The Hills are Alive

As I reserved our tickets for Ashland High School’s annual musical, the melodies from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” began to tickle my fingers. So before we braved the winter weather last Saturday night, I sat down at the piano to set the stage for our expedition to Ashland Middle School. The notes, practiced so diligently nearly fifty years ago, poured through my fingers as I climbed every mountain, forded every stream, and followed every rainbow. I fumbled for a chord or two, but I was surprised at how easily my memory retrieved the music and words of “Do-Re-Mi,” “My Favorite Things,” and “Edelweiss,” imprinted on my brain so long ago. I couldn’t wait to sing once more, “The hills are alive with the sound of music!”

What fun it was to greet fellow Ashlanders as we entered the grand old lady, perhaps for the final time. As an immigrant to Ashland, I’d never danced upon the stage of the John A. McDowell Auditorium, or made music in her orchestra pit, but I could tell the air in the theater was tinged with nostalgia that night, blended of course with the time-honored sense of anticipation in the moments before the curtains open. Our second level, front row balcony seats provided a great view as we joined more than a thousand of our friends and neighbors to watch as the young people of our community brought the classic musical to life once again.

How I wished we had brought the lovely Madelyn Simone with us, but I wasn’t willing to risk a white-knuckled trip to get her from Canton in Saturday’s iffy weather. I’m not sure she would have understood the story line (the nuns, the threat of the Nazi takeover, etc.), but she would have loved the singing and dancing as well as the von Trapp children dressed in the draperies.

The story itself is a dramatic portrayal of the lives of a musical family who suffered through the takeover of Austria by Hitler’s regime in the early days of World War II. The climax of the musical comes when the family is spirited off the stage of the Salzburg Music Festival and ultimately hikes to freedom over the Alps, accompanied by the strains of “Climb Every Mountain.” In real life, Captain von Trapp also held Italian citizenship, and the family simply walked to the local station and boarded the train to Italy.  

As the music swells at the end of the theatrical production, the audience is left with the sense that all will be well for the von Trapp family as they “followed every rainbow.” Yet that romanticized image belies the truth of the treacherous journey facing the refugee family of 1938 or of 2015. In today’s world, there are an estimated 16.7 million refugees, people who have left or been forced out of their country of origin. There are another 33.3 million considered to be internally displaced persons, forced to leave their homes as a result of armed conflict, generalized violence, or human rights violations.

As I studied World War II history in high school, I naively thought that civilization had learned its lessons from the atrocities of the Nazis and the terror of that conflict. In reality, as the BBC reported last year, the world is in similar turmoil today. “The number of people living as refugees from war or persecution exceeded 50 million in 2013, for the first time since World War Two.” In Syria alone, nine million people, almost half its population, have been displaced in its bloody civil war. 

Naomi Shijhab Nye speaks for me: "Those of us who leave our homes in the morning and expect to find them there when we go back - it's hard for us to understand what the experience of a refugee might be like." I may not be able to understand, but I cannot ignore the anguish.

Unexpectedly, in the midst of a fabulous, joy-filled performance, a tender nudge opened my eyes to a sliver of the world's pain. With a "sad sort of clanging," joy and sorrow converged on a chilly February night that will stay with me forever.