Turn Left At The Trojan Horse: A Would-Be Hero's American Odyssey
Brad Herzog
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0806532025
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Turn Left at the Trojan Horse has been described as On the Road meets Eat, Pray, Love because it goes well beyond a road trip. More than just a funny and profound narrative of Brad Herzog's cross-country trek toward a college reunion in Ithaca (New York) and more than another reimagining of Odysseus's ancient journey (he visits places like Troy, OR... Iliad, MT... Apollo, PA...), it is a memoir exploring the parameters of a heroic existence - by chronicling the lives of people in America's oft-ignored spaces, by examining the universal truths embedded in ancient myths, and by undertaking a fair bit of self-evaluation. It is the memoir of an Everyman searching for the hero within.
who walks most often with the mortals, frequently taking human form, as if approximating humanity herself. While the other gods are rather one-dimensional in their behavior—Aphrodite the lustful, Ares the wrathful, Hermes the rogue—Athena seems more complex. She is belligerent in battle but benevolent in peace. Although she is the archetype of the invincible warrior and is credited with inventing the war chariot, she is also the goddess of intellect, a model of measured judgment, inventor of the
lead me. My goal: Visit with other lives. Explore other places. Find coherence in the diversity I am sure to encounter. Accumulate the knowledge of journeys past and present as I rumble toward an under standing of the heroic ideal. Locate exemplars of that elusive concept. Court adventure and epiphany and insight. Then come home in one piece, and possibly at peace with myself. I descend the Space Needle and spend an hour wandering around Seattle’s trendy Belltown neighborhood, past assorted
town in west-central Minnesota that sounds like something out of a drug-fueled dream, where there are watermelons as big as Volkswagens and insects as large as poodles and bathtub-sized coffee cups suspended in midair. The detour will take me a couple dozen miles in the wrong direction, but I wager it may be worth it. A half hour later I arrive. WELCOME TO VINING, DOORWAY TO THE LAKES, says the sign. POPULATION 68, says another. I stop to fill up at Big Foot Gas and Grocery, which is fronted—the
say, ‘Can we come out now?’ I hugged every one of ’em.” Stories that emerged in the tornado’s aftermath merely added to its legend. Records from the Siren Dental Clinic were found more than twenty-five miles east in the town of Spooner. The sign from the Auto Stop was deposited in Trego, some thirty miles away. One young student’s school picture—which had been in a frame on the family’s piano—was discovered eighty miles away in the hamlet of Cable. More than 175 buildings were destroyed, turned
fifty miles south of here and almost exactly twenty-five years earlier, a tremendous blast blew the top off Mount St. Helens. An ash column rose more than fifteen miles and dumped volcanic dust across the Northwest. A hundred-mile-per-hour landslide covered twenty-three square miles and left debris and ash as much as six hundred feet deep. Fifty-seven people died. By contrast, Rainier’s environs are far more populated than those surrounding Mount St. Helens; more than three million people live