Arts & Humanities
Ode to a Musical - Nancy Irish

Editor's note:
With the musical drama of Marquette's history and ancestry, Beacon on the Rock, starting its second season this month at the Lower Harbor, we wanted to bring you this journal of the play's affect on one resident in hopes it will spur others to examine their own roots and connections through time—and to go experience a performance of Beacon and Haywire.
  Morning sunlight filters through white pine and glass, landing on the old wooden floor at the foot of my rocking chair as I write. The only sounds I can hear are the fire roaring in the kitchen wood stove as it warms the morning and the laundry I just hung on the drying rack behind me, and the occasional calls of blue jays, mourning doves, and a cranky raven. All is peaceful and beautiful here at Big Creek, and coming alive with spring. I realize once again, as I often do now in quiet moments of solititude, how much my life resembles that of my U.P. Norwegian great-grandmother. I recall a powerful experience with the art of musical drama that helped me realize my deep connection with her.
  The finest art, to me, is that which helps our hearts perceive important truths in a way that our minds, so prone to distortion and narrowness, cannot. Art, if powerful enough, and if we allow it, can help lead us from the perception to the embodiment of truth. It can help us realize—make real—what is true. Such a realization is precisely what I experienced last summer when I donned a 19th-century work dress and became part of the dramatization of my great-grandparents' time in Beacon on the Rock. I realized no less than the truth of who I am. I also found my voice. This is quite a gift. I share my experience knowing that the personal is often universal, with the hope that it may help other sons and daughters of the Upper Peninsula reap the full benefit of the gift Shelley Russell has given us.
  My great-grandmother's name was Anna ("Ah-nah") Larsen. My daughter Anna, who was named after her, represents the fifth generation of Larsen women to call the U.P. woods home for a good part of their lives. I find great comfort and strength in that, somehow. Anna Larsen left the shores of Norway when she was nineteen years old, watching the parents she knew she would never see again turn into specks on the shore as her ship sailed away. She spent the rest of her life in a clearing in the Upper Peninsula forest, where her husband Nels and their ten children raised enough vegetables and cows to feed and support themselves. She, like I, found solace and strength in the Creator and in Creation: when mothering ten children got to be too much for her, she would say, "I'm going to da voods," and go and restore herself there.
  In her obituary, she was called a saint by a neighbor whose husband was killed in a mining accident. My great-grandmother delivered food to the miner's widow and her children every day for years, keeping them from hunger. I never met her, but I know, because I have known many of her children and her children's children, that she would have done so quietly, without any show or expectation—but with compassion in her heart, a spring in her step, and a twinkle in her eye.
  Grandpa Larsen was strict and stern, and had rigid ideas about discipline, work and moral uprightness. The story goes that the grocer in town trusted him above all other farmers—he never weighed Nels's vegetables, knowing that Nels would only err on the side of generosity. Nels had no qualms about imposing his moral code on others: when a refrigerator repairman came to his house in his later years, smoking a cigarette, Nels marched right up to his face, sputtering in his thick Norwegian accent,and grabbed the cigarette right out of the repairman's mouth. He reminded his children of his code whenever they left the house, saying "remember the Larsen name."
  I have heard these and other stories of my Larsen ancestors all my life, and have always loved the Larsen spirit that shone through Anna and Nels's children—my great aunts and uncles—and through my gentle, hard-working, fun-loving mother. It was Anna's spirit that the elder Larsens I have known seemed to embody most—there was a quiet, unpretentious beauty and grace about them, and they got "tickled" over simple things. It was only when I moved to a clearing in the Upper Peninsula woods myself, however, and started raising children, buildings, and vegetables here, that Anna and Nels's life started to seem real to me. Many times as I have planted seeds in the spring, stacked firewood, or made gallons of applesauce in the fall, I have imagined the Larsen family engaged more than a century ago in the very same tasks, listening to the very same bird songs. How I have yearned at times to visit them and observe them, talk, laugh, and work with them....especially my great-grandmother. She, like I, left her familiar world for the U.P. woods to build a better life for her children, and I know she could teach me a lot.
  All of these stories, thoughts and feelings about my Norwegian ancestors surfaced unexpectedly during the first music rehearsal for Beacon on the Rock, when we started singing "Step off the Boat..." My great-grandmother was on my mind, as she stepped off the boat to find Nels, who had come over first to find work in the mines, and was waiting to marry her. Also on my mind was my music director father, whose hands I kept seeing at the end of Rob Englehart's arms as he directed us. I hid behind my music and cried like a child, surrounded by mostly younger people whose concerns of the moment were more hormonal than ancestral and sentimental.
  In the play I assumed the role of a miner's widow with one daughter, which caused me to ponder a simple twist of fate. I wouldn't be here, if it had been Great-Grandpa Nels that died that day in the mines instead of the neighbor's husband. In another serendipitous twist, the lullaby I sang in Beacon on the Rock during a tense moment in which my character fears the death of her young boarder Joe, is the same one I've sung many nights to my daughter Anna during the awful tension of a bad asthma episode, fearing she wouldn't survive the night. I have since learned that the Larsen family often sang "All Through the Night" around the piano. I am beginning to understand what Shelley meant when she commented to the cast that if we bring our real life experiences to our roles on stage, our characters—and our lives—become more real.
  The fateful intertwining of lives in the forming of a community was another truth that was realized at Frazier's boathouse theater. We were a cast of many ages, beliefs, and backgrounds, and despite the usual dramas involved in people coming together with a common goal, we learned to work together, and eventually enjoy and appreciate one another (to varying degrees, as in a real community!). We didn't face anything as trying as a mining accident, but rehearsals were long, and it sure was hot some nights up there on stage. We formed a community out of diversity and shared challenges, both on and off stage.
  Playing out my great-grandmother's story in Beacon on the Rock had a remarkable affect on the bittersweet yearning I had so long felt for her. The experience transformed my deep longing to be with her into a deep knowing that she is with me, because she is in me. I, in part, am her. I feel her now in my blood and in my bones, in my smile as I watch the red squirrels chase and quarrel, and in my hands as I knead my daily bread.
  By coming to know what in me comes from the Larsens, I also am able to understand what in me does not come from them, and embrace what fruit the rest of my family tree bears in me. My mother's Mennonite father's commitment to justice that cost him his school superintendent's job in the middle of the Depression. My father's central Illinois family's gypsy rover gene, their love of art in all its forms, and their fun-loving, down-home witty candor. They are all a part of me, and I have finally come to understand that which countless others before me have understood—that to deny any part of me is to wreak havoc with my spirit, and indirectly, to the spirit of those closest to me. I no longer question what kind of person I want to be; only how to manifest who I am.
  Like most family trees, though, mine has needed some pruning...some ridding myself of the dead wood that doesn't serve me well. Claiming my inheritance seems to be the easy part. Disinheriting what I don't wish to carry on is much harder. What I have struggled most to disinherit is a susceptibility toward judgment: others' of me, and mine of others. I'm quite sure I would jump up, shamefaced, to do the dishes if Grandma Larsen walked in right now and found me sitting and writing by the wood stove with dishes undone. I wonder how she would respond if my friendly chain-smoking Ojibwa buddy asked her, as he sometimes asks me, "How's your Norwegian butt today?" I cringe and chuckle at the thought.
  I have done, said, and worn many things in my day that make me feel some relief that Nels and Anna Larsen are safe in their graves. I don't feel anymore, though, that I've forgotten the Larsen name—I've just been trying to figure out who I am in my own time and context, and want those around me to feel free to do the same without the burden of judgment from me. The Larsens simply viewed the world from a narrower perspective, which naturally breeds the kind of judgment a diverse society cannot afford. Judgment, the essential ingredient of prejudice, is incompatible with justice and compassion, and it is the familial penchant for justice and compassion I wish to carry on. Smoking cigarettes, after all, has not been as widely destructive as prejudice…just ask my Ojibwa buddy.
  I remember a summer day during the month of Beacon performances when I had washed my work dress costume and hung it out on the line next to my own cotton summer work dress. Later in the day when I was going about my outdoor business, the scene caught my eye as the two dresses flapped in the breeze, side by side among the sheets and towels and blue jeans. I was taken aback by the poignancy of it. More than a hundred years seemed to evaporate and melt together there on the clothesline, here in my country life.
  The farmer philosopher Wendell Berry wrote, "we can't know who we are if we don't know where we are." Beacon on the Rock helped me to see this land more clearly, and the achievements, heartaches and indomitable spirits of the people who came to this land, and of those who were already here. Beacon on the Rock can help us understand where and who we are, through the dramatization of where and who we have been.
  I don't have it figured out just yet how I'm going to integrate and live out all this deep new understanding about my identity. My heart sure does sing, though, when I envision my unfolding life as the country-lady-gypsy-bard-warrior-for-peace I lately fancy myself to be. Oh, Great Grandmother, the idea tickles me so. Thank you for playing your part in life so beautifully. May I contribute half as much to the well-being of descendants I never met. And thank you, Shelley Russell, for your gift of illumination. Whatever evolves I know that my life will be good, because I finally know where I stand, inside and out.
  I stand on good ground.
—Nancy Irish