Beach Bards Bonfire is “Here All Along”

From staff reports

In his new memoir, Here All Along: Finding my way to Cherry Republic, Bob Sutherland, the founder of Glen Arbor’s iconic company, wrote about the Beach Bards Bonfire and his role leading children’s hour during the 1990s. The Beach Bards holds its final summer evening of by-heart storytelling, poetry, and music on Friday, Aug. 21, at 8 pm near The Leelanau School beach, one mile northeast of Glen Arbor.

Here’s an excerpt from Here All Along:

“On a summer Friday evening in 1989, Norm Wheeler, then a high school teacher at The Leelanau School in Glen Arbor, started a small performance-sharing activity called Beach Bards Bonfire. It was just up the beach from the hundred-year-old private school. The previous summer, Norm and I had frequented another storytelling bonfire called the Stone Circle. We studied. We recited. We brought ideas back. And here, a year later, we were on our first night with 30 people on the shores of Sleeping Bear Bay, eager to participate either by listening or telling.

Watch this video, filmed by Ray Deremo, of Bob Sutherland performing during Beach Bards children’s hour in August 1992. Bob’s performance begins at the 2:30 mark.

It was a humble start to an iconic cultural program that continues today. One by one, those who were prepared would stand up near the fire with the flames roaring and the shadows and wind swirling, and tell or act out a story or poem. Surrounded by windswept white pines and juniper bushes, Norm and I took turns telling tall tales and reciting epic poems from memory. He blew horns and conch shells. I howled to the moon, told tall tales, and sang rousing camp songs. Humanity has been telling stories around a fire for millennia, and it felt grounding to connect with that ancient spirit.

This was the same summer I started Cherry Republic, peddling my T-shirts out of the trunk of my old Toyota Tercell. But while driving that car to various sales destinations, I was passionately memorizing lines from Little Orphan Annie or writing a story in my mind about waking up the Sleeping Bear. I brought books of literature to study while I ran the Glen Lake Yacht Club’s sailing races. I was awash in a poem’s nuances riding my bike to pickup basketball games.

Here I was, a young man more at home alone deep in the north woods or playing an intense game of “winner stays” basketball with fifteen players waiting, venturing into a new interest. I was devouring Carl Sandburg—there is a wolf in me—and William Blake—to see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower. This immersion in art and literature, it just felt so good.

Each week, new tellers joined us at the fire: writers, professors from Interlochen Arts Academy, professors from Northwestern Michigan College. It was an honor for me, a jock and by then five-time college dropout, to be surrounded by these really wonderful well-read and well-spoken people. I felt the best was coming out of me with them, while listening to them tell, while sharing stories together. There’s a song in the movie The Greatest Showman called “This Is Me.” Well, I wasn’t there yet. I wasn’t anywhere near the level of storyteller I wanted to be. But I could hold an audience in awe, and in that space more than anywhere else, I felt this is me.

Over the course of the summer, more people came to listen. I started running into people all over town who would pat me on the back and ask me what I was going to tell on Friday. I had felt this kind of attention before as a basketball star a decade ago. For a drifting T-shirt peddler, this was seismic stuff.

Every Friday night, I would come in a pair of worn-out jeans and bare feet and I’d share a new story or poem that I had memorized that week. Slowly, over the weeks, more people came until we had hundreds of regular families.

There was this special moment every Friday after we let a few kids share their stories: Norm would tell a classic like Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches, then local writer and poet Anne-Marie Oomen would share the ancient story “Legend of the Sleeping Bear.” Just as it became fully dark, when the electric energy was at its best, I would step up and tell a big, funny tall tale. Then I would close out the circle with, “You didn’t see it on TV or catch it on the radio. Nope. This is heart-to-heart, face-to-face sharing around a fire. Humankind has been doing this since we invented fire tens of thousands of years ago; it is in our blood so deep. We lean in closer and put the dark, cold, and shadows at our backs.”

And then I would put on a wolf ’s mask and dash and dart in the shadows, growling and acting out a short tale that finished with a big howl at the moon.”