity for survival in Troy, fifty miles from the nearest grocery store, a place so remote that when the garbage truck makes the trek to town every Thursday, it is an occasion for the locals to dump their trash at the inn and stay for a game of cards. So gossip here is sustenance.

“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 will 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?”