Bill Donahue is a writer living in Portland, Oregon.

Tea Party Road Trip
The Washington Post Magazine
October 24, 2010
Edited by David Rowell
© Bill Donahue

“I got some Dramamine that’s supposed to knock me out,” says the elderly woman sitting nearby. “And I’ve got some headphones, too.”

Her husband, nose in a book about the minor prophets of the Old Testament, does not look up, and the bus rolls on, past Springfield, then past smaller communities on Ohio’s green prairie: Limecrest, Brighton, Gillivan. Darkness falls, and the passengers begin chatting and passing little crinkly bags of Cheez-Its and miniature Oreos back and forth across the aisle. Now and again, laughter jingles over the steady blast of the air conditioner.

They met, all 51 of them, at dusk outside of Dayton, in the vast parking lot of the Washington Heights Baptist Church. Most are from Dayton’s suburbs, but they started as strangers united by a common mission. Tomorrow, after their nine-hour journey, they will gather in the bright light of morning near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Precisely 47 years after Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at that vaunted monument, Glenn Beck, the populist Fox TV superstar, will join former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to address his Tea Party faithful at a rally of his own fervent making.

“Restoring Honor,” it’s called. Beck wants his fans to look past President Obama and what Beck calls the “most corrupt” administration ever, and to focus, instead, on the heroism of the nation’s God-fearing founding fathers, who established an exceptional republic, “a shining city on the hill,” by crafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The people on the bus all seem to share Beck’s ardor for those hallowed sheets of parchment.

At the start of the trip, the tour leader gave each rider a souvenir copy of the Constitution and promised to show a film called “Fighting for Freedom: Revolution and Civil War” on the overhead video screens. But I wasn’t quite clear why, exactly, these folks were traveling to Washington, or what they stood for. Until recently, I’d never met a Tea Party supporter. I live in Portland, Ore., amid acupuncture clinics and co-op groceries, in what may be the nation’s most un-Tea Party neighborhood, and I knew only that these patriots composed a political force poised to change the outcome of November races nationwide.

On the bus, I would be embraced and welcomed as a shaggy dog cousin from the Left Coast. I would meet solicitous folks who would invite me into their homes back in Ohio. I’d ask hard questions about health care and taxes and race, and I would hear earnest declarations of religious faith.

Most of the bus riders I meet readily volunteer that they are, like Glenn Beck, devout Christians. The man sitting beside me right now is even built like Glenn Beck. Dale Unroe, a 41-year-old IT consultant for a Cincinnati telecom firm, is big and beefy, but he is also quite soul-searching as he describes his recent decision to spend $500 on a pistol, a .40-caliber Glock. “I’m not a gun person,” he says. “I mean, I went out and shot in the woods in Cub Scouts or whatever, but I’d never taken that deep of an interest in owning a gun until I got involved last year in this whole thing about people being upset with the country. Then, I began thinking, ‘Hey, we need be able to exercise our rights.’ I just felt that, as a citizen, I needed to honor the vision of the founders and, you know, buy a gun. So I purchased the Glock, and I’ve used it once, at a firing range.”

“So, how’s your shot?” I ask.

Unroe laughs. “You know, that’ll take time.” Years, perhaps. Unroe doesn’t like firing ranges. “They’re kind of a little scary,” he says. “Sometimes people misfire. Where we went, they’ve got all these holes in the ceiling, and that’s because people just fired, accidentally, when they were getting their weapon ready.” Unroe casts me an ominous, wigged-out look.

“So what are you going to do with this gun?” I ask.

“Right now,” Unroe says, “I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to make it an effective tool in my life.”

Soon we come to a rest area and pile out into the cool Ohio night. Nearby, there’s another silver bus, thrumming and idling, and beside it, a young man who hails us: “Where ya guys from?”

“Dayton.”

“Awesome! See ya on the Mall!”

**

The writer Greil Marcus anticipated the Tea Party in 2006, arguably, when he said, “America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion. …” In his book “The Shape of Things to Come,” Marcus, a culture critic and rock music historian, goes on to explain that unlike most nations — which came together organically, over time, as a gathering of tribes — America is cohered by ideals: “Its only legitimacy is found in a few pieces of paper. The promises made in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution … were so great that their betrayal was part of the promise.”

The Tea Party is bound by a deep sense of betrayal, and my adventures with it began on a Friday afternoon, when the group’s leader picked me up at my hotel. Chuck Henthorn, 63, is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. He is leathery and compact, with toned pecs and a jaunty, can-do manner. The son of an alcoholic father, he enlisted at 17 because he needed a home. He served in the Air Force for 25 years and made his first-ever foray into political action last year. Henthorn was disgusted with the “extreme left-wing thought process” that he says underlies Obama’s bailout of General Motors; in protest, Henthorn attended a Tea Party rally in Dayton.

For the past few months, he has been coordinating Tea Party buses to Washington for an ad hoc Dayton group, the Freedom Institute, whose Web site, WethePeopleUnderGod.com, features an essay titled “Why the American Flag is Folded 13 Times.”

As we drove around Dayton gathering provisions, Henthorn said he has guided four citizens groups to Washington for rallies. “A lot of these people,” he said, “have never been to Washington before. I teach them a little bit about riding the Metro, about how to stay safe. They’re apprehensive about who they’re going to encounter — the SEIU [Service Employees International Union], the Black Panthers or what have you. I’ve encountered those people before. To me, it’s no big deal. I’ve lived in 11 foreign countries. Islamic extremists killed one of my deputies at his desk in Istanbul. I’ve had a bounty on my own head. I know what it’s like to be a hunted man.”

Henthorn spent most of his career in the Air Force’s “services” division. He ran mess halls, golf courses and gyms, and administrated over winding roads past bunkers and airstrips. He learned to focus on the safety and well-being of others. When we came across a motorcyclist wearing a flimsy T-shirt, Henthorn was disapproving. “I’ve scraped enough accidents off the highway to know that that guy ought to be wearing leather,” he said.

By his own reckoning, Henthorn is a “born leader.” On the bus, he announces, “I am running for U.S. Senate in 2012.”

There is a joyous burst of applause. People holler “Oh, yes!” and “Yee ha!” Then Henthorn continues. “And you may or may not think I’m crazy,” he says, “but five months ago, I got woken up in the middle of the night. The good Lord woke me up when I was sound asleep, folks, and he said, ‘You’re running for office.’ And I said no, and he said yes. We argued for three weeks, folks. Then I said, ‘Okay, I’ll run for township.’ And then we had another two-week fight, over what I was gonna run for. And, finally, we were up to senator or president.”

There’s a soft awestruck murmur from the back of the bus: “Wow!”

“And I said, ‘I’m not going to run for the U.S. presidency,’ ” Henthorn continues. “I’m running for Senate.” He lays out his platform: “I believe that elected officials on the Hill should govern from the state that elected them. They shouldn’t be up there holding hands singing ‘Kumbaya’ in D.C. I believe that we don’t need the Department of Education or the Department of Energy.”

“Or the IRS!” someone shouts.

“Well, I do believe in the flat tax,” Henthorn rejoinders gently.

“I’ve got an extremely different platform,” he’ll tell me later. “Most politicians would see my platform as the kiss of death.”

“So you don’t expect to win?” I say.

“No, no, no. I’m going to win. I’m just not going to be a career politician.”

Henthorn may get many votes. In the current race for Ohio’s open Senate seat, Republican Rob Portman is trouncing Democrat Lee Fisher, perhaps because Portman’s ads savage his foe for his ties to Obama. And the area around Dayton is a Tea Party stronghold. The South Montgomery County Liberty Group can lure 300 people to a meeting. I’ll hear varying assessments as to why this is so.

Henthorn thinks that greater Dayton is patriotic, in part, because sprawling Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is there. One middle-age bus rider, Sue Nannarone, a teacher, remembers hearing the fighter jets flying over her childhood home, cracking the sound barrier. “It made you feel proud,” she says.

Donna Schlagheck, the political science department chair at Dayton’s Wright State University, has a different explanation. “Southwestern Ohio culture is extremely conservative, Bible-belt, patriotic and stunned by globalization’s impact,” Schlagheck will say in an e-mail, noting the closure of several Dayton-area GM plants during the past decade. “And there is no discounting the racism in this Mason-Dixon region. I suspect we’re seeing a convergence of culture, economy and fear of a future represented by a black president.”

On the bus, I ask Ann Hucke, a 57-year-old ambulance billing specialist, about the accusations of racism frequently lofted at the Tea Party. She bristles. “I grew up in Oakland, California, which is probably the most diversified city in the United States,” she says, “and it’s not like I live in a lily-white neighborhood now. There’s Section 8 housing right near me.”

Hucke has grown skeptical, though, especially at work. “We see outrageous abuse,” she says. “It’s the people on Medicaid who cause the problems. These jackasses stub their toe and then call an ambulance. They have such a sense of entitlement.”

Hucke is a Christian who has spent years evangelizing at shopping malls, and by her lights, our once-godly nation has become so decayed — so crime-ridden and secular — that it’s time to draw lines. She supports racial profiling, for instance. “We’ve got Mexican people streaming across the border, and we can’t profile that?” she says. “And who’s flying airplanes into buildings? Muslims! You know how they treat Muslims over in Israel? They stop and search them. Because they’re the ones who are doing it.”

**

When we pull into the Wardman Park Marriott in Woodley Park, I scramble off first and watch the passengers trundle down the steps. There are 26 men here from Ohio and 25 women. Two-thirds appear to be older than 55. I do not see a person of color among them. There is an elderly couple with their 11-year-old grandson, who is wearing a T-shirt from Emmanuel Christian School, where he is a fifth-grader. There is a heavyset and contemplative man wearing a blue T-shirt that says “American Patriot.” It is 5 in the morning, and they are here in the nation’s capital to take a stand.

After a nap, we meet, per the lieutenant colonel’s instructions, in the lobby at 7:30. We make our way to the Metro stop en masse. Quickly, though, our neatly bunched group falls apart. The underground corridors are choked with Tea Party ralliers, and they are hot and fetid with human scent. The crowd is so compressed that it seems on the verge of a stampede, and at Foggy Bottom, it takes nearly half an hour to shuffle toward the exit. Two of the three long escalators are broken, and when a sole traveler moves toward one, he’s halted by a shrill voice in the crowd: “Stay away from that thing! It’s dangerous!”

Noah Weaver, here with his grandparents, is scared. “I felt like I was going to suffocate,” he says later.

“And the sad thing,” adds his grandfather, Paul Weaver, “is that it was totally unnecessary. The city didn’t need to let it happen like that. They weren’t doing their jobs, and I think it was deliberate. They wanted to deter people from going to the rally.” The Weavers will encounter another Metro jam later in the day, at Arlington Cemetery.

“There were police at the entry with assault weapons,” Noah says.

“And I set down a bag on the sidewalk, and they didn’t say anything,” his granddad says. “I could have been a terrorist setting off a bomb.”

Now, at Foggy Bottom, an African American Metro worker comes along and fiddles with one broken escalator. It lurches into motion. The crowd erupts with delight. The Metro guy grins.

And then the lieutenant colonel glides skyward. When he hits street level, there are two peppy young green-shirted volunteer marshals standing at the mouth of the escalator. Henthorn high-fives them both, simultaneously.

***

At the rally, my seatmate, Dale Unroe, unfurls an immense blue flag reading “Don’t Give up the Ship.” It’s a replica of a banner flown by a victorious Naval commodore, Oliver Hazard Perry, on Lake Erie during the War of 1812, and Unroe is in patriotic pique. “Maybe they’ll be flying Beck in a helicopter,” he speculates gleefully. “That’d be really wild to see him just drop down to the stage on a rope.”

There is no helicopter and no rope, however, and the rally itself is rather anticlimactic for the Ohioans. By the time they reach the Mall, at 9:30, it is so swarmed they’re relegated to a spot amid trees, with no view of the stage or the giant video screens. Beck’s opening prayer comes over the loudspeakers pretty well, but for much of the next three hours, it sounds as if the voices have been dunked underwater.

A woman named Kathryn Koehler is especially peeved. A retired Ohio State immunology instructor, Koehler is white-haired and chirpy. As she waits out the rally in a lawn chair, she says: “I can’t hear a word they’re saying. This is kind of bad, isn’t it? And if we have to go back in the heat of that Metro, I’ll die. We won’t do this every weekend, now will we?”

Henthorn busies himself by walking the perimeter of the entire crowd, roughly three miles, in search of portable toilets to which he can direct his charges. The toilets are precious few, with excruciatingly long queues, and when Henthorn comes back, he declaims, “Whoever planned this thing was no logistician.” He stands and listens to the amplified murk for a

We retreat from the crowd and sit down under a tree, where Henthorn tells me that when he was an airplane mechanic in An Khe, Vietnam, in 1966, he was exposed to Agent Orange for four months. “I was sprayed every day,” he says. His joints have ached ever since.

The Department of Veterans Affairs does not recognize Agent Orange as a cause of Henthorn’s joint pain, he says, adding that VA still gave him an 80 percent disability rating. “I accept that,” he says.

“But when you’re really hurting,” I ask, “does your patriotism ever wane?”

Henthorn purses his lips, regarding the question as fair. Then he goes long. “I took an oath, and if this nation calls on me to give my life at the age of 63 or 65 or 70, so be it. I’d go to Afghanistan today, in a microsecond. It’d hurt a lot, but I’d do it.”

By the time the rally is over, the Ohioans have scattered so that Henthorn is alone on the streets of Washington with Dale Unroe. The two men are close friends. Unroe is Henthorn’s communications director and the acting chief of staff for his campaign. Unroe frequently drives up to Dayton from his home in Cincinnati, an hour south, to crash at the comfortable ranch home Henthorn shares with his wife, their youngest son, and three tiny pugs. He maintains Henthorn’s computers, and Henthorn, a father of four, regards him as a wayward fifth child. Unroe giddily phones him after he works out with his personal trainer, a onetime tennis ace from Sweden, and Henthorn, in turn, fondly feigns exasperation. “Yes, Dale,” he drones when Unroe calls. “Okay, Dale. Sure, Dale.”

The two men wander onto Constitution Avenue, and then, they’ll both report later, they run into their political foes. Marching toward them are thousands of anti-Tea Party protesters led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. The vast preponderance are black, and they seem angry that Glenn Beck has come to town on Dr. King’s day. They’re chanting slogans such as, “Martin’s dream is under attack,” and Henthorn and Unroe are aghast.

“They had only one American flag that I could find,” Henthorn will say later, “but they had a huge, huge African American flag.”

As Unroe sees it, one of the protesters’ signs is egregiously impolite in its treatment of Alaska’s foremost celebrity. “It just called her ‘Palin,’ ” he tells me afterward. “It didn’t say ‘Governor Palin’ or ‘Mrs. Palin’ or even ‘Sarah Palin.’ Just ‘Palin.’ It seems they were trying to signify insult.”

“I have a rough-streets kind of instinct,” Unroe continues, “so I didn’t engage the bully.”

But Henthorn pitches a single question to the man with the looming red, black and green flag. “I asked him, ‘Are you an American, too?’” Henthorn says. “I have a problem with people who say, ‘I’m African.’ I think we’re all Americans first. And I think that, if you want to be here as a citizen, you need to participate as a citizen. But I didn’t say all that to him — I’m not that kind of person.”

***

On the ride home Sunday, I sit beside Unroe again. We talk about bicycling and the nasty crashes we’ve had. When Henthorn stands to make a campaign promise over the PA — “I’ll come and speak to any group that invites me” — Unroe cops a high, fluty voice and trills, “Even the Girl Scouts?”

Everyone seems to be in good spirits now, after a full night’s sleep, and Kathryn Koehler, the immunologist, is especially perky. “That was one of the most wonderful weekends I’ve had in a long time,” she says, having revised her earlier assessment. She raves about the killer deal Henthorn scored at the Marriott. “Ninety-nine dollars for a room like that? That Chuck, he knows how to travel!”

Eventually, we stop to eat, and standing outside the bus, I overhear a tall, 50-ish man with a salt-and-pepper mustache talking to Ann Hucke, the ambulance biller. “I was at some liberal church in Maryland,” he says, “and the pastor called the Pilgrims drunkards. So I stood up, right there in the pews, and I pointed my finger at him, and I said, ‘You are a liar!’ They called the cops on me, but I don’t care. The Pilgrims were godly people!”

Hucke has been listening with an admiring grin. She hugs the man intently, and I follow him inside. He continues, apocalyptic and wrought. “This country is under God’s wrath,” he says. “When a nation turns from God, God brings judgment. Look at Katrina, in New Orleans. Look at California and all the sodomy they have there. Why do you think they had those wildfires?”

The man says he is a beekeeper by trade but won’t give his name. His voice is steady and cool, and as he speaks, he looks away from me, out the window, gnawing a toothpick. Beside him is his father-in-law, a man named Herbert Joyner, who now turns to me: “If you were to die today, if you were to die today, do you know where you would spend eternity?”

The beekeeper answers the question for me by conjoining two verses from Revelation. “If your name is not written in the Lamb’s book of life,” he says, “you will be cast into the lake of fire.”

I feel a tap on my shoulder. Paul Weaver, the grandfather, has tears running down his face. He is weeping so profusely he cannot speak.

Ann Hucke leans toward him and gently touches his knee. “Go ahead,” she says.

What Weaver wants to talk about is how he found Christ. Working on the line at the International Harvester plant in Springfield, Ohio, 30-odd years ago, Weaver felt an urge at break time to step into an empty room by himself. “I started praying,” he says. “I asked God for forgiveness, and then it was almost like a movie: I could see that shimmering light. And it changed my life!” Weaver looks directly at me, his hands quivering as they urgently carve at the air. “We’re not trying to make you uncomfortable here,” he says. “I’m really sorry if it feels like that. We just want to help you.”

***

In the days that follow, as I linger in Dayton, I keep thinking of how caring Paul Weaver was, and I keep being treated to the same sort of earnest caring. One morning, Henthorn takes me out to Wright-Patterson and shows me where the Air Force’s B-52 crews once slept, in an underground bunker he calls a “mole hill.” Later, we dine with his 22-year-old son, Zack, who works at Staples. Zack aspires to serve his dad as a security officer, once Henthorn is elected as senator. “I’m excited about what my dad’s done for this country,” Zack says. “He cares for its people, and I’m proud of him. He’s my dad.”

Eventually, I get a clandestine call from a 62-year-old retiree I met on the bus. John Holdren once worked for the Air Force as a civilian, in a division that bought special ops airplanes. Now, he raises pet rats. Holdren keeps 10 rats in cages in a spare bedroom and devotes two hours a day tending to them. He wants to show them to me. Problem is, his wife doesn’t want a reporter in the house.

“Can we be a little sneaky here?” he asks over the phone. “My wife’s about to go out, and when she does, I’ll leave the porch light on. That’ll be your signal that it’s okay to knock.”

I rush to Holdren’s neighborhood, but as I’m killing time strolling past stately homes and well-manicured lawns while I wait for the porch light, a woman drives by, staring me down. A minute later, Holdren calls. “Here’s the thing,” he says gamely. “You’ve been spotted, but it’s my house, too. Why don’t you come on over?”

The rats are in the living room, scampering about in a cardboard box set amid a few dark blue leather chairs. In tender detail, Holdren describes how he ministers to the animals’ injuries and illnesses. “I give them antibiotics,” he says. “If they have bronchial problems, I work with a nebulizer. I take them to the vet for surgery sometimes.”

“Sounds like the Obama health plan,” I crack.

“Well,” Holdren says, smirking, “it’s paternalistic. They’re rats.”

Holdren is an eager-eyed man who trades in ideas. He grew up in an “all-white town,” he says: Westerville, Ohio. He was such a fan of Barry Goldwater and his libertarian allies that during a 1962 election, Holdren wore holes into a new pair of shoes in a single evening skipping up and down porch steps, delivering leaflets. Today, he spends four hours a day tuning into conservative media: Fox News, Drudge Report and NationalReview.com. He voices his political views with precision, as though they were mathematical theorems.

“I’m not particularly oriented toward embracing other cultures. I like American culture,” he says before adding, “Sharia law is not compatible with the Constitution. For starters, under sharia law, it’s legal to stone a woman to death. And the intent of Islam is world domination. If allowed, they will bomb and butcher their way to success. Their goal is to either convert you or tax you into submission or kill you.” Soon, Holdren says that back in the ’70s, at the University of Kentucky, he had Muslim friends. “Two brothers studying pharmacy,” he says. “They were Palestinians, and they used to joke about how they carried bombs in their back pockets.”

“What were their names?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Holdren says, chuckling. “They all have, like, five names. We need to control immigration,” he continues. “If you’re willing to say you’re Muslim, you need to leave. We are going to fight them in a big way, and we need to strike them in a way that’s memorable. Myself, I wanted us to make a nuclear strike after 9/11.”

Before I leave, I use Holdren’s bathroom. It’s immaculate, and on the wall by the toilet, there’s a small, oval-shaped wooden sign decorated with painted flowers. It says, “Be ye kind one to another.”

The Atlantic
September 2010
Edited by Tim Lavin
© Bill Donahue

WHEN HE WENT MARAUDING about the known world some 800 years ago, Genghis Khan almost certainly never slept on a bed scattered with rose petals. He was a hard guy. So it seems fitting that the journey east from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, toward a 131-foot stainless-steel statue of the infamous Mongol warlord is a stark experience. The roadside is barren of trees and unpeopled, and brown rubbly mountains stretch into the distance. When you travel the 35-mile route on a bicycle, as I did recently, the headwinds can be cruel.

Still, I pedaled on, for Genghis Khan is Mongolia’s future. After his conquests were downplayed in the history books during seven decades of de facto Soviet rule, the nomad who ruled an empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to Siberia reemerged in 1990, as democracy was being established. Today, he is a poor nation’s avatar of hope—and he’s becoming a major industry.

In Ulaanbaatar, you can drink Chinggis beer at the Grand Khaan Irish Pub. (For obscure reasons, the local spelling differs from the Western.) The Genco Tour Bureau, an Ulaanbaatar-based company, has spent about $7 million on the Chinggis Khaan Statue Complex, a commercially minded homage where the giant steel Chinggis will soon be flanked by an artificial pond, a skating rink, and 200 small gers, or round tents, for paying campers. Nearby, Genco has also built a 13th-century living history museum, sort of a Colonial Williamsburg on the steppes, where artisans make felt by beating wool with wood sticks. And at the Chinggis Khaan Golf Country Club, the greens are tiny, bright patches of artificial turf on the infinite brown.

With a poignant hopefulness, Mongolia, population 2.7 million, is trying to establish a market economy in the deep shadow of neighboring China. One morning when I was looking for a pastry in Ulaanbaatar, I strolled into a grocery store and found all the bakery workers watching me with quiet, expectant pride. “You are our first clee-ent,” the manager told me, explaining that it was opening day. “We are so honored.” Down the street, Louis Vuitton opened its first Mongolian outlet last year, and Hugo Boss likewise set up a shop for the Mongolian elite who have grown rich mining gold. I stood beneath an ad for a Mongolian department store— I AM ALL NEW, read the slogan, next to a picture of a beautiful woman—and then the wind kicked up, uprooting a small road sign that came catapulting toward my head, pole and all.

Mongolia doesn’t quite have the modernity thing down yet. It remains a poor country where the electricity is constantly flickering, even in the capital, and it’s so dependent on ranching and sheepherding that last winter’s dzud, or unusually heavy snow, was still wreaking havoc on the economy when I visited in May. The tourist map I bought depicted what I swear were phantom roads. When I tried to follow one, I ended up in a cow pasture, being chased through a snowstorm by barking dogs.

On my way to the statue, I got lost. No road signs pointed there yet, and the only pedestrian I found outside Ulaanbaatar was an old man gathering horse dung for heating fuel. He could not help me. Finally, I found a gas station, built in 2009, where the attendants wore matching red-and-blue uniforms and sat inside a glass-and-steel booth.

“Chinggis?” I said.

“Ah!” They smiled and pointed.

A few miles later, I came upon a truck driver, who’d pulled over to pee. “Chinggis?” I said.

When he pointed, I saw it—a glimmer of silver down the hill. Genghis Khan sits astride a stallion, grimacing as he clutches a gold-tinted stainless-steel whip. The statue’s pedestal is a columned, white-granite rotunda, and everything inside the rotunda is calibrated to impress and make money. There’s a collection of Bronze Age artifacts, a screening room wherein a stentorian video (with English subtitles) heaps praise on the Mongolian construction industry, and a luxurious conference room and restaurant, both empty when I visited. The landscaping is brutal: not a tree or bush in sight. The black iron fence surrounding the complex goes on for more than a mile. Cumulatively, the place shouted, “Watch out, folks— Mongolia is back on its horse!” But I detected an undertone of desperation too. A more plaintive voice seemed to whisper, “Believe in us, please. We’re trying very hard.”

I snickered for a moment, but then, riding home, I felt guilty for laughing. I remembered a kid I had met earlier, while lost on a back road, named Ertene Bulgan. He was a shepherd, with a shaved head and a stud earring, and he invited me into his grandparents’ ger. Later, he drew a map of his world into the dirt with a stick. “Home,” he said, pointing. Then he drew a little rectangle. “School.” Then, with a solemn nod, he said, “Chinggis.” And he drew a long road, hooking into the distance, toward a steel marvel he hoped to visit one day.

THE TRAIL TO NEVERLAND

Backpacker
July 2010
Edited by Dennis Lewon
© Bill Donahue

There’s something hallowed-looking about the faces of people the moment they step through the door of Galehead Hut, 3,800 feet up in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire. They’ve arrived there, invariably, on foot, over steep, rock-rubbly trails dotted with lichen-specked cairns and roots and stubby, wind-stunted evergreens. And they’ve traveled, often, up through cold mountain air and wisps of fog and lashing outbursts of rain.

By the time they reach Galehead–a rustic hikers’ bunkhouse and mess hall 4.6 miles from the nearest road–they are weary. But they’re also sort of floating, for they have wriggled free of the niggling abstractions of everyday life and accomplished something solid. They’ve traveled here on their feet. Their boots are dirty and their faces glisten with sweat, and they’re somehow alight with such pure happiness that, watching, you think, “That person is good.”

Whenever someone stumbles through Galehead’s front door at dinnertime, two dozen or so people at the long dining tables cheer–the applause is instinctive. Indeed, sometimes when you are merely waiting for someone to show up at Galehead, a certain aura of celebrity builds up around him, particularly if the new arrival has ever served on the hospitality staff–or the “croo”–in any of the eight shelters of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s White Mountains hut system, which was established in 1888.

Croo workers are almost invariably college students or recent grads, and by some measures they’re simply $7.25-an-hour wage slaves in a backwater of the tourism industry. The 49 caretakers who labor in the Whites’ huts every summer are tasked with cooking guests’ meals, selling them souvenir water bottles, and, every few days, wielding a stick, so as to stir the huts’ composting toilets. But their real mission is spiritual. It’s their charge to keep alive the delight that imbues each hut arrival, even after the dining hall starts festering with the fetid scent of wet, blister-bloody wool socks.

Hut workers sing and play guitar. They perform skits. And carrying 50-pound loads of food for the guests, they bound up mountain paths with lightning grace. Often, they become legends within the tight croo community–and on a chill, gray afternoon at Galehead last June, the hut’s five resident caretakers gather in the large, airy kitchen and await the arrival of two such legends: Gates Sanford and Alex May. Both are hut alumni, and collectively they’ve served seven seasons in the White Mountains.

“Alex May is coming?” one staffer says. “No way.”

“Yes, Alex May,” says his colleague, with a hushed reverence. “Alex May. And Gates too.”

I’m familiar with this sort of reverence, for 30-odd years ago, when I was a scrawny grade-schooler hiking hut-to-hut through the White Mountains with my mother and sister, I regarded the hut workers as looming gods–as lords over a surreal alpine kingdom where you could actually have snowball fights in July. More recently, as I’ve aged, I’ve wondered how a bunch of college students (children, essentially, from my antique perspective) could possibly run the nation’s oldest network of mountain shelters. The responsibilities are ominous. Hut staffers double as search-and-rescue crews, and they function as lifeguards to the myriad unprepared hikers who shamble up some of the nation’s most punishing trails. The White Mountains are steep, and devoid of switchbacks. There are frequent summer hailstorms and the wind can gust to more than 200 miles per hour. Since 1849, more than 130 people have died on the slopes of the Whites’ highest peak, Mt. Washington.

The threats are real, to be sure. But for the most part these young adults spend their transformative years working like glorified counselors in an extended version of summer camp. Does that mean they’re growing up fast, or not at all?

It’s not easy getting a job on croo. This year, more than 130 people applied for 20 open positions. And the appeal of the work is not immediately obvious. There you are, up in the mountains, cut off from all frontcountry pleasures–Facebook, school buds, beach parties, whatever–and obliged (at least at Galehead) to live for 10 weeks in a cramped 10-foot-by-10-foot bunk room with four other staff, each of whom often goes more than a week without bathing. (Croo members work 11 days on, three days off.) The social scene can get confining and testy.

Still, life is delightfully slow-paced. Workers help out with breakfast and dinner, and typically have afternoons off. In their free time, they’ll spend hours handwriting letters to friends, or updating journals, or enjoying picnics on mountaintops. They hike almost daily, and on my first stay at Galehead, Nick Anderson decides to bust out and climb a trail that scales 1,100 feet–ascending South Twin Mountain in less than a mile.

Anderson, 21, is Galehead’s assistant hutmaster, and a rather serious youth who often wears a pin-striped, blue-and-white oxford shirt while interacting with guests. (“You look fantastic,” Sanford tells him, “straight out of the summer Polo catalog.”) Short and sturdy, with curly black hair and a frequent black stubble on his chin, he does look quite dashing. He’s a fast hiker, too. Once, he made it to Greenleaf Hut–7.7 miles away, and over two mountains and through a trickling, sole-soaking cascade–in a blazing two hours and 45 minutes. Still, I invite myself along on his afternoon jaunt.

“OK,” says Anderson.

I follow. He lollygags for the first 50 feet or so and then, with no preamble, he turns his stride into a leap and begins hurling himself up the mountain, knee to chest, knee to chest. I’m in decent shape; I keep up. But I move with a desperate and gasping intent, gritting my teeth against twinges of pain in my knees, and Anderson just flows up the hill, chitchatting, oblivious to how lucky he is to possess fresh, unblemished cartilage.

Anderson is light on his feet, at all times. One night, when 10 little girls come to the hut with their parents, he summons them all to a table after dinner, leans toward them, and, in hushed, spooky tones, tells them ghost stories. The girls all giggle and squeal–and then, afterward, they linger about him, burbling, as though he is the drummer for the Jonas Brothers.

Working in the huts, it strikes me, is kind of like being in Neverland: You can stay on only as long as you remain young, unburdened by the worry and self-consciousness that crust on over time. And as with any fairy-tale landscape, arcane mores apply. Every summer, for instance, hut workers seek to distinguish themselves by “packing a century”–that is, by lugging a full 100 pounds into a hut, usually with a plain wooden packboard. But the most critical ritual is the raid. Half seriously, half in jest, the croo of one hut will invade another hut, sometimes “stealth raiding” at night and sometimes executing daytime “power raids” replete with all the sinewy horseplay of professional wrestling: chokeholds, half-nelsons, full-body pins. The object, always, is to steal previously heisted detritus attached to the walls of the invaded dining room: old road signs, for instance, and antique skis.

The practice of raiding began soon after the first AMC hut opened in 1888. In the 1940s and ’50s, the prize booty was a human skull, “Daid Haid,” lifted from an abandoned logging camp. Later, in more politic times, an airplane propeller, recovered from a high-mountain crash, was coveted above all else. Today, the grail is a long wooden rowing oar that was used, allegedly, in the 1972 Olympic Games. As the summer begins, the oar is at Zealand Falls Hut. The croo at every other hut wants it. “Once you have the oar,” Galehead staffer Chelsea Alsofrom, 22, tells me, “you don’t really need anything else.” Raid strategies and other clandestine plans are often hatched in the privacy of the kitchen, away from the guests. There, after dinner one night, Sanford unveils a plastic liter jug of Canadian Hunter whisky, along with a T-shirt that features his name (Gates “Rolling Thunder” Sanford) and the slogan “Get Hunted.” In Sanford’s day, Canadian Hunter was so celebrated among croos that one hut worker, a burly, mustachioed youth, was known simply as “The Canadian Hunter.”

“This stuff is vile, by the way,” Sanford says. “We did a taste test between it and Old Crow, and Old Crow won.”

It’s quite possible that Sanford could afford a tonier brand. He prepped at Milton Academy, and his grandmother owns a house in the Hamptons. Which shouldn’t be surprising. The huts have always attracted well-to-do Easterners. The first staffs were heavily represented by Dartmouth and Harvard, and today the huts still offer up-and-comers a chance to fly free of expectations–to get muddy and loopy up in the mountains.

The bottle goes round. No one gets anywhere near wasted. But toward the end of the night, Teschner wears a warm grin. “I’m feeling,” he says, “a little Canadian poached.”

The next time I visit Galehead, in early July, Teschner is off-duty, at home in Haverhill, New Hampshire. Anderson is hanging out in the kitchen. I’m a little hesitant to go in there, though. The kitchen is the one refuge where the croo doesn’t have to be all cheery and customer servicey, and sometimes when a guest peeks his head in there (to ask for tea water, say), it’s as though he’s crossed an electrified line. Anderson has been working for more than a week straight. Still, I decide to venture into the kitchen, where he’s reading a book. “Yeah?” he asks. I begin awkwardly, asking if being up in the mountains is losing its luster now, midsummer.

“No,” Anderson says. “I mean, has your life suddenly become less exciting for you because you were alive last year?”

I kind of move my jaw for a second, without speaking, and then I retreat to the dining room, intrigued. All along, I’ve been looking for little explosions–for telling failures in the Galehead machine. But I’ve seen very few, and minor ones at that. One morning, Sanford repeats the name of some woman and Anderson storms out of the room, irked. After another morning’s breakfast rush, Chelsea Alsofrom is supposed to tidy the bunk rooms. When she blows it off, the hutmaster, 22-year-old Katherine Siner, rolls her eyes and says, “Having this job is like being a mom. Someone has to be responsible.”

But mostly the hut glows with authentic, transcendent joy. On Bastille Day, 11 older women–one-time Girl Scout leaders who call their group “Babes in the Woods”–rise from the table and sing “La Marseillaise” before packing up and leaving a generous tip. (“We’re mothers,” explains the Babes’ leader, a lawyer. “We’re happy to know that there are young people up here, levitating over the trails.”)

The croo never imposes themselves on anyone’s holiday, but they sprinkle the festivities with good cheer of their own. “Hi, I’m Luke,” Teschner says one night during the staff’s standard after-dinner spiel, “and one interesting fact about me is that I’ve gone skiing in Africa. It’s a true story.”

“Hi, I’m Nick,” Anderson says, “and today, hiking, I stepped over a dead moose.”

It’s their job, of course, to be cheery, and they pull it off 99 percent of the time. Indeed, one night when I sit down with Siner, the hutmaster, she speaks in relentlessly upbeat tones. “I’ve learned so much in this job,” she says, “about responsibility, about working with other people, about guest services.”

I never would have talked like that in college. I would have been skulking in my bunk, reading Nietzsche as I silently fumed over the Orwellian implications of the huts’ communal dining scheme. Or, more likely, my application would have been nixed. The AMC is careful and somewhat image-conscious in its management of the huts. The club’s publicist specifically routed both me and another reporter toward Siner. He enjoined me from going on a raid, and before my first hike into Galehead, he met me at the trailhead and gently pleaded for sympathy. “If they say anything crazy,” he said of the staff, “remember: They’re young.”

The publicist didn’t hike in with me, though, and the AMC never sent any busybody, iPhone-toting “hospitality specialist” up to Galehead to ride herd on the crew. The graying administrators seem to recognize that the huts’ magic lies in surrendering control to the kids. The whole show is like a mountain flower in springtime–you don’t want to mess with its loveliness.

One morning at 6:30, Siner and another hut worker, Elizabeth Waste, stand in the hall outside the bunk rooms, silhouetted in the soft gray light coming in the fogged-over window, and play a wake-up song, “Angel from Montgomery.” The folk classic is a sad and plaintive tune, a story told in the voice of an old woman at the end of her life. “Just give me one thing that I can hold on to,” it goes. “To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

The two young women sing softly and with tentative care, Siner holding the lyrics out before them. And as the guests begin traipsing out of their bunks (silent, unshaven, stooped and pottering about, in old long johns speckled with odd scraps of bark), I am moved to reflect that people have been waking like this, to the sound of the human voice, in the AMC’s huts for more than 120 years. The whole virtuous endeavor of sallying forth into the fresh air of New England’s high mountain climes began back when men hiked in knickers and women in long woolen dresses, and it is still going on. Kids are still playing mandolin and singing up in the mountains with sweet and earnest intent–it’s one thing to hold on to.

“We’ll have breakfast for you at 7,” Siner says, wrapping up. The salt smell of sizzling bacon wafts out of the kitchen, and the guests gather their toothbrushes and limp along toward the bathroom and its cold-water taps.

By midsummer, the croo settles into a veteran rhythm. Teschner starts reading a history book on Iran. He sets an easel up in the hut’s storage loft and begins painting the sylvan view from the window. Meanwhile, speculation mounts as to which hut will end the summer with the oar. Commonsense favors Lakes of the Clouds, the biggest hut, with 10 workers; Lonesome Lake, very small and remote, is a dark horse. But then Galehead bursts into dominance in late July, during a complex series of battles. To do it all justice, I’d need to conjure a hoary military historian with a wooden pointer, gesturing at a roll-down map.

In brief: One morning, on the short-wave radio, Anderson overheard that two croos were conspiring to converge on Zealand, to seize the oar. The invaders’ huts would, of course, be understaffed, so the Galeheaders split up and power-raided both of them, garnering an oversized wooden spoon and a few dilapidated signs. The oar ended up at Greenleaf, and one afternoon Anderson and Alsofrom hiked there, timing their arrival for lunchtime, when only one staffer was present. Anderson wore a skirt for the occasion. He and Alsofrom pinned their foe to the floor. “She fought like hell,” Anderson says. “She squeezed Chelsea’s head in a door pretty hard, and she kept kneeing me.” A crowd of hikers gathered. “People were videotaping us,” says Alsofrom.

After Anderson wrenched the oar from the wall, he gave it to Alsofrom and together they rushed it three miles downhill, to a parking lot, where Teschner was waiting with a getaway car. The next day, the croo of another hut, Lonesome Lake, raided Galehead, led by a large and swashbuckling red-bearded young man whom Teschner calls “the Jack Black of the hut system.” Johannes Griesshammer, 21, pried through a rope lashing Galehead’s front door shut and shouted, “Let the onslaught begin!”

But Galehead had been tipped off, and the staff had hidden the oar in the woods atop measly Galehead Mountain. Is this legal?

“Semi-legal,” Alsofrom tells me, days later, still gloating. “We’re like monsters. We steal and then we lie. It’s awesome.”

When I go back to the Whites, it’s a bright, warm day in early August, and I meet Teschner at the Gale River trailhead. He’s on a mission. He’s hiking up Galehead Mountain to retrieve the hidden oar. “I just ate a whole pint of Ben & Jerry’s,” he says, walking toward me. “Let’s see how that goes.”

We start walking. Teschner’s hair is a little longer now, less bristly, and he has patches of duct tape stuck on his shoulders, covering an oozing yellow melange of friction sores. Two days earlier, he had packed his first century, laboring up the Gale River Trail bearing 110 pounds. “When I first came here,” he says, “I thought carrying 50 pounds up the trail time after time was going to crush me. I didn’t see how I could do it. But I broke the trail down mentally, into sections–this river crossing, that rocky pitch. During the last quarter-mile, I felt like I was going to collapse. I could hardly put one foot in front of the other, I was so tired. But I never questioned that I was going to make it. I’ve gained confidence this summer.”

I ask what he means. “Well,” he says, “I’ve definitely become a better cook. I’ve made peanut butter bars and apple spice cake; the other night, I cooked pasta primavera. I’m thinking about opening my own restaurant some day.” The scheme is vague. He says something about a “tiki bar in the U.S. Virgin Islands” and then adds, “I still think the cookbook is awesome.”

“Oh,” I say. I guess I’d hoped for deep insights–for dispatches from a mind finding its way toward cool adult poise. But the process of growing up is subtle and incremental, and Teschner is still ensconced in the woods of it. He cannot offer up any sweeping perspectives.

We cut across the river. Teschner stoops low to a cold pool of water and says, “Usually when I get here, I dunk my head in. It’s refreshing. The way you do it is you put your hands on these two rocks here, like you’re doing a push-up, and then you kind of lower…” He goes underwater and then he pulls his head out and shakes it, so the water flies off the tips of his hair. Then he waits as I dunk my head into the icy river.

When we get up on Galehead Mountain, the sun shines brightly and the oar is fairly visible in a thicket of trees. The wood on it is a little chewed up, and its metal paddles are bent, but the grail is now solely in Luke Teschner’s care. He isn’t giddy about it, but he does seem quite pleased. “Here we are in the middle of the woods,” he says, “and there’s stealth treasure lying around.” He shoulders the oar, which is surprisingly light, and starts down the tree-lined trail, carefully. The oar has a wide turning radius.

When Teschner reaches the hut, he fetches a long ladder and leans it against the dining-room wall. He climbs it and then pounds in some nails up near the ceiling, for the oar to sit on. Anderson stands at the base, holding the ladder and giving instructions: “Yeah, another nail there. Good, good.” Teschner bends the nails tight around the oar handle. He balances a cache of butter knives on a thin ledge above, so that a cascade of cutlery will rain down on any would-be marauders. And then he sets a large sign–”Dog Walk,” it reads–dangling below so it will fall like a guillotine if the oar ever is touched. “Ah yes,” Anderson says, peering up. “This is evil!”

By my reckoning, Galehead is toast: It’s only a matter of time, it seems, before invaders will come along to deliver the Galeheaders a large serving of humble pie. Indeed, one day over lunch, Johannes Griesshammer, aka Jack Black, pronounces ominously that he will blitz for the oar “in the very near future.”

I wait. But as August wears on, the thrill of raiding–and being up in the magical huts–finally wears thin. “It takes a lot of social energy being here,” Alsofrom says. “It can only last so many weeks and then you want summer to end.”

On August 20, with the oar still up on the wall at Galehead, the summer croos come down out of the mountains. Life as the rest of us know it resumes. Autumn arrives, eventually, and myself, I keep thinking about the sublime, long-ago joy of being up in the Whites amid blinding patches of snow as the summer sun baked down upon my bony little kid back. I begin hatching this theory that the most important part of the whole hut experience involves remembering the place and wanting to go back. And that’s when I think of Emily Taylor, the hut veteran who visited Galehead on my first night there.

Taylor is 24, and a small wire of a person, black-haired, tiny, and tautly muscular, with this intense, bouncy ebullience about her. She came to Galehead straight from her job at an organic farm in Portland, Maine, driving three hours right after work and then beginning her hike in at 7:30 p.m., bearing a six-pack of beer.

“I’m so happy to be here,” Taylor said, arriving, “so happy.” But she told a wistful story about her previous summer, her sixth and last season in the huts. It came right after her graduation from college. She was the hutmaster at Carter Notch, and Chelsea Alsofrom was on her crew. “I have so many great memories,” she said. “When it rained, I’d sit on the kitchen floor on a blanket with Chelsea and listen to James Taylor on an iPod. But I was stressed out, running a hut, not knowing what I was going to do in the fall.”

“You saved your senior spring college freak-out for the hut,” Alsofrom said. “It felt like you were having an existential crisis.”

“I was just feeling,” Taylor said, “like I couldn’t do another summer. A goal of my life had been completed, and I felt like I was being torn out by the roots.

“I wish I still had the energy for this job,” Taylor continued. “I wish that I was still OK with sharing my home space and that I could set out silverware again, without feeling like I was going to scream. I wish I could go back to being 19. I loved the huts; I’ve felt so at home here. But it’s time to move on.”

Luke Teschner was lingering by the stove as Taylor reckoned with the hard reality of growing a little older, of no longer belonging where once she was so comfortable. Does the sting of her story register on him?

He doesn’t remember, he says when I call him this spring. But he is looking forward to going back to the huts in June. He’ll be at Madison this time. “I’m pretty excited,” he says. “Madison is the oldest hut in the system. It’s above treeline. It’s notoriously the hardest hut to get to. The hike in is steep, so you tend to get more hardcores there: people who really know what they’re doing. It’ll be good. It’s gonna be a good summer.”

SEMPER YOUNGSTOWN

Inc.
May 2010
Edited by Dan Ferrara
© Bill Donahue

There are no hotels in Youngstown, Ohio, population 82,000, and there is no real airport, either. Even before you get there, you have a sense of the place as somehow gutted of commerce. But then you roll into the city, over the highway, and you shudder a bit, for the skyline is sublime. Here is the Central Tower, a graceful 17-story art deco sliver that narrows, à la the Empire State Building, as it reaches its peak. Here, beside it, is the older, more earthbound Huntington Bank building, with its white terra cotta façade.

Both of these structures were built for the ages, before 1930, when Youngstown was among the three largest steel producers in the U.S., with a population of 170,000 and dozens of foundries. Wealthy financiers lived upwind from the smokestacks then, in Doric-columned manses on Millionaire’s Row. The mansions are still there.

You don’t really apprehend how desolate Youngstown has become until you pull off the highway and begin navigating the potholes of Southern Boulevard. Here’s a concrete-block convenience store with bars on the windows. On some streets nearby, up to 40 percent of the houses are vacant, and down the hill, 200 yards or so from the mayor’s office, the brick, hangarlike Wean Steel plant stands vacant amid high, tawny grass. With a 13.7 percent unemployment rate and 3,500 vacant buildings, Youngstown is depressed, failed postindustrial America in distilled form.

Keep driving. Turn left onto the city’s main drag, West Federal Street,―and then, eventually, you see something weird: a newish green awning, printed with shiny metal lettering. Youngstown Business Incubator, it says. Inside is a guy, Jim Cossler, who calls himself the incubator’s “chief evangelist.” Cossler is a scrappy fellow, 55 years old and sparely built, balding, with a habit of ducking out onto the street to furtively light cigarettes, his hands fluttering a bit as he cups the match in the wind.

Cossler has a rap about how Youngstown is perfectly suited to become a mecca for producers of business-to-business software. “When you buy software,” he says, his voice a bit high and nasal, “do you ever turn over the box and say, ‘I wonder where this was made?’You don’t! Nobody cares where software is made. And you can make software in Youngstown, Ohio, inexpensively. You can hire a software programmer in Youngstown for $50,000, and that’s a good salary.

Cossler has been the CEO of the Business Incubator since 1998. The State of Ohio now gives him $375,000 each year, and he uses the money exclusively to nurture tech-related companies. The YBI houses seven start-ups and gives the newer ones free rent, free utilities, and free Wi-Fi and phone service. It also gives guidance to nine companies that sit off-campus in greater Youngstown as they develop tech products. A framed photo outside Cossler’s office, by the elevator, bespeaks the dream. It captures the original Microsoft team in 1978 — a baby-faced, beak-nosed Bill Gates flanked by several furry-bearded hippies. At first, it registers as a little absurd.

But attached to the YBI building is a symbol of hope — a brand-new 30,000-square-foot building in chrome and glass. This is the headquarters of Turning Technologies, which last year grossed $33.5 million making an audience response system used in academic settings and on shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Turning began in 2002, under Cossler’s stewardship, in a small room at the incubator. Today, it has 173 employees, who work amid airy, high-ceilinged rooms with exposed brick walls and aluminum ductwork.

Cossler is especially proud that Turning stayed next door. “In most business incubators,” he says, “when companies are successful, you graduate them, and then they move away and work in isolation. That’s a horrible idea. We’re open-source.”

It’s Cossler’s hope that everyone on the Turning/Business Incubator campus can share ideas by, say, advising one another on how to display wares at a trade show, or participating in what he calls “your baby is ugly” meetings — that is, candid product-review sessions. He wants Turning’s triumph to rub off, and he wants to reverse a grim brain drain: For decades now, Youngstown’s brightest youths have fled town. He wants to call home what he calls “the Youngstown diaspora,” to sprout a cerebral local culture and a computer industry that can support 5,000 jobs on the YBI campus.

Cossler is by no means there yet. The seven companies that sit beside Turning in the incubator collectively boast 62 employees. They are reluctant to share revenue figures, but by Cossler’s estimate, they grossed a total of about $3.5 million in 2009. Still, there are intimations of glory. Youngstown’s U.S. representative, Tim Ryan, keeps an office inside the incubator. In the past seven years, he has secured more than $23 million in federal grants for tech projects involving YBI’s portfolio companies.

Meanwhile, Cossler is scheming to expand the campus, which includes three buildings and 83,000 square feet. He gave me a tour, pointing first at a weathered brick warehouse — Furnitureland of Youngstown, read the fading sign — and then at an open pit alongside West Federal Street. “Here,” he said, gazing down, “we’re going to build a bocce court, or maybe a barbecue area where everyone on campus can mingle.”

We were out on the sidewalk, and it was winter. A scrim of windblown snow skittered about, accentuating the bleakness. But still, there was a new martini bar nearby and a swank Italian restaurant that YBI’s workers now frequent at lunchtime. And if you squinted a bit, you could actually see it happening — the rebirth of Youngstown.

Youngstown died on September 19, 1977. That was Black Monday. Forty-one hundred workers at the Campbell plant of Youngstown Sheet and Tube, the city’s biggest employer, showed up that morning to learn they had been laid off, permanently. A spirit of fear and anomie had been seeping into Youngstown for years, as the U.S. steel industry withered and the local foundries, once owned by the lions of Millionaire’s Row, got sold off to out-of-town conglomerates. Now, despair set in. By the early 1980s, Youngstown had one of the highest arson rates in the country. Sheet and Tube had shuttered another plant. U.S. Steel and Republic Steel left Youngstown, too. All told, greater Youngstown lost about 50,000 jobs in steel and related industries.

It was a story that repeated itself all over the rust belt, but Youngstown was particularly demoralized — and fragmented. In his recent book, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, organizational theorist Sean Safford celebrates how Allentown, Pennsylvania, a similarly ravaged steel town, reinvented itself in the 1980s, as “community-based divisions” melted and city leaders formed a “bridge across ethnic, class, and indeed geographical divisions” to develop a new, diverse economy driven by tech start-ups. Youngstown, Safford writes, was “balkanized.” Members of the Garden Club didn’t talk to entrepreneurs. A few power brokers (namely, the Garden Club bunch) held the purse strings, marginalizing everyone else. The place was lorded over by the Mafia and often called Murdertown USA. And Jim Cossler felt the sting. In 2002, he told Safford that the city’s mayor had never even set foot in YBI’s office. “The community isn’t behind the incubator,” Cossler said, in a rare moment of moping. “We are the ones with the least community support.”

Youngstown reserved its support, instead, for a onetime college football star who had apparent ties to the Mob. In 1980, Jim Traficant was elected sheriff of Mahoning County. Audiotapes nabbed him in clandestine chats with a Mafioso, who eventually handed him an envelope containing $163,000 in cash. Still, when Traficant was indicted in 1982, for accepting a bribe, he defended himself and opened, incredibly, by stating, “I fucked the Mob.” His populist gusto sang to bitter, disenfranchised Youngstown, and after he wriggled free of conviction, he became a beloved U.S. representative, serving from 1985 to 2002, when he finally was caught and sent to federal prison for bribe taking.

In Traficant’s heyday, Youngstown’s urban core was practically gagged — so moribund that the city’s leaders seemed almost determined to suffocate enterprise there. In the ’70s, they closed West Federal Street to cars and put in a brick terrace, thereby killing downtown.

Things got so dire that in 2005, the city’s voters did a 180. They elected as mayor Jay Williams, a 34-year-old African American banker and political rookie who carried a vision to make Youngstown “healthy and leaner,” largely by demolishing vacant houses and revitalizing downtown. Williams, who is still mayor, is now the rock star of the rust belt’s burgeoning “shrinking city” movement. He appears frequently on national television and has been invited to the White House. He works in tandem with Tim Ryan, who is just 36.

And there is suddenly a host of young, civic-minded idealists in Youngstown, among them Phil Kidd, a bald and muscled onetime Army lieutenant. Kidd, who is 30, made his first foray into activism in 2005, by standing on a downtown plaza each week with a sign reading Defend Youngstown. Today, he works for a new nonprofit, the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative. He has rallied Youngstowners to shut down a corner liquor store where criminals gathered and to help residents of battered neighborhoods get the city to pull down vacant buildings — drug houses, usually, or vandal magnets.

Kidd often works 80 hours a week. He signs his e-mails Defend, PK, and he is intense even when he is just hanging out. One evening, he invited me to the Youngstown YMCA, where, he said, the city’s young professionals gathered each week to play dodge ball. I expected a convivial gathering with, perhaps, a pitcher of iced tea on the sidelines. But no, the game was ugly. Kidd whaled the ball so hard that he grunted, and one of his targets grew so riled that postgame, he was spoiling for a fight. “Did you call me a faggot, No. 4?” he bellowed to Kidd’s teammate.

“I was just sayin’, ” said No. 4, walking away.

Afterward, over beers, Kidd smirked, recalling the tension. “That’s Youngstown!” he reveled. “That’s Youngstown! What makes this place is its blue-collar ethic and its dysfunctionality. There are characters here.” In time, Kidd told me about Paul Dunleavy, the dauntless co-owner of a local gym who runs through the streets shirtless, year round, while carrying a 55-pound log. “It’s insane,” he said. He paused, and then he grew confidential. “I’ve got my own log,” he said, “back home, in my apartment.”

But how do you build businesses in a city that revels in its dysfunctionality?

When Jim Cossler first came to his job, from Youngstown’s chamber of commerce, the Business Incubator hosted just three start-ups — a digital printing company, a manufacturer of wooden rocking horses, and an outfit that wanted to place printers for travelers’ use at airport check-in areas. In 2002, the state legislature established funding for the development of technology businesses in Ohio, and Cossler had an insight that would help spawn Turning Technologies: “Software companies are easy to start. Pretty much all you need is a server and some computers. And if we have a bunch of tech companies here, we can build synergy.”

That year, Turning began at the incubator. CEO Mike Broderick is still grateful for the jump-start Cossler gave him. “We probably got $250,000 or $300,000 worth of help from the incubator,” Broderick says. “We didn’t have to worry about infrastructure. We could focus on the product — and that accelerated the process. Jim Cossler has a Rolodex of thousands of people, and he made introductions for us. We’ve been very cognizant of that.”

In 2007, when Turning needed to expand, it considered moving its headquarters to the suburbs of Youngstown. The city imposes a 2.75 percent income tax on everyone who works within its boundaries, and parking downtown can be a hassle for Turning’s largely suburban work force. “But we took an informal poll, and 95 percent of our workers said they liked working downtown,” says Broderick. “There’s an energy, a hope.”

Now Cossler is trying to create Youngstown’s next Turning. In a struggling city, he is a sort of kingmaker. About 20 people approach him every month, trying to secure space in the incubator by pitching ideas for products. Many of the ideas are just plain bad — “they tend to self-select out,” as Cossler gently puts it — but still, Cossler always speaks as though he is surrounded by geniuses on the cusp of greatness. He describes Zethus as “a company whose deep and leading-edge knowledge of cloud computing may just revolutionize how we manage our electronic data.” Founded in 2003, Zethus makes a platform called cumulus::DocumentMatrix. One of Zethus’s neighbors at YBI, BizVeo, makes an online platform that medical patients can use to download, say, medical-history forms or streaming video of their doctors discussing the nuances of open-heart surgery. The company just made its first sale, to a local hospital.

YBI’s off-campus companies, combined, grossed just shy of $60 million last year, and some have a deep history. Still, it seems that Cossler’s main job is cheering up a city with bad-self-esteem issues. In one open letter to the YBI community, he sounds an almost therapeutic ring, calling the incubator “a shining example of how disbelief in ourselves can and must be overcome throughout Northeast Ohio.” He wears a short-sleeved YBI polo shirt virtually all the time, even in winter, and in his talks with young inventors, he taps their potential deftly, with the indulgent patience of a good Little League coach.

One afternoon, I sat in as Cossler met with a 28-year-old photographer, Rasul Welch, who wants to fabricate and sell “follow focus” hardware that can facilitate video shooting on DSLR cameras. Welch’s business partner was a half-hour late. And as we all waited for him, Welch slumped in his chair. He was impressively schooled on camera technology, but he seemed a little casual for a guy on thin ice. “Charles is a young buck just off the boat from Dubai,” he said of his straggling mate. “He went to the University of Cambridge, in England.” He admitted he had done only one casual market study for his mount: quizzing five photographer friends about his concept. “Four of them hated it,” he said.

Cossler had a flash of doubt. “Just because your mom and your girlfriend like your idea…” he began. Then he changed tack. “I like you guys,” he said, after fabricator Charles Beal finally showed. “I like your pedigree. You have nice skill sets.” A moment later, he was offering the inventors access to YBI’s Inspire Lab, a set of two ground-floor conference rooms shared by about 20 start-ups so germinal that they are just tinkering, nights and weekends. He also offered the gratis aid of a lawyer who could help the inventors incorporate. “We could go to work for you tomorrow,” he said.

“But,” said Beal, “I don’t know how we’d create jobs for Youngstown.”

“Don’t worry,” Cossler said. “We’d morph you along so you did. Say you wanted to create software for DSLR; we’d find you programmers.”

As the inventors left, they were envisioning software that could aid video editing. Seven weeks later, they began working in the Inspire Lab.

Urban theorist and author Richard Florida has identified what he calls the “three T’s” of economic development. Florida argues in his 2002 bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class that urban areas need “talent, technology, and tolerance.” By tolerance, he means venues that embrace “cultural, entrepreneurial, civic, scientific, and artistic creativity.” Cool hangouts, in other words: museums, microbreweries, experimental theaters, and research labs.

In those terms, Youngstown could go either way. The ruined steel mills hold a certain rust belt chic, and when I was there, I met artists and writers who had come back to the city, enchanted by the pathos and romance of the place. There is a splendid new café on West Federal Street — the Lemon Grove, where the walls are hung with paintings from local artists and the floors are made of planks salvaged from an old barn. There is an old-school museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, that boasts Edward Hoppers and Georgia O’Keeffes in its permanent collection, and there is also a gay advocacy group, Pride Youngstown. Youngstown State University, which sits on a hill above the downtown area, is a big and important presence. But Youngstown is — let’s face it — not the sort of place where U2 is going to kick off its next tour. It is a small town, more homey than cosmopolitan, and it is trying to fight its way back from a haunted past.

Skeptics hold that Youngstown could be damned by its history. Heike Mayer, a professor of urban planning at Virginia Tech, notes that Youngstown has no track record with high tech. She adds, “You can’t create 5,000 jobs out of nothing. You have to connect to what’s already there, historically. Pittsburgh did that. It was a steel town, and it built highly specialized steel-technology firms. But Youngstown, I don’t know.”

Mayer has studied Oregon’s Silicon Forest, south of Portland, where a number of small tech start-ups have emerged in the shadows of the local giants, Tektronix and Intel. “Even there,” she says, “the start-ups didn’t create 5,000 jobs. Youngstown has Turning, yes, but that won’t generate 15 spinoffs. If there’s two successful ones, that would be good. Perhaps Youngstown needs to lower its goals and go after low-level tech jobs — the sort of work that often goes to India or China, like customer support.”

But Mayer, who is on leave this year in Switzerland, is far removed from the good news that has of late been sweeping Youngstown. In February, a French pipe manufacturer, Vallourec, announced plans to spend $650 million building a Youngstown plant that will make small-diameter pipes for natural gas extraction. That project will create 350 blue-collar jobs. Eight days later, General Motors said it would expand operations at its Lordstown plant, just outside Youngstown, by adding a third shift and 1,200 jobs. The factory now employs 4,500 workers. Meanwhile, Ryan’s grant money keeps streaming in. Ned Hill, the dean of Cleveland State University’s urban affairs program, feels Youngstown has momentum. “There’s unprecedented optimism there,” he told me. “The mayor is walk-on-water amazing, and they know what they’re doing at the incubator. They realize that incubation isn’t just about giving away free space. And because that area is dominated by community, as opposed to national, banks, the tech companies can get good financing. The bankers there are willing to take a little risk to get Youngstown going again.”

For Hill, the big question is: Will software companies stay in Youngstown? Tech start-ups are often funded by venture capital — and VC firms have no qualms about selling a company as soon as it achieves some success and letting it be swept out of town. “Will that happen in Youngstown, or are YBI companies poised to stay and grow?” Hill asks. “The honest answer is, I just don’t know. I am not smarter than the market.”

Along with Hill, Mayor Williams knows that high tech is a gamble — and that it can’t single-handedly rescue Youngstown. “We’re pursuing software,” he says, “but not with the notion that it will replace steel. Manufacturing will still play a role here, and the service industry, too. We’ve got a new call center downtown that’s employing 650 people.”

Ryan also wants diversity. “We do have a manufacturing base,” he says, “and we need to build on that. But computers — that can change our image. The average salary at the business incubator is $58,000. That’s a force multiplier for us. We want those kinds of jobs here. And so we’re designing a city that people would want to live in.”

Soon, Ryan was talking about a Youngstown entrepreneur who had just spruced up three local golf courses, to host LPGA tournaments. “You want world-class golf here?” he says. “We’ve got it. You like to ski? It’s nearby. You like hunting and fishing? It’s here. Music? We’ve got Elton John coming. Right in downtown Youngstown, at the Covelli Centre. Elton John!”

When I had downtime, I wandered about town in the snow. The lyrics from a famous Bruce Springsteen dirge, “Youngstown,” wafted about in my head: “Here in Youngstown/ Here in Youngstown/ My sweet Jenny, I’m sinkin’ down.” In its direness and gloom, the soundtrack seems to fit, until Youngstown’s quiet old splendor sneaks up on you.

Directly across the street from YBI is the Powers Auditorium, built for $1 million in 1931 by three of Hollywood’s Warner brothers, who were Youngstown natives. The woodwork is wrought of Carpathian elm. The ceiling is coved and gilded, as in a church, and hung with grand chandeliers.

A few miles away is Kravitz Deli, which has been serving corned beef sandwiches since 1939. Founder Rose Kravitz, now 94, still works six days a week, even though she is nearly blind.

Ethnicity still matters in Youngstown, a city that lured legions of immigrants, mostly Italians and Eastern Europeans, in its steel heyday. Myriad Polish, Slovakian, and Ukrainian churches sell pierogis on Fridays, and on Saturdays at one Croatian eatery, the Dubic Palm Cafe, servers carve up whole smoked lambs on a backroom table, in full view of the diners. There is an old-world charm to Youngstown, a substance and intricacy that you would never find amid the McMansions of Phoenix. The place can pull on a person, and a few years ago, one Youngstown native, John Slanina, missed Youngstown while living in the Netherlands. Slanina, a policy analyst focused on tech-based development, launched a blog titled I Will Shout Youngstown.

The project became a record of one expat’s homesickness. Slanina wrote about both ancient Youngstown delights and nouveau tweaks, such as the group Polish Youngstown, which offers Polish-language karaoke at its sprightly ragers. A fondness pervades every word. When Slanina discusses a wedding tradition unique to the rust belt — the cookie table — he lambastes a friend’s painfully cookieless wedding. “The initial shock of not having a cookie table is difficult for the soul,” he says, “but it also shows us how there are some traditions out there that are weaved into the core of our beings, which you can’t find everywhere throughout the country.”

Cossler is happy to have Slanina in his corner. He dreams of a day when students at Harvard yearn to be sitting on West Federal Street, quaffing Rust Belt beer, which is proudly brewed with Youngstown tap water. But he doesn’t want to pinion bright twentysomethings. “We want our best and brightest to leave Youngstown,” he says. “We want them to go to Seattle or New York or wherever, and then come back and share everything they learned.”

Until about 2005, Youngstown was a hard sell to young creative types. Now, though, there is a small community of tech people who have come back to their hometown, to embrace the place as though it were the lost Holy Land. The group’s guiding spirit is Tyler Clark, a 34-year-old musician and Web-strategy consultant who serves as YBI’s “chief imagination officer,” helping local businesses spruce up their websites. Clark grew up in Texas and went to Youngstown State University; as an undergrad, he was the musical director at the Youngstown Playhouse. He bounced around after graduation, living in suburban Virginia and Tucson, but then, in 2006, a good friend in Youngstown fell ill. Clark’s wife, Jaci, a photographer who grew up here, came back, and the visit was a revelation. The Clarks bought a meticulously maintained five-bedroom Millionaire’s Row manse, once the home of Sharon Steel president Henry Roemer, for $188,000.

Today, Clark works in a home office replete with a curving black and crimson art deco bar, and he regards Youngstown as an adventure. “We’re urban pioneers,” he told me. “We’re trying to bring a city back from the dead, and Youngstown needs so much.” Clark writes a blog, Youngstown Renaissance, that advocates for a livable Youngstown. (“For God’s sake,” he writes, “no more surface parking lots.”) As a member of the group Resettle Youngstown, he takes care of vacant houses, boarding up the windows and doors to keep vandals out, and every so often, at the Lemon Grove Cafe, he emcees Thinkers and Drinkers, a casual powwow that sees locals sipping pints as they hash over questions like, How can we get Youngstown State students more involved in the community? When I went one night, he began with caution. “Complaining is OK,” he said, “but I don’t want this to turn into a bitch session.”

The Lemon Grove is Youngstown’s most progressive and outré venue, and among regulars, there is a feeling that the entrepreneurs at YBI are irrelevant — alien to the Youngstown revolution and ensconced on their own little island of narcissism. At Thinkers and Drinkers, I met Howard Markert, 43, a small-scale green developer who had recently arrived, from the Bay Area, to convert apartments into eco-havens replete with nontoxic paint and energy-efficient furnaces. He told me that he felt obliged to be civically engaged: “If you’re not,” he said, “the neighborhoods will fall to pieces around you. Your investment will be worthless.” Markert is active in nine Youngstown nonprofits. I asked him about YBI’s entrepreneurs. “I never see those people,” he said.

It was sad to see how far apart the techies and the activists are in a town that needs its visionaries to band together. At times, it seemed to me as though there were two separate Youngstown renaissances happening on the same street, and not in radio contact. It was as though the Garden Club schism was plaguing Youngstown all over again.

But then, on the day I was to leave town, there came hope for a bridge between the two worlds. John Slanina, the blogger, moved back to Youngstown. Revere Data, a San Francisco company specializing in investing software, was opening a 10-person office in the Youngstown Business Incubator. Slanina had taken a job as a senior analyst with Revere, and he came home brimming with schemes. “Maybe we ought to put a couch on the sidewalk outside the Business Incubator and offer passersby free milk shakes,” he said. “Maybe we could open the windows and blast polka music. I’m going to start a Boomerang Initiative. I’m going to get together all the people who moved back here, so we can talk about our hometown — and what we learned while we were away. I’ll ask, Can we combine local trust with global knowledge to do good projects?”

Later, I talked to Tyler Clark, and he insisted that the answer is yes. “Youngstown is a laboratory,” he said. “There’s not a lot of restrictions and bureaucracy. You can make a difference without a lot of effort.”

Clark paused, and then cracked out a screwdriver so that he and I could flagrantly violate the law. We were trespassing our way into an abandoned 10-bedroom Tudor mansion he was trying to keep standing, in hopes someone would buy it. The house had a sheet of plywood over the front door. It looked out onto grassy Wick Park. It was cold and musty inside, and Clark was dressed rather nattily for a burglar, in a long woolen overcoat, black pinstriped slacks, and a necktie. We walked up the stairs. The wallpaper was peeling and gathering into piles on the floor, amid a blizzard of old office papers. The bedroom floors were covered with an ugly yellow linoleum. Somehow, though, there was grandeur there under the surface, waiting for a makeover. Over the hearth was a white plaster mantel bursting with carved lions and cherubs.

Clark told me the story of the place. Until 2006, it was a home for the mentally disabled, but then the owner, facing financial trouble, walked away, abruptly, leaving the water service on, so the pipes burst. We strolled into another room, where there was an old piano and also a buckling floor. “A lot of houses in Youngstown should be torn down,” Clark said, “but this one — ” He paused. “There’s integrity that’s lost the moment it hits the ground, and there’s a gaping hole beside the park.”

We went back downstairs and screwed the plywood back onto the door, to stave off vandals. Then Clark lingered awhile on the lawn, talking to a neighbor. “It’s a beautiful house,” he said.

“Yeah,” said the neighbor, “it is. It’d be a shame to see it go.”

The Atlantic
March 2010
Edited by Don Peck
© Bill Donahue

“DEAR FATHER,” the announcer intoned over the darkened arena, “we ask that you put your mighty hands on this event, not only on the cowboys, but on the livestock as well.”

The 7,500 fans crowding the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, to see the rodeo—an event put on by Professional Bull Riders, Inc., and one steeped in God and country—went hush. Earlier, a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force had marched, ramrod-erect, onto the loose dirt of the bullring and asked 23 saluting recruits to solemnly raise their right hands, so as to be sworn into the force. A battery of explosives burst in the darkness, leaving three fiery letters—USA—burning bright in the soil. Then, as dry-ice fog crawled the arena, a spotlight settled on a man in a white cowboy hat, his hands on his hips Old West–style, his cold grimace terrifying, as the announcer hailed “the reigning … world … champion!”

Guilherme Marchi? From Leme, São Paulo, Brazil?

Well, yes. Brazil has the world’s largest commercial cattle herd—more than 200 million head—and its own burgeoning rodeo culture. And now, as the PBR launches its 17th season, bringing its 40-rider show to 31 cities coast to coast, several Brazilian riders are in the hunt for the tour’s $11 million in prize money—and for the Ford 4×4 pickup bestowed upon the winner of the PBR World Finals, slated for November, in Las Vegas.

The riders mount snorting 1,800-pound animals specially bred to kick and buck. They endeavor to stay on for a full eight seconds, and last year Marchi, who’s 27, succeeded about 60 percent of the time. He is square-jawed, with plaintive brown eyes and a little crease of a scar in his chin, thanks to a cow that kicked him when he was 6. When he appeared recently on the cover of PBR’s media guide, shilling for what promoters call “the toughest sport on Earth,” the scar was displayed prominently, and Marchi was festooned with every imaginable emblem of cowboy masculinity: ropes, a fist-sized belt buckle, leather chaps.

Away from the spotlight, though, the machismo vanishes and Marchi exudes a common touch, climbing over 10-foot fences to be photographed with fans. “He talks American pretty good,” Dean Woods, a retired heavy-equipment operator, told me. “And he’s not like your basketball and football players—he stops and signs autographs.”

Marchi had plenty of Portuguese-speaking company in Portland. Wiry Renato Nunes performed a backflip off the bullpen fence. Paulo Crimber, from São Paulo, often moonwalks in the ring. Robson Palermo—5 foot 6, 163 pounds, and a bit chubby for a bull rider—has tried dirt dancing, too, but he stuck to bull riding when I saw him. “I have three slipped discs,” Palermo, the 2008 Vegas winner, told me backstage, afterward, “and I’m not a very good dancer.”

A moment later, Palermo was genially grinning as my interpreter showed him cell-phone photos of her children. “It’s funny,” he confided. “Sometimes when you’re with the bulls, you’re laughing and joking. And then you see the TV cameras are on you, so you have to act all serious and mean.”

The pose doesn’t come naturally to the Brazilians, for in their country rodeo is more homey than steely. The 10-day Barretos International Rodeo, which draws 800,000 fans every year, is a sort of festive state fair, replete with petting zoos, outdoor concerts, and barbecue joints. The prize money is paltry, and the cowboys bear a sense of inferiority. “Rodeo is just getting popular in Brazil,” Marchi explains, “and so you want the fans to like you. You try to be nice.”

Palermo once made $30 a month as a cattle hand, and lived with his parents in a remote shack with an outhouse. There was no TV reception, but if he cranked the generator, Palermo could watch bull-riding videos. He learned the art, at first, by bucking and heaving about on his tattered couch.

Today, he’s earned more than $1 million on the PBR circuit. With his wife and infant daughter, he lives on his own Texas ranch, an 82-acre spread in Tyler. He has 10 horses, and he is breeding bucking bulls. But what he cherishes most is the mounted deer head that an admiring PBR fan gave him for his wall. “In Brazil,” he mused, “we only kill deer to eat them. It’s strange what people do in this country, but I think I’m staying. I like it here.”

Channeling Sappho

Reed Magazine
Autumn 2009
Edited by Chris Lydgate
© Bill Donahue

She was a tall woman, maybe, and a sultry beauty. In the paintings we have of Sappho, the lyric poet who lived circa 600 BC, her eyes are often soft and beguiling. Her robes are loose and flowing in the warm island breezes of her native Lesbos, and her skin is alabaster and tender—painted with a sweet affection reminiscent of Caravaggio.

Usually, she is carrying a lyre, for in her largely preliterate culture, Sappho was a singer-songwriter—a feminist voice, and a sort of Ani DiFranco of her day. She performed at weddings and funerals, sometimes alone, and sometimes with a chorus of teenage girls. Some believe that she ran a finishing school for the wealthy young debutantes of her day, tutoring them in fashion and the arts. Others contend that Sappho’s school was secular, and cultlike in its embrace of homosexual love. This latter theory has a certain seamy marketability today (your alumni magazine herewith directs you to sapphosflame.com), but in truth Sappho’s poems are not raw anatomy lessons. They tend, instead, to be pain-acquainted notes on Eros’ sting. Consider this poem, as rendered in a famous American translation:

With his venom

Irresistible

and bittersweet

that loosener

of limbs, Love

reptile-like

strikes me down

For several centuries, Sappho was venerated. In his first- century-AD treatise, “On The Sublime,” the Greek critic Longinus reveled, “Are you not amazed at how she evokes soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, skin, as though they were external and belonged to someone else? And how at one and the same moment she both freezes and burns?”

But just a few years later, in 180 AD, the theologian Tatian dissed Sappho as a “pornikon erotomanes”—and Christianity was only beginning its purifying ascent. In 1073, according to one Renaissance writer, Pope Gregory VII coordinated the burning of Sappho’s work in both Rome and Constantinople.

The bonfires may be apocryphal. What matters is that Sappho’s poems went out of vogue. The pottery bearing her words turned into dust. The papyrus got tossed, mostly, and all that remains is a few fragments—a line here, a word there: a corpus so scant that it instills longing. It’s as though we can hear Sappho’s voice, just barely, calling out of the past, asking to be heard and deciphered.

Let me tell you this:

someone in some future time

will think of us

It is strange how things happen. You have a poet who stood on a Greek isle singing into the wind, and then 25 centuries later, in about 1930, here at Reed, a young woman from Vancouver, Washington, tunes into Sappho—and goes on, in 1958, to publish what many regard as the definitive English language translation of literature’s first significant female voice. Mary Barnard ’32 was an established poet by the 1950s, celebrated for her spare evocations of the Northwest landscape. Her slender book, Sappho: A New Translation, excerpted throughout this piece, is lucid and lean, delivering around 100 of the 200-odd extant Sappho fragments in free verse, in plainspoken American idiom. For example:

If you are squeamish

Don’t prod the

beach rubble

Nearly every English translation that preceded Barnard’s was a dog—a bona fide clunker that endeavored to twist Sappho’s clean Greek into bouncy rhymes. Lord Byron’s circa 1820 stab at Sappho, for instance, includes these regrettable lines:

Equal to Jove that youth must be —

Greater than Jove he seems to me —

Who, free from Jealousy’s alarms,

Securely views thy matchless charms.

Barnard’s rendering of the same stanza reads:

He is more than a hero

He is a god in my eyes—

the man who is allowed

to sit beside you—he

who listens intimately

to the sweet murmur of

your voice

When A New Translation appeared, it was instantly celebrated. “The sheer penetration Miss Barnard achieves is staggering,” opined The Hudson Review. “She is Sappho, here.”

Barnard’s book remains the default Sappho—the best selling of the twenty-odd Sappho translations on amazon.com and also, probably, the translation most widely used at American colleges. In the eyes of many, Mary Barnard brought Sappho to the American public—and helped, inadvertently, to spawn a new vision of the ancient poet, as lesbian activist. Witness the 1970 call to arms, “Sappho Was a Right-On Woman,” by Sidney Abbot and Barbara Love—and also the eighties-era all-women a capella group, the Sapphonics, whose specialty hit was, “There Is Nothing Like a Dyke.”

In her later years, Barnard was often embraced as an avatar of the Movement. “She would get fan letters that would begin, ‘Like you, I’m a lesbian. I read your book every night before going to sleep,’” remembers her friend James Anderson ’76. “She was a very open-minded person, but it perturbed her.”

Indeed, Barnard was no libertine revolutionary. Apolitical and single throughout her entire life, she was a remote and self-contained person. The poet Marianne Moore called the tall, bespectacled Barnard “trim, pale and spare,” and Sarah Barnsley ’95, a British academic now at work on a Barnard biography, labels her “an aesthete, and an immensely private person.” Barnsley spent eight weeks in the library at Yale University, sifting through the 3,000 letters that Barnard wrote to her parents. She has found no evidence that the poet ever had any romantic liaisons, and she is still not sure whether Barnard was gay or straight.

Deliberate and exacting, Mary Barnard produced only about 150 poems, all told, and they are burnished little jewels devoid of Sappho’s soft sensuality. They’re almost absent of people, in fact, and lonely. Consider:

Sweep the mind

clean

like a field of dry stubble

when the constellations

of daisies have been mown

Reed grads of the 70s and 80s remember Barnard as a wry and crisp éminence grise who obligingly entertained poetry novices at her immaculate condo in Vancouver, Washington. “She had an old-school propriety,” says John Sheehy, ’82. “You’d go over there and she’d serve you tea and cookies.”

One has to wonder: How did such a cool character ever pull off a translation of Sappho that was so white-hot, so on the money? Likely, no one will ever know, but with the centennial of Barnard’s birth looming—she was born on December 6, 1909—it is time to piece the story together.

It all began, arguably, in the mouth of a crocodile. When the late Greeks and the Romans tired of Sappho, they treated the papyri bearing her work as something like old, coffee-stained newspapers. They used it as packing material—and one day in 1900, as a workman was digging in the Fayum basin of Egypt, looking for mummies on the site of an old Hellenist city, Oxyrhynchus, he unearthed the leathery body of a mummified croc. Inside its mouth were blackened papyri; hundreds more crocodiles were likewise stuffed. Most of the long-buried papyri were dross—IOUs, invitations, tax returns, laundry lists. But Oxford grads Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt kept probing through a nearby ancient garbage dump. They gathered scraps as small as postage stamps in reed baskets and brought them to England. By 1915, they’d reassembled texts from Euclid, Pindar, and Euripides, along with 56 undiscovered fragments of Sappho.

The new Sappho prompted great joy in London, for there a brash young American expat poet, Ezra Pound, was hatching a new literary movement—modernism—that was at war with Victorians like, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and their longwinded, fanciful musings. In founding a lit journal called Des Imagistes, Pound called on writers to present “images of concrete things arranged to stir the reader.” He also advocated a vigorous mining of classical texts, sprinkling his own poems with snippets of Greek. Sappho’s clarity and elusive mystique thrilled him. And as the Sappho papyri were shipped to the British Museum during the nineteen-teens, Pound was often there in the refreshment room, sharing buttered toasts and cream puffs with his old flame, the poet Hilda Doolittle, or HD, as they argued over verse that Hilda had written in Sapphic style.

Mary Barnard was starstruck by the whole episode. In a letter to her parents, she asked that they give her both the poems of HD and a translation of Sappho for Christmas. At Reed she veered from an institutional mania for T.S. Eliot (“It was Eliot, Eliot, Eliot all the way,” she wrote) to embrace the man who edited Eliot’s antiepic, The Wasteland: Ezra Pound. “He knew more about the technique of writing poetry than any other living poet,” she says in her 1984 memoir, Assault on Mount Helicon, “and I had a sneaking suspicion that he might like the kind of poems I wrote.”

In 1933, with the ink still wet on her Reed degree, she was living at her parents’ house in Vancouver, babysitting here and there for 50 cents an hour and arduously writing. She finally screwed up the courage to send Pound six poems and a note beseeching advice. Pound responded as he did to all letters—with a garbled note that reads like an antediluvian text message. “Age?” he harrumphed. “intentions? how MUCH intention? I mean how hard and for how long are you willing to work at it? . . . Nice gal, likely to marry and give up writing or what Oh?”

Barnard responded with sass: “I’m a nice gal, yes, but not in the least likely to get married. I abhor kitchens, I’m scared to death of children, and I have an extraordinarily chilly disposition. That I should give up writing is inconceivable.”

Soon, the correspondence between Barnard and Pound was flowing. She played earnest student. He rattled off hoary advice—and launched her into the giddy swirl of literary life. With reference letters from her mentor, Barnard moved to New York in 1935 and befriended Marianne Moore. William Carlos Williams—26 years her senior, and a known philanderer—made an unrequited pass at her on the Brooklyn Bridge, then became a close pal. In 1940, New Directions Press included her, along with John Berryman, in a momentous slim volume, Five Young American Poets. She found work as an indexer and research assistant.

But still her life was not easy. Barnard was an odd bird—on the outside and alone in many a social setting. The only child of a traveling lumber buyer, she’d spent her freshman year at Reed with “no friends at all,” she writes. And when she traveled to New York, she was “green as grass” and “very shy, and more than a little terrified.” Her life was solitary, and small. In recounting her time in New York to James Anderson, she once told him a story about buying a warm winter coat. “That was the highlight of her whole year,” says Anderson.

She was never robust, and in late 1950, after losing her job, she came down with what her autobiography calls “the Bug-of-the-Year. I became more and more depressed, probably because I was already ill,” she writes in a rare confessional moment. “In January, when my landlord decided to put in a new boiler during a cold snap, it was the last straw.” Her weight plummeted to 105. She checked into the hospital. She spent a month convalescing at a friend’s apartment. In the spring she traveled home to Vancouver, so that her aging mother could tend to her in the family’s generous, tree-lined home near the center of town. Upon arrival, she came down with hepatitis B.

This bout of illness changed her life. She would lie in bed for about six months, and she would never again seek full-time work. Indeed, it was only a matter of time before she’d pull up stakes in New York. In 1957, she would leave the city and settle back into her parents’ home, on a permanent basis.

For Sappho, probably, a personal decline would have been splendid literary grist. So many of her poems express heartsickness. For instance:

It is clear now:

Neither honey nor

the honey bee is

to be mine again.

Barnard didn’t feel that 20th century writers were entitled to bellyache so. Indeed, after going to see James Agee read from Let us Now Praise Famous Men, a self-involved, sorrow-tinged nonfictional book about Southern sharecroppers, she snipped, “It was like listening to a man saying his prayers.”

Mary Barnard didn’t disdain Agee simply because she believed in privacy. She was also an heir to a certain artistic tradition. The modernists espoused impersonality, and the aesthetic is perhaps best enunciated by T.S. Eliot, who, in his seminal 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” laid down a complex dictate: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

Barnard had personality and emotions, and when she was sick she wanted to escape from them. In her memoir, she writes of being “hooked up to a glucose bottle” at a Vancouver hospital—and of protesting vehemently when a doctor instructed, “Stay in bed another month.”

“I felt that I must do something to make this catastrophe pay,” she continues. She cracked open two Greek grammar books and began honing her rusty language skills, first acquired at Reed, where in the evenings her classics professor, Barry Cerf, read Homer aloud to his charges.

In bed, Barnard reread parts of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Then by chance a friend sent her a new Italian translation of Sappho done by Salvatore Quasimodo. It was “very beautiful,” Barnard writes, “spare but musical, and [it] had, besides, the sound of the speaking voice making a simple but emotionally loaded statement.” Reading in a language she knew only vaguely, she was “free to balance between the Greek phrase and the Italian phrase while I search for the truly equivalent phrase in living, not lexicon English.”

At first, Barnard just did translation in her head. But eventually she felt the prod of a note that Ezra Pound had sent her back in 1934, advising her to translate Sappho. (“You hate translation???” Pound thundered. “What of it? Expect to be carried up Mt. Helicon in an easy chair?”) She sat up and started to type, limiting her sessions, per doctors’ orders, to one or two hours. Each fragment went through about 40 drafts, and when she wasn’t writing, she did what she calls “pillow-work.” She lay in bed, rolling the fragments “around and around in my mind, trying different words and different arrangements of words, asking myself over and over: what did she mean?”

As Barnard describes it in Assault on Mount Helicon, the translation was sort of like doing a crossword puzzle: She searched for clues, then wrote things down. You figure, reading the memoir, that her translations are literal. But actually she pruned; she bridged fragments together. She made brazen assumptions, and then, for each fragment, she devised a title. Look at these two related fragments as they were rendered in an intentionally literal translation by poet Anne Carson in 2002:

1. Evening

you gather back

all that dazzling dawn has put

asunder:

you gather a lamb

gather a kid

gather a child to its mother

2. of all the stars most beautiful

Now, look at Barnard’s condensation:

The evening star

Is the most

beautiful

of all stars

Likewise, Carson records these words:

but I to you of a white goat

and I will pour wine over

Where Barnard writes:

And I said

I shall burn the

fat thigh-bones of

a white she-goat

on her altar

In truth, Sappho never said anything about the goat being fat, or about thigh-bones. But in Barnard’s almost filmic version we can see the meat crisping and sizzling, and the word “altar”—not in the Greek, either—gives the whole tableaux a shimmering holiness, without being highfalutin. Surely, as she lay there, devising her clear, concrete imagery, Barnard was thinking of Pound munching his toasts.

And maybe she thought of Sappho as a friend, too, for the ancient poet—despite all her modern guises (Super Dyke, Porn Queen)—shared much with the odd bird laid low in Vancouver. On the page, Sappho does not present as a brazen Amazon ringleader, but rather as an outsider, a sensitive artiste so astonished by the hurt of life that when she speaks of a girl losing her virginity it is:

like a hyacinth in

the mountains, trampled

by shepherds until

only a purple stain remains

on the ground

“There’s a sense of loss about Sappho,” says Sheehy, now a San Francisco-based writer and editor. “She wrote so much great poetry, but then it just disappeared. And there was something tragic going on in Mary’s life, too. She’d had all this promise and now there she was, in her forties, sick and living with her parents.”

How did Barnard contend, artistically speaking, with the drab misery of it all? It seems almost certain that she’d read Eliot’s manifesto, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—and that she heard its call for “concentration.” Eliot wrote that poetry is a “concentration of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all.” And in a 1989 letter to a graduate student, Angela Christy, Barnard hints at how she concentrated her bedridden interlude into poetry. The letter discusses this Sappho fragment, as translated by Barnard:

Pain penetrates

me drop

by drop

Christy has just written a thesis speculating that Sappho was thinking of dripping stalagmites. Barnard corrects her. “I’m sure that she did not have stalagmites in mind,” she writes, “nor did I. I thought of a faucet dripping—in the next room, say—then of a heartbeat, then of the pulse, then of throbbing pain. The comparison is not with a hard stone pointed object, but with rhythmic liquid movement, inside the body. The Village Voice published a long poem by Joel Oppenheimer at the time of his death. In it he described what it felt like to be eaten by cancer and treated by chemotherapy, and in the midst of it he quoted those six words of my translation. I’m sure he understood it exactly the way I meant it.”

In her memoir, Barnard says she likely couldn’t have translated Sappho had she been leading an active life: “I would never have had the patience to work so long over each fragment.” She also speaks fondly of the house in Vancouver where she grew up and did her translation, extolling its large porch and the cleared back yard running down to nearby railroad tracks.

The place is still there, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood just off Main Street. It’s just a few miles from my home in Portland, so recently, on a spring afternoon, I pedaled my bicycle over the bridge and rolled up to the lawn.

The Barnard house was grayish blue, the paint flecked, and the roof rotting and speckled with moss. Inside, a large dog was barking at a plasma TV sitting amid a cluster of cardboard moving boxes still unopened by the new owners. I knocked. A young woman came to the door, and then I stood on the porch explaining my mission.

The woman looked at me, skeptically. “Are you a Reedie?” she asked.

In time, she warmed up. She offered to let me come back and tour the place once her husband got home, and for a while I did plan on returning for Mary Barnard instilled a certain sadness in me. Just like Sappho, she’d almost vanished. She’d left behind no heirs, and although she did write a memoir, it was close to the vest. I wanted some tangible hint of her life: I wanted to touch the walls that she touched. I wanted a bead on the story of her life in that house.

But soon, as I kept reading the poems, that urge for facts faded—and felt rather silly: A New Translation is, really, all about imagination. Sappho, working when literature was a new medium, imagined a fresh way to tell the truth, and Mary Barnard, lying on her back, stared up at the ceiling over her sickbed. She imagined the evening star, and she made it the most beautiful of all the stars.