Sisu
SISU Sisu is a Finnish word that simply means stubborn inner strength. Some define it as determination beyond all reason. When confronted with adversity , sickness, or a bad roll of the dice, the true Finn summons something within to rise above it. In the valley of the shadow of death, a Finn fears no evil. My father, Elder, instilled sisu in my head before I was even old enough to say my prayers. He learned it from his father, Emil, who learned it from his father, John, who learned it from his father, Isaac, who learned it from his father whose grave lies somewhere near the river that divides Finland from Sweden in the Land of the Midnight Sun. Great-grandpa John emigrated to Minnesota from Finland in 1888 with his wife, Selma, and two children. He started his new life in America as a miner, working a half-mile underground in the Soudan mine. After several years they accrued enough money to buy some land and, in 1904, moved their young family and John’s parents, in horse-drawn wagons , along with three teams of horses, four cows, two chickens, and all the family belongings across twenty-two miles of trail from Soudan to Angora. There the Metsa homestead was established on 520 acres. By 1915, a seven-room, two-story farmhouse was completed. The children grew and helped run the farm, which during the most productive years yielded as much as fifteen hundred bushels of grain and thirty tons of hay. My father was born there, on New Year’s Eve 1928, in one of the small rooms upstairs. The doctor from Virginia who delivered him made the twenty-mile trip in a blizzard, and while he was tending to the birth, the men carried hot bricks from their blacksmith shop across the road to place beneath the doctor’s car engine to keep it from freezing. When he was finished, he charged the new parents 35, no small amount at a time when the going rate for the workingman was a dollar a day. His parents, Emil and Elna, named the baby Elder, adding a link to the E chain of uncles and aunts named Erick, Eli, Edward, Eva, Eino (who married Elway), and Ellen. Curiously, when Elder later married SISU my mother, her parents were Ernest and Evelyn. Eerie. Poetry played no small part in my family. Dad grew up on that farm, an only child among his parents and older relatives. He was a favorite of his Grandpa John, and during their long saunas he’d be the water boy, pouring ladle after ladle on the hot rocks atop the stove, and whisking Grandpa’s back with cedar bows. Back in the farmhouse in the dead of winter Grandpa let Elder sit on his lap and fire his BB gun across the room at the wooden staircase that led to the second floor, much to the consternation of Grandma and the rest of the family. After milking, it was young Elder’s job to take pails of the skimmed milk to the pigs that would sometimes knock him down in their frenzy to eat. To this day he hates skim milk and confesses, “I can barely drink 2 percent, either.” Dad graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, in June 1951, married in September, and moved to Bayfield, Wisconsin, where he had accepted a high school teaching position. Mom got a job as a delivery nurse in the local hospital. They returned to Virginia the following June, a time when the mines were on strike and there were virtually no jobs. Elder had already secured a teaching position in Mountain Iron for the fall but sought something to tide them over for the summer months. He approached his old boss at the city parks and recreation department, where he’d held a summer job in high school. “I’m sorry, Elder,” he said. “I’m afraid the only job I have open is feeding the monkeys at the monkey house in Olcott Park, and being a college graduate, I’m sure you wouldn’t be interested.” “I’ll take it,” said Elder. “I’m not too proud to feed monkeys.” His friends would come to the park and chide, “Hey, Monkey Man, throw us some peanuts!” He shrugged off the comments, and while friends were struggling to put food on their tables, Elder and Bess had a steady supply of leftover peanuts and...
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