Why Mythology?

“When I was a child, I soaked up the ancient Greek myths and epic adventures that my mother read aloud as bedtime stories. Until a rotation system was established, the five of us kids would vie vociferously for the coveted spots on either side of her. Then we would enter a world of glorious and inglorious extremes—mayhem, murder, sexual exploits, and outrageous indignities—even though the tales within the beautifully illustrated books, Metamorphosis, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, had been cleaned up sufficiently for our young minds. I remember crying when the victorious and spoiled Achilles dragged Hector’s body behind his chariot around the walls of fallen Troy.”

As in many myths and sagas, the backbone of The Last Shade Tree is the hero’s quest or journey—which moves externally within the world, and internally within the self. Sequoyah, who is my hero, resembles two mythological heroes, Moses and Ulysses. The first hero leads his people to a new place, and the second hero spends many years seeking a way home as he cares for his band of similarly stranded adventurers. 

Sequoyah’s story begins when he is four years old and an unwilling captive in a Cherokee boarding school. When he is eight, he composes a poem: “Old Man Moses ate the roses, /Meanie Matron broke his noses.” It seems like a nonsense rhyme, but it is not. The child Sequoyah is already a poet who tries to cope with his experiences and assimilate the beauty he sees around him. He is prevented from doing so by the Establishment that breaks him in every way possible. Did Sequoyah know what his poem meant? Probably not, but it is his first creation, and it mentions one of the heroes that he will emulate eventually when he and his small band of fellow travelers journey to the future.

Ulysses, on his way home from Troy, had to choose between the wrath of one or the other of two sea monsters, Charybdis or Scylla. In fact, one of my novel’s final chapters bears their names. Sequoyah’s “Charybdis and Scylla moment” happens in the previous chapter, “Babloons,” when he faces two options: to either accept or reject help from the future world’s dominant species, creatures highly evolved from their original kind. The choice is rigged, of course: each option is equally awful. He decides to accept their help, and this decision protects the clan members from the coming winter. But it comes at the expense of their freedom. For better and worse, it is the logical choice for a person with his caring nature.

The heroine’s name, Aleta, means “traveler” in Greek, and she, too, participates in multiple journeys, both real and symbolic. Aleta and Sequoyah, husband and wife, must mimic Ulysses’ journey home, but not to a real place. Their journey is internal—to the symbolic centers of their joined hearts.

Real myths that are interwoven throughout the book include two Cherokee stories: “The Haunted Whirlpool” and “Cherokee Rose.” Both occur at significant turning points. In “The Haunted Whirlpool” Sequoyah sees his future in a vision, and in ”Cherokee Rose” his teenage daughter, Svnoyi, who is both as fragile and as tough as the flower in the myth, understands how her future will tie to his. Many myths appear as passing references, some serious, others, cynical jests: The myth of Sisyphus, Hercules and the Augean Stables, Leda and the Swan, Niobe and the death of her children, and many, many others. 

I came to realize as I worked that perhaps the strangest achievement in my novel is the evolution of new myths. Many of these spring from the horrors of true historical events: the magic wolf pack during the WW II persecution of the Roma or the tale of the golden eagle pair on the Cherokee Trail of Tears. A most powerful mythological figure is Aleta’s almost animate Italian violin, made in 1838, the year that coincides with the Trail of Tears. It often screams when the people in its life are suffering. There on the Trail, Sequoyah’s great-great-great grandmother had tied a rope around the neck of the violin case, and she “drug it, that thing howlin’ up a storm inside, all the way to Oklahoma like a pup on a leash.”

What? Never Heard of It

Looking back, I now see my high school history classes as one big maneuver to avoid the ugly facts from our nation’s past. Was my generation shielded from harsh realities that later generations of students would hear about with the misguided but honest motive of protecting the young? I suspect that it was due to something worse and intentionally dishonest; suppressing uncomfortable facts was simply the policy of the time. Education for the young put forward nice-sounding myths about our country’s virtues and achievements over its blind spots, failures, and atrocities.

When my heroine Aleta is forced to time-travel back to the week before Pearl Harbor, she learns first-hand of the compulsory internment of Japanese American citizens: “Aleta frantically scoured her memory for what she’d learned in her high school history class [in about 1960], but she could not recall a word in her textbook about this human catastrophe.”

When I started writing The Last Shade Tree, I had no idea that I’d be tackling the horrors of recent history. But as the books began to stack up on my desk and my research intensified, I grew more and more aware that too many dreadful episodes had been swept under the rug. So I came up with the time-travel concept so that my heroine and hero would experience personally some of the atrocities that had been kept from us or glossed over.

I believe facing this history is especially urgent today as our world lurches again toward exclusiveness, racial hatred, totalitarianism, and, worst of all, nuclear war. Some of the book’s episodes are better known than others, such as the Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor and the Cherokee Trail of Tears. But are they known well enough? And what about Drancy, the Indian boarding schools discontinued only late in the last century, or the Roma in Nazi camps? Add in the right-wing historical revisionists, and I just can’t shake feeling that we as a nation are in big trouble.

From Bad to Worse

How did I dream up The Last Shade Tree, a strange book by any definition? When I was fifteen, a frightening polar-route flight home from Europe to San Francisco forced an emergency landing at the US air force base in Frobisher Bay, Canada (now Iqaluit), near the Arctic Circle. It was mid-winter. Shivering in the sub-zero air, I was amazed by the intensity of the Northern Lights. I decided to write about it one day. Many years later, pieces of that experience have inspired several chapters.

But as I’ve grown older and more aware, what has surely shaped my book’s unusual story are my fears for our future. I have watched the world lurch from bad to worse to bad and back again—more times than I can count. And so I decided my characters would convey a message: that humans don’t seem to learn from the past horrors they’ve either created or lived through—except briefly at best. Soon the well-intentioned agreements and treaties begin to unravel until the world finds itself in worse shape than before, whether through hubris, greed, or the mind-boggling limitations of our world’s leaders.

Still, I wanted to write a novel, not a piece of forbidding non-fiction. So I came up with a story that would be thought-provoking and a great adventure at the same time. I hope I’ve succeeded, and that The Last Shade Tree will sweep you off your feet as you share my characters’ extraordinary journey across the world and through time.