And the sixth-graders, well, they insisted on a poparokulus, mythical, imaginary, part zebra, part giraffe, part lion.
“Oh my,” thought Beth Nixon. “What am I going to do? A walrus doesn't belong in Troy, Montana. What in the world are we going to do with a walrus?”
But that's for later. That's the end of this story.
And Nixon, for one, likes to tell her stories in the proper order, from the beginning right on through to the walrus.
The beginning for Nixon and Troy was five years ago, when the puppeteer from Philadelphia arrived in northwest Montana with a Pew foundation grant and a plan to tell Troy's tale.
She settled into the local schools, carved cardboard and plastered papier-mache and slung paint to create, with a whole lot of help from local school kids, a giant, wearable puppet parade.
It began, as these things do, with a costume comet streaking across the field, the sun hot on its heels, clouds whirling about. Then snowflakes, trees, mountains, all to the cacophonous roar of flutes and rattles, slide whistles and at least one kazoo.
Then insects, dinosaurs, a flowing red dragon; later a rippling fire, birds, animals. A rainstick joined the band. Moose, raven, wolf, a 20-foot Indian, miners, cowboys, a train chugging along.
A guitar played “Funky Town,” and a tiny version of Troy took to the field - houses, groceries, schools, churches, all in cardboard miniature, school buses, log trucks, snowplows, dancing, swirling, telling the story of Here, as seen through the eyes of youth.
“It was pretty amazing,” Nixon said of that parade now five years gone. “It was an important experience.”
Important because the citified puppeteer was feeling her way in a foreign land and a new storytelling medium, and important because the rural kids of Troy likewise were a long way from their everyday.
It was a hit.
And so Nixon wasn't exactly surprised when Troy invited her back this spring, courtesy of grants from the Montana Arts Council, the Montana Committee for the Humanities and the Troy Fine Arts Council.
“Morrison Elementary wanted a giant puppet show,” Nixon said. “It was all about storytelling.”
In fact, school principal Lance Pearson said the whole school year had been about stories, and kids had listened to many tales through the winter months. International travelers had shared stories. So had American Indians.
Stories, the kids learned, are important. They're who we are.
“And the puppet show was the grand finale,” Pearson said. “It was a great opportunity for our kids to get some good art instruction from an expert in the field,” Pearson said.
“This brought us together - the teachers, the students, the parents. It was so collaborative, and it got families involved in the whole curriculum.”
Pearson said his elementary classes studied oral traditions, later the written word. By the time Nixon showed up, they were ready to tell their own story.
But which story would that be? And how would the walrus fit in?
“OK, Morrison Elementary, what's your story?”
For two weeks, Nixon said, she listened carefully to 230 kids with 230 stories.
“That took some bravery,” she said of their efforts. “To put your ideas out there and hope someone agrees, that can be scary.”
In the end, they didn't all agree, perhaps, but they compromised, and that took bravery, too.
Nixon heard stories about the sky, about the land and the water and the animals that share Troy with Morrison Elementary. She heard about grizzly bears and loons and salamanders, about loggers and miners and ranchers.
What she heard, really, was finally a single story, about a place where people identify themselves by way of their relationship to their shared landscape.
“OK,” she thought. “This is going to be great. I can already imagine it.”
Imagining it and doing it, however, are two very different things, and the doing can take a whole lot more work.
The older kids helped more on the script, she said, fine-tuning and constantly adding elements to their common story. She shared Aesop's Fables and Kipling's Just So stories, and the students made up their own Just So stories about how Troy came to be.
The primary question, according to principal Pearson: “Why would you want to come to Troy? What's neat about Troy?”
Turns out, the key to seeing Troy clearly was to see it from the outside in. And fortunately, the walrus and the poparokulus could do just that.
Nixon calls them the visitors, and she added a third of her own, a city pigeon recently landed in Troy. Throughout the giant puppet performance, the locals - moose, deer, ducks, fish, miners, loggers, snowboarders - they all tried to convince the three visitors that Troy was a fine place to put down roots.
A kindergarten colony of ants marched in, and an entire school of minnows, and bees joined flowers in a pollination dance. Butterflies emerged from a giant caterpillar, and hummingbirds dueled mosquitoes in a battle of buzzing and whining.
A bunch of turtles (Is that a herd? Or a pod? Nixon calls it a “wad.”) lumbered around, sharing the stage with all sorts of resident flora and fauna, skunk, coyote, snake, human, telling the story of Troy to the unlikely visitors.
Inside their enormous wearable puppets, the kids actually “became” the story, Nixon said, in all three dimensions and then some.
Other kids read the script into microphones, “which solved the no-one-can-hear-you-inside-that-giant-cardboard-walrus problem.”
But the pigeon, for one, “she finally decides she truly is a city girl,” and heads back to the East Coast, hoping, though, to return for the Fourth of July.
The mythic poparokulus likes Troy just fine, but decides the winter is just too much. He does buy a summer home just outside town, though.
And the walrus, well, he is smitten by a lovely local sturgeon “who really shows him a good time,” and together they buy a cabin on the lake. He applies for a teaching job at Morrison Elementary.
Of course he does.
“This is who we are,” Pearson said. “This is what we do here.”
The whole story, told on a recent Saturday night, was as much about the telling as about what was told, Nixon said.
“It's an immense challenge to get 230 people, no matter who they are, to agree on a common story about anything,” Nixon said. “That in itself is a huge victory.”
Nixon called her five weeks in Troy a “bizarre, complicated messy process, because everyone must buy into this one story at the end.”
It was, she said, a bit like carving everything that isn't the elephant away from the stone, and being left with what always was, but couldn't be seen.
“We create what the story is,” she said. “It's a blank slate. No one's telling us the story, or telling us what to think. We have to think for ourselves. It's a massive triumph for all these people to agree that this is the one story on this one night in this one town. It's a huge exercise in sharing and cooperating and collaborating.”
Beth Nixon knows, of course, that no walruses live in Troy, knows “that all we did is make a puppet show that performed one night for parents and people who already love these kids. It wasn't exactly global.”
But Nixon is an artist, and she also knows that “if you can't imagine your future, let alone build it, then all you can do is consume a future someone else imagines for you.”
The puppet show, she said, was a sort of “test reality,” a place to experiment with everyone at the table, all in the same story, if not on the same page.
“And to me, that has huge positive implications for what we're maybe capable of in real life, in ‘non-test reality.' It's a rare thing for kids to be in charge of reality, with the responsibility of calling the shots and building what's possible. Here, they're in charge, and that's a start.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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