It is raining and dark and cold, yet there on the hill above the school they are practicing their show for the hundredth time, the thousandth time. No part of them is dry. The water has found its way to them, inside their jackets, through their jeans, down their socks and into the bottoms of their shoes. It is like performing in an ocean.
It rained on them yesterday. And the day before. And today a cold wind blows as well. The rain makes it difficult to grip their instruments. But the cold is worse. It pinches their fingers, numbs their lips. When they stop to listen to their director, his words seem to come from some distant place.
With the ground beneath them turning to mud, their minds recede to the summer before spent on the hill. They wore shorts and T-shirts then. Sometimes they kicked off their shoes, and the grass felt warm against their feet.
Those summer days were not cold and wet. They possessed their own burdens. Huddling on the edges, whispering, their uneasiness evident in their eyes, the ones who had never performed in a high school marching band wore a collective concern. No less worried were the ones whose turn had finally come to lead. And like it is every year, the show was foreign to them all. The music, the drill, none of it was the same.
They felt like children learning to walk.
And walk they did. Up and down and back and forth and around and around. Their nine-minute show was portioned into pieces, links in a chain, each only seconds long, and they marched for hours, repeating each ephemeral part – over and over, again and again – until it filled their dreams.
March. Stop. Listen.
March. Stop. Listen.
The heat of the sun seared their skin while inside their muscles burned. Every part of them was on fire. Under their breaths they cursed themselves and each other. But mostly they cursed the director.
Above them on his stand where he could see their every move, their every mistake, he seemed to them to have broken free from reality. They wanted to tell him there were limitations to their abilities. He demanded perfection, they wanted to tell him, and perfection was too much. Wasn't it enough, each thought at some especially insufferable moment, to just be good? Is being great that much of a difference?
They wanted to seize his megaphone and grind it into the dirt. Instead, they marched. They marched to the end of July and then through August and September and deep into October. And now on this fall morning, they march in a persistent pre-dawn drizzle while most of the world around them sleeps. They are bone tired. They have spent their Saturdays on often interminable bus rides to marching band competitions in communities across the prairie, rising early and returning late, and except for Sundays when they did nothing, every day of the week had been devoted to painstaking preparation for the next competition.
They persevere even though their accomplishments go largely unnoticed. Television cameras do not capture their highlights. Nor do the front pages of the local newspaper revel in their deeds. They lack the incentive of celebrity that is so much the society in which they live. Unlike their taller, faster, stronger classmates who play sports to applause and adulation, in the halls of their school they are anonymous by comparison, and although they never confess it, that indignity bothers them, but they shrug it off, more determined and more resilient for it.
Shrouded in the rain, hunched and shapeless, they are shadows on the hill above the school. They are preparing for their final competition. Already, it has been a good season. They beat their cross-town rival the Saturday before – a band three times their size and under whose reputation and tradition they have toiled. Only once before in the 17-year history of their school had they or their predecessors done that, and when word of their victory was announced, they roared before jubilantly spilling into each other's arms, laughing. What their director understood about sacrifice, about excellence, they now did, too.
The rain falls harder. Bracing myself against it, I look up at them and shake my head in wonder.
They are a marvel to me.