Lost & Found

We turned back north this morning, heading up US-59 to the college town of Marshall, Minnesota, out near the South Dakota border. And as is so often the case on these trips, getting there was the bulk of the adventure.

It should be no more than a one-hour drive from Worthington, where we stayed after our concert in Jackson last night, to Marshall, and yet, I always seem to find ways to extend these things. To begin with, I noticed months ago that this particular leg of the tour would take us within 15 miles of the little prairie town of Walnut Grove, which those of you good with childhood memories will have immediately placed as the home of Laura Ingalls Wilder during the years when her family was living in a sod house on the banks of Plum Creek. In my world, this is a big, big deal, and my traveling companions, violists Megan Tam and Jen Strom, agreed just enough to allow me to turn the car east on highway 14 and spend an hour or so exploring the place.

Walnut Grove is well aware of its important place in the history of children's literature, and from the moment you hit the otherwise modest city limits, you're bombarded with Ingalls references. The museum itself is closed in winter, but the folks who run it (and the attached gift shop, which stays open year-round) are more than happy to let visitors wander around the grounds. The main attraction is a recreation of the sod house the Ingalls family lived in while waiting for their real house to be completed. (The original sod house, which washed away more than a century ago, as sod houses were always meant to do, is located on a family farm a mile north of town.)

What gets soft-peddled is the obvious fact that Walnut Grove was hardly the town where the Ingalls had their best years: Mary went blind here from scarlet fever, a son was born and then died within a year, and Pa's dream of becoming a successful wheat farmer was dashed. Eventually, the family hightailed it over to South Dakota, and never looked back. You couldn't really blame them.

Rolling into Marshall a half-hour or so after leaving Plum Creek behind, our trio of violists opted for an afternoon of decompression in our hotel rooms before tonight's concert at the local high school. Around 5pm, we met up again to find some food, which is often one of the trickiest parts of an outstate tour, made trickier by the fact that Jen is a vegetarian. Fortunately, we discovered a more than passable bagel-and-coffee joint a few blocks from the hotel, and made quick work of some sandwiches and caffeine. It was 6pm when we left the cafe.

I mention the time because I want to establish right off the bat that it was not my fault that we somehow managed to show up for our 6:30 rehearsal at the high school, which was less than a mile from the bagel shop, at 6:32. See, what happened was that I had plotted our trip using the addresses provided to us by the orchestra and whatever online maps were available to me, and Marshall was actually a bit tricky. The address I had for Marshall Senior High was on Tiger Drive, and every mapping site I consulted insisted that there was no such place. Being a resourceful sort, I used Google Earth to locate the high school, and then confirmed the information on a few other sites. Every source I had said that the school would be easily found just south of downtown, on South Saratoga Street. Since I could clearly see the roof of a school-like building at that address on Google Earth, that was good enough for me. Tiger Drive, I assumed was some unofficial name that only the locals knew.

It isn't. We drove up and down Saratoga Street for 20 minutes, and all we found was a middle school, and a couple of teenagers practicing for their drivers' tests. Eventually, as I started to get desperate, I spotted a lone teen practicing his penalty shots on an outdoor rink (how Minnesota can you get, right?) and hopped out of the car to ask if he had any idea where we might find the high school. He shook the iPod buds out of his ears, cocked his head to the side, and said, "Oh, sure. Do ya know where the Applebee's and the Best Western are, out by the highway? It's just kitty corner to them."

The Best Western was our hotel. We had driven all over town, and the damn school was literally within sight of our rooms. Jen and Megan clearly found this hilarious, but recognizing that I was not in the mood to be poked, stifled their amusement. I stepped on the gas, and managed to make it to the parking lot of the Fine Arts building just as Megan's phone rang to tell us that the rehearsal had started, and our personnel manager was wondering whether we were planning to join the party this evening.

In the end, the concert went well, the hall was warm and inviting, and the crowd was wonderful. But the memorable part of the evening came after the Beethoven had ended, and the audience assumed we were done for the night. We weren't. As everyone in Minnesota knows by now, something horrible happened in this part of the state earlier in the week, and it would have felt utterly wrong for us to blow into town, play a show, and leave without acknowledging it.

So as Osmo was called back to the stage for his third bow after the Beethoven, he stepped up onto the podium, and raised his hands for silence.

"We have all heard," he said slowly, "about the terrible thing that has happened here this week. And of course, we all have still so many questions. Perhaps there are no answers. But we would like to play for you now music for those who have lost their children. We would like to play music for those who are grieving the loss of friends. We would like to play music for the hearts of everyone in your town who has felt this pain. We would like to play the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber."

I won't lie - the Barber Adagio is not an easy piece to play under the best of circumstances, and to attempt its whisper-soft textures and long, spun tones while your muscles are still twitching from the finale of Beethoven's 7th is something that string players ordinarily would balk at. But we've all been watching the news this week, and there are times when you just have to draw your musical strength from the far greater strength around you. I had to look away from a woman in the front row who had tears rolling down her cheeks even before we began (lest I choke up myself,) but I felt her gaze throughout, and when 60 bows lifted silently off their strings at the end of the impossibly soft chord that ends the Adagio, the room was quieter than any I've ever heard. Osmo waited a full ten seconds in the silence, then stepped off the podium and walked quietly offstage.

The applause didn't begin until he was almost off the stage, and in the silence, this whole trip became worth it for me. The idea that the music we play can silence hundreds in common mourning, can call up who knows how many personal and communal emotions, is why I will never get tired of this job. Critical accolades and CD sales are nice. Knowing that you've given a specific person an experience they'll carry with them is far better.

Now, it's an hour after the concert, and I'm sitting in the karaoke bar at our hotel, listening to an almost shockingly talented woman belt out Martina McBride's power ballad, "Independence Day," and it all feels right, somehow. This town couldn't be less like Minneapolis, and I know that a lot of my friends back home would probably take one look at the Friday night crowd in this bar and sneer. But I wouldn't trade the people who were with us in that high school auditorium tonight for anything, and I'm hoping they wouldn't trade us, either. There's common ground everywhere, y'know?