by Brad Herzog
Just thirteen months later, Hanford’s first nuclear reactor went online. Plutonium manufactured at Hanford was used in the first atomic bomb tested at New Mexico’s Trinity Site and the second atomic bomb ever used in warfare—the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Afterward, the newspaper in Richland shouted, “IT’S ATOMIC BOMBS,” reporting that the reaction in the Hanford area was “disbelief…followed by enthusiasm.” Richland High School adopted “Bombers” as its nickname. The school’s coat of arms featured an adorable mushroom cloud. You can buy bumper stickers there—still, to this day—that declare, PROUD OF THE CLOUD.
These days, Hanford’s reactors lie dormant, but the Tri-Cities continue to thrive, based not on what is produced here but rather on what has accumulated. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the largest nuclear waste dump in the Western Hemisphere. It is one of the most toxic places on earth. Nearly 10,000 workers are involved in what has been called the world’s largest environmental cleanup. Their task: Guard 25 tons of plutonium (which has a half-life of some 24,000 years), dig up 10 million tons of contaminated soil, mitigate 2,300 tons of corroded nuclear fuel rods sitting in two huge indoor pools that might at any time crack open during an earthquake and spill into the Columbia, and clean up more than 50 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste stored in 177 underground tanks, each the size of a three-story building, many of which are leaking. It is a task worthy of Hercules, and the cleanup will last for decades.
So here is the man-made version of the volcanic metaphor. Native American writer Sherman Alexie, who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, about one hundred miles north of the Hanford site, has observed how myth and science are “first cousins who strongly resemble each other and passionately hate the resemblance.” It could be argued that at some point, when we began messing with the atom and developing enough destructive power to obliterate the planet, we started poaching the divine powers. Our aspirations out-paced our aptitude.
Indeed, a great many mythological tales warn of the dangers of hubris. Arachne challenges Athena to a weaving contest and is forever transformed into a spider. Phaethon learns that his father is Helios, god of the sun, and tries to drive his chariot across the sky, only to be struck dead by a thunderbolt from Zeus. Sisphyus, believing his cleverness surpasses that of Zeus, is left to constantly roll a huge rock up a hill in the underworld, only to have it roll back down just as he reaches the top. The Greeks and their gods didn’t much care for overweening pride.
And what is that middle ground between earthbound man and divinity? The hero. The paragon of humankind. But given that even the gods seem to have their flaws—a constant narrative of jealousy, rage, arrogance, infidelity—I have to remind myself again as I stumble forward that although the heroic may be the ideal, there is room for imperfection.
Perhaps the best indication that the hero has long been viewed as a sort of God Lite is the fact that most of antiquity’s most celebrated heroes were born of a union between the human and the divine. Hercules and Perseus, for instance, were direct offspring of ever-philandering Zeus. However, Odysseus was a man of comparatively low birth. For one thing, his parents—Laertes and Anticleia—were human. Yes, Laertes was king of Ithaka, but Ithaka was just a rocky, barren island on the fringes of what was then the Mycenaean civilization. Odysseus’s maternal grandfather, Autolycus, was a thief—a notorious, brilliant expert at trickery but a thief nonetheless. It is from him that Odysseus received his oft-mentioned wiles, not to mention the helmet he wore during the Trojan War. His gramps had stolen it.
Of course, Autolycus was said to be the son of Hermes, the god of thieves, and he inherited some impressive skills. And since Hermes was the son of Zeus, that would make Odyseus the great-great-grandson of the king of the gods. But by Hellenistic hero standards, that ain’t much. This I admire about Odysseus, not least because I am on a mission to find the murderer in my ancestry.
I had always thought my paternal roots were firmly entrenched in Chicago, where I and my father and his parents were born and raised. I figured a handful of folks came over from the Old World sometime in the late nineteenth century and made straight for the Windy City—until my paternal grandmother began to tell me foggy tales of how her family came to Chicago via eastern Washington, somewhere near Walla Walla. She claimed, though there was conviction missing from her voice, that a family patriarch was awarded plots of land in eastern Washington in gratitude for his gallantry in battle. One of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, she seemed to recall. Or something like that.
But then I talked with a cousin of mine one day, and he shrugged his shoulders at the Rough Rider reference. Instead, he mentioned rumors of a sordid event in the family history—a disgruntled uncle, a mystery, a murder-suicide. Rumor has it that this uncle is buried, he said, in a small town called Dayton, about an hour west of Washington’s Tri-Cities along a road touted as the Lewis and Clark Forgotten Trail.
These days, it is a trek through farmland, much of it nearly vertical. The layered hills—dark green wheat fields, light green pea fields, brown fallow soil—look like striped gumdrops. Just west of Dayton, on the north side of Highway 12, one of the foothills comes alive in the shape of a giant—a green giant, actually, over three hundred feet tall and made of colored eight-by-twelve-inch patio blocks set into the hillside.
My Homer-saturated mind conjures up images of gigantic cannibals—the Laestrygonians, who welcome three envoys sent by Odysseus by grabbing one of them and preparing him for dinner. When the other two men race back to the harbor, the Laestrygonians rush in from every direction and toss massive boulders at Odysseus’s ships, smashing them to pieces. Then they spear the men like fish, carrying them home for supper. The confrontation amounts to all of a dozen lines in Homer’s epic, but in an instant Odysseus loses eleven of his twelve ships—all but his own.
This is typical of Homer, by the way. He spends only a few lines describing horrific scenes: sinking ships, terrifying maelstroms, ghastly deaths. But he uses dozens of lines to explain how Odysseus’s old wet nurse recognizes him upon his return to Ithaka by a scar he received while hunting a wild boar as a young man. It is a strange imbalance of event and exposition, but it isn’t necessarily inconsistent with Homer’s intent. The Odyssey is a story about a man’s journey home, rather than simply a man’s journey.
Regardless, the all-too-brief encounter with the cannibals begins with an encounter with a sturdy girl who is drawing water from a spring. She points the men toward her home, where they expect to be welcomed as traveling strangers. Beware your friends, the scene seems to suggest—which, it turns out, well describes the tale of the green giant.
The hillside giant is the logo of the Green Giant label, which was long represented here in Columbia County by the Seneca Foods asparagus cannery. For seven decades, the cannery reigned as one of the major employers in the region—until 2004, when Seneca announced it would shift its operations to Peru, where workers earn in a day what Americans make in an hour. The Dayton facility, touted as the largest in the world, had been the last remaining asparagus cannery in the state, and the move left a huge void in Columbia County’s economy, eliminating thousands of full-time and seasonal jobs in a region with a total population of only 4,100 people. But the green giant is still there, decorating the hillside, only now it must seem like a massive chalk body outline at a crime scene.
For the time being, Dayton remains a charming little community, the kind of nineteenth-century hamlet—with the oldest continuously operating courthouse in the state and the oldest train depot—that clings to the significance of its past amid a modern world that has rendered the place largely insignificant. It has been the Columbia County seat since 1875. I head for the public library, where a woman named Liz assists me in my exploration; we go through old newspapers, census records, deed records, history books. And a story begins to emerge.
There were no Rough Riders in my family. I come from a long line of Dry Cleaners and Insurance Brokers. If old T
eddy Roosevelt wanted his shirts pressed or his claims paid, we were of heroic stock. Adolph Roth made it to America first, emigrating from Austria-Hungary to New York City in 1873 at the age of eighteen. How and why he found his way to the southeastern corner of Washington remains a mystery, but he did so less than a decade later, well before the Spanish-American War. He was the first of three Roth brothers to arrive.
By 1883, the Adolph Roth Mercantile Company was advertising in the Columbia Chronicle. Adolph married a woman from New York a few years later, and they raised three daughters and a son in Dayton. The son died suddenly at the age of five in February 1906 and was buried in Dayton Cemetery. Almost immediately thereafter, Adolph must have moved his family to San Francisco, just in time for the city’s infamous earthquake. Records show that Adolph wrote to his brother to tell him about the unfortunate timing.
Henry Roth, the oldest Roth brother, was the second to come over, following his brother to Dayton in 1895 and lasting about fifteen years there, before moving to Chicago, where he and his sons ran a dry cleaning business. Henry was my great-great-grandfather. The story I always heard about his second son, my great-grandfather, was that he was originally called Otto. However, for some reason he despised the fact that his name could be spelled the same forward as backward. So he renamed himself after his uncle—Adolph. History will record that as lousy timing, too.
Of the original immigrants, there was also a third son. His name was Joseph. My grandmother, Celia Roth, is in her nineties now but still as sharp as the spear of Achilles. She lived across the street from her grandfather in Chicago and heard tales of his brother, the elder Adolph. But she had never heard of the other brother, Joseph. Apparently, the family was keen on keeping him a secret.
This I know: Joe Roth was born in Hungary in 1862. He lived in Dayton for a dozen years, and he is buried in Dayton. In between, he lived in Hermiston, Oregon, for four years, and he died there, violently. After a good deal of digging, I discover the family secret on the front page of the Columbia Chronicle, dated June 3, 1916, which reprinted a report of a few days earlier from the Hermiston Herald:
Goaded on by a crazed brain crying for a righting of fancied wrongs, Joe Roth Thursday lay in wait for James Ralph, shooting him twice, and a moment later turned the gun to his own head and fired. The shooting took place just a few minutes past 9 Thursday evening. There was no warning and both apparently died instantly.
James Ralph had been out riding during the evening and on his return ran his car up to the front door of the Sapper Bros. garage. This large door has no lock on it nor a means of opening it from the outside. The garage was closed and Mr. Ralph did not have a key to the side door. He knew, however, that by taking a screwdriver he could lift the door sufficiently to get his fingers under and then raise it. He did this and just as he succeeded in raising the door as high as his shoulders there were two shots in quick succession and Mr. Ralph fell backward to the walk. A moment later a third shot was fired…
It seems that both Joe Roth and James Ralph had worked at the Dayton Electric and Power Company, which brought the first electric lights to the town. In 1912, both sold out and moved about one hundred miles southwest to Hermiston, where they purchased interests in the Hermiston Power and Light Company. At the time of the shooting, Joe was the company’s president; James was the vice president and general manager. Again, beware your friends.
Apparently, that night Joe came home from work and sat for a while with the evening paper. Then he left, telling his wife and two daughters that he was going to the office. That is the last they saw him alive. Joe seems to have gained entry to the garage through a side door. He left through a rear door and was found behind the building with a bullet in his head. A revolver with the spent bullets was found next to his body; another revolver with one exploded shell was found in his coat pocket.
Records indicate that in 1909, at least, Joe Roth lived at 703 South Third Street in Dayton. But there is no 703 South Third Street; it is an absent address, although it would have been located across the street from what is now the high school gymnasium. So instead, I trudge to Dayton Cemetery, where Adolph Roth bought a dozen plots 115 years earlier. The city clerk informs me that, had I arrived only a few years earlier—before the city changed its policy on such things—I could have sold nine plots back to the city for $800 each. Again, bad timing.
In section A, I find a trio of gravestones in a neat row. Two belong to Adolph Roth’s children—ten-week-old May and five-year-old Sammie. The third, a square slab of granite, smaller and less adorned, is Joseph Roth’s. He was fifty-four.
The final resting place of Joe Roth in Dayton, Washington
I stand there, listening to the birds chirp blissfully, and I think back to the last words of the Hermiston Herald’s account of the tragedy: “Mr. Roth was a kind, loving husband and father.” So what caused Joe Roth’s descent into madness? Did he discover that Ralph had embezzled money? Was he trying to cover up his own thievery? Had he found Ralph in bed with his wife? Had the stress of business led him to snap? Or was he a man destroyed by miscommunication? Did he simply think Ralph was a burglar trying to enter the garage? Then again, why was Joe in the garage in the first place?
There are no real answers, only clues, as gleaned from the newspapers: “Mr. Roth was in Dayton several weeks ago, and it was noted at that time that he was worried about something, but no one knew what it was…. It is also learned that for the past two years Mr. Roth has wanted to buy the electric plant and own it all to himself, but Mr. Ralph did not want to sell…. Mr. Roth had a bruise on the back of his head which cannot be accounted for unless it was caused from falling.”
Most intriguing to me is the third bullet. Why did he kill himself? Was he distraught over his place in life? Or was he remorseful over his involvement in death?
Among the myriad tales of suicide in the ancient Greek myths, several are directly tied to Odysseus himself, including the death of his mother, whom Odysseus had thought very much alive. But when he encounters her spirit during his trip to the underworld, she tells him, “It was no disease that made me pine away, but I missed you so much, and your clever wit and your gay merry ways, and life was sweet no longer, so I died.”
Still if I were to guess at what might have driven Joe Roth to murder-suicide, I might point to Odysseus’s experiences in Troy. The legendary Ajax, tallest and strongest of all the Achaeans and second only to Achilles as a warrior, is the only main character in the Iliad whose prowess on the battlefield is absent any help from the gods. With the death of Achilles at Troy, Ajax and Odysseus both claim his armor for themselves. Both men deliver speeches, and Odysseus, far more eloquent, takes the prize. Ajax then goes into a narcissistic rage, vowing to kill the Greek leaders who deprived him of what he considers his rightful inheritance. It is a tale of unmet expectations.
To stop Ajax, Athena makes him temporarily insane, and so he slaughters a flock of sheep instead, mistaking them for his former comrades-in-arms. It has been described as vengeance against the social order, a rebellion against the notion of honoring a negotiator over a true warrior. When his madness leaves him, blood on his hands, his honor diminished, he sees death as the only way to reestablish his heroic stature. He fastens a sword to the ground and falls on it.
So maybe Joe Roth was equally enraged by the order of things. Perhaps he, too, considered himself worthy of sole ownership and went mad when his ambitions were thwarted. It could be that he came to his senses in time to see the blood on his hands and did what he considered to be the only honorable thing.
I can only hope that my great-great-great uncle was humbled by his grave error in judgment, perhaps understanding—as I am beginning to—that obsessing about unrealized life goals might only serve to undermine a life entirely. Ajax? He never learned. When Odysseus visits the underworld, all his fallen comrades-in-arms are there. He speaks with Achilles and Agamemnon and Patroclus…but Ajax simply walks away in silence.
III
/> athena
“Should I call you Mr. President?”
The man loosens his grip on the lawn mower and offers a smile and a handshake. “Bill would be fine.”
I am in Oregon now, some fifty miles southwest of Dayton, having enjoyed a gorgeous drive that took me through quintessential rolling hills to a hamlet called Athena, home to about 1,200 God-fearing souls. It wasn’t always Athena. When a New Yorker named Darwin Richards settled the area in 1866, the stagecoach operators who stopped there called it Richards’ Station. Later, the town that sprang up was known as Centerville, as it was halfway between Pendleton and Walla Walla, which must have seemed like metropolises back in the day. But, predictably, there were already a few Centervilles in the region. So a local school superintendent, a classical scholar, suggested a name change. He claimed the hills of what is now called Umatilla County were similar to those around Athens, Greece. So Athena it became.
And why not? There is no harm in aiming high when christening a settlement. You can harbor big-city dreams, and since a community far outlasts its original settlers, you don’t have to deal with the angst of unrealized expectations. So it seems sensible enough to name a burgeoning hamlet after an immortal, especially one who ranked among the most feared and revered of the Olympians. Particularly in Athena, though, birth seems to have been accompanied by lofty aspirations. Among the town’s early settlers was a fellow named Isaac Newton Richardson, a minister and dentist. His relatives included George Washington Richardson, Thomas Jefferson Richardson, Benjamin Franklin Richardson, Andrew Jackson Richardson, and Lewis Clark Richardson. To be sure, living up to such names seems an unenviable challenge, but it is significant that more than a few Americans choose to saddle their offspring with such historical burdens. The Leader of Men is a hero for all time.
