Turn Left at the Trojan Horse by Brad Herzog

Author:Brad Herzog [Herzog, Brad]
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2010-05-27T22:00:00+00:00

“I’m a fifth-generation Athenian,” Bill Hansell begins. He is sixty years old, with a head of white hair that is thinning but hanging on gamely and glasses set in rectangular frames that rest slightly askew on his face. He leads me into his living room and hands me a soda, and for the next twenty minutes I hear a family history like something out of a James Michener novel.

The paternal side of Bill’s family reached the West Coast via the Oregon Trail, settling in the Willamette Valley. Two sets of families made the trek together, each with teenaged children. Two of these teenagers fell in love and, as many pioneers did, returned to land that they passed through along the way—back to Umatilla County. They raised a daughter, who married a carpenter named George Hansell, a fellow who had come out from the Midwest on the train.

One of George’s children, M. W. Hansell, used his eighth-grade education to become a horse trader—literally, rounding up strays and selling them in the Athena area. He had a business partner whose family boarded a schoolteacher assigned to a one-room schoolhouse out in the country. She and M. W. fell in love, but she told him, “I don’t want to be the gypsy wife of an itinerant horse trader. If you’re serious about marriage, then I want roots.” So they bought a 640-acre farm just north of Athena, raising wheat and peas. The family eventually got into ranching, too, primarily a cattle and hog operation. But M. W. never quite lost his horse trader’s instincts, which paid off considerably during the Great Depression when he purchased another 640 acres, much of it covered by forest, for $640. When he died nearly a half-century later, the family sold the timber from that section of land to Boise Cascade for nearly three quarters of a million dollars.

“That money paid the inheritance tax and saved the ranch,” Bill says with a grin.

Bill’s mother, Joyce, was a pharmacist. His father, also named Bill, was a veterinarian who was shipped over to China during World War II, where he doctored animals as they came over the Himalayas. When he came back home, he decided to return to farming, which is all he ever desired in the first place.

“So my dad is one of the few people who, for his entire adult life, did exactly what he wanted to do more than anything else in the world,” says Bill, and he says it with great pride in his voice, as if it represents the pinnacle of existence. Which, come to think of it, it damn well might.

The younger Bill, on the other hand, didn’t much care for farming. He had been born when his father was overseas, and it may be impossible to have a more enviable birth date than his: He arrived on 01/23/45. Bill lived in Athena until the third grade, then moved to the family ranch and was raised on the farm. At the University of Oregon, he met his wife, Margaret.

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