Today marks what would have been the 93rd birthday of my mentor Ardie Fortier, who died last fall.
When we’re young, some of us have the good fortune of finding a mentor—someone who sees a potential in us others don’t, and who is willing to provide us with a guiding light toward helping us realize it.
The word “mentor” comes from the name of a character in Homer’s book The Odyssey. Mentor was the person entrusted with the education of Odysseus’ son while Odysseus went off to fight the Trojan War, and then spent 10 years wandering the world before making it back home.
In my case, the roles were somewhat reversed—I left home shortly after graduating from high school, and set off for Europe with a backpack for four years. Along the way, I took as my mentor an incarnation of Odysseus in the lovely form of a woman named Ardie Fortier.
I had a passing acquaintance with Ardie growing up in my hometown of Petaluma, as she was the mother of one of my classmates, Carrie Steere. But when I first encountered her and her husband Joe during my travels in their little cottage overlooking the Shannon River in West County Clare, our connection as kindred souls was instantaneous.
We spent hours in the kitchen—the only warm room in an Irish cottage—talking about everything under the sun—history, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and psychology—all infused with Ardie’s contagious enthusiasm, curiosity, and good humor.
For an aspiring autodidact like myself, out to study the world first hand and not on some college assembly line, it was pure heaven.
Not long after that visit, Ardie and Joe moved to Munich, where Joe took a teaching position at an extension of the University of Maryland, and Ardie took a job at the nearby headquarters of the company that ran the PXs on American military bases in Europe.
Their Munich apartment became my refuge from the road, where I could recharge and reengage with Ardie and Joe in far-reaching discussions around the kitchen table. Some evenings, Joe’s faculty colleagues—an eclectic group of intellectuals from around the globe—would join us, and we’d have a literary salon of sorts with Ardie as host, employing her gracious humor and infectious laughter to keep things from going off the rails.
After a couple years of hitchhiking around Europe, working odd jobs, studying history, literature, and culture, I hit a wall, both broke and burned out. I made my way back to Munich, where Ardie helped me find a place to live and a clerical job at the PX headquarters where she worked. In a weird twist of fate, some months later, I was made an office supervisor, managing a group of people twice my age, including Ardie.
Now, for most people, having to report to a scruffy 21-year old road bum you’ve just helped scrape off the streets, would be awkward, to say the least. But not Ardie.
She stepped in as a mentor, sharing her incredible wealth of emotional intelligence in coaching me on how to manage the crazy bunch of Germans and American expatriates in the office. Because she had a master’s degree in psychology and Joe was a psychology professor, that included a deep dive into the study the Myers-Briggs typology to understand how to work with others.
Ardie’s type was INFP—introverted, intuitive, feeling, perceptive. Mine type was similar—except I was typed as a thinker instead of a feeler, meaning that, while Ardie relied upon feelings to sort out the value of what she was intuitively taking in, I turned to analysis.
Joe also conducted tests to determine which professions Ardie and I were best suited for. In Ardie’s case, I believe it was nursing, which she eventually gravitated to later in life. For me, it was writing and reporting. My least suitable occupation was business management.
When I finally did get around to pursuing a career, it was indeed as an editor at a literary magazine in New York City. But within a couple of years, I gravitated to the least of my talents in becoming the magazine’s publisher. I went on to spend the next 35 years running media companies, with no business management training whatsoever aside from those tutorials with Joe and Ardie, and Ardie’s on-the-job coaching at the office in Munich.
It was same with education. I hated the idea of going to college, but as an aspiring autodidact, I was a complete failure, overwhelmed with information. Ardie and Joe helped me to see that the “T” for thinker in my Myers-Briggs profile meant I needed some formal training in critical thinking to make sense what I was taking in.
Once again, Ardie was there as a mentor. She had attended Pomona College for two years before marrying her first husband, Jim Steere, a big animal veterinarian. After the first two of her six children were born, the family moved to Oregon, where Ardie enrolled at Reed College in Portland to complete her undergraduate degree. There she found her intellectual home, and absolutely thrived. She thought I would too.
As fate would have it, Reed had only one study-abroad program, and it was at the University of Munich. After hanging out with the Reed students there, I realized Ardie was right—I had found my people.
With Ardie’s help, I applied to Reed—it was the only college I ever applied to—and was surprisingly accepted. While Reed accepted me, they would not provide me with any financial aid, as they considered me a “spice student,” there to add a different life experience to the student body, but not expected to last long. I continued working in Munich for another year to save up the money for my first year of tuition.
Today, thanks to Ardie, I am not only a Reed graduate, but a long-serving member of the college’s board of trustees.
Ardie and Joe eventually returned to the states. After Joe passed away, Ardie joined the Peace Corps in Costa Rica at age 60. Upon her return, we found ourselves near neighbors in San Francisco.
Ardie and I started volunteering together at a local food bank, making monthly food deliveries to people in need, mostly in the projects. I carried in the food, while Ardie greeted everyone with her generous smile and upbeat manner, mentoring me once again in the characteristics that opened doors wherever she went—courage, curiosity, and compassion.
“On the path laid out before you,” wrote the poet Gary Snyder, another Reed alum, “others have already been that way and picked all the berries. In order to get your own berries, you need to leave the path and make your own trail.”
On her personal odyssey in this life, Ardie not only carved out her own trail, and got her own berries, she inspired me, and I’m sure countless others, to do the same, for which I am eternally grateful.
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A link to Ardie’s obituary in Reed College alumni magazine:
https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/in-memoriam/obituaries/2022/ardeth-owen-steere-fortier-1955.html
