Rumble Strip: Finn and the Bell
2023-08-25 00:39:13
Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.
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This is radio lab. I'm Lulu Miller. A couple years ago, our producer Annie McKeown told the whole staff You have to listen to this piece. It quote tore my heart wide open, and most of us didn't listen.
We forgot to listen, we didn't, but then. More recently, that piece has been winning a ton of awards. It won a Peabody Award, a Third Coast Award, which is like the Oscars of radio. And then a bunch of us started listening and passing it around and sharing it.
And I listened this past weekend and I changed is maybe how I would put it anyway. The piece is called Fin and the Bell, and it comes from this little podcast called Rumble Strip, which is a super independent operation. It's just one woman in a closet in Vermont.
That woman's name is Erica Heilman, and she really is a treasure, a gift to this medium of ours. She listens so closely and finds her way into private places that don't always make it onto the air. And Fin and the Bell is such a powerful, multifaceted example of that. I think it's best if I don't say any more about it than that. Other than that, I would recommend you listen all the way to the very last second.
And, as Erica will tell you, this piece might not be suitable for all listeners.
Welcome to Rumble Strip. I'm Erica Heilman. Fair warning This story involves suicide.
He'd write little notes to find in weird places, you know, he'd write notes on logs. So when we would, you know, in the winter, deep in the winter, go out to get wood for the fire.
There'd be like, a hi, mama, I love you.
I found one of them this summer.
I was afraid I was going to, but also really wanted to. I couldn't decide which way I wanted to go with that.
He just recognized coziness and was always trying to create that what, you know, the blanket felt like, was important. Or, like, let's get our pajamas on, you know, and let's make cookies. He just recognized the importance of little things you could do to make day-to-day life so much, exponentially better.
And he was determined to do that all the time. He appreciated leaving the light on all night, so there would be a bunch of moths in the morning. Or he appreciated a perennial garden and would say, like, look at their perennial garden, you know, or a compost pile. A perfect song being played at the perfect time.
What did he look like?
He wasn't very tall, he was 5'7 when he was little. He had really long hair, like down close to his hip bones, probably. And then, as a teenager, he would let it grow, you know, down past his shoulders, cut it, let it grow long again.
But then?
About a month before he died, he cut it.
That's something I think about a lot, yeah.
That's Tara Finn's mother. Finn Rooney killed himself on January 3rd, 2020, in the afternoon after school. This story will not explain why he did this, as if anyone can explain why a person takes his own life. Suffice to say that not a single person in his life predicted this. There were no signs.
The closest one can say is that there was a flash of high emotion that comes with youth. And there was a gun nearby and bullets. This is not a story about suicide, it's a story about a boy called Finn Rooney, who lived in Walden, Vermont, near Hardwick, with his mother, Tara, and brother Lyle. And occasionally, his father, Alex, who is a long-haul truck driver. A boy who loved to fish and play baseball, he played the euphonium not very well.
He was the student body president, and right before he died, he had an idea about a bell.
This is Finn's friend Alex talking about the town of Hardwick.
Well, Hardwick's more like a, you know? They got pretty much everything to a certain extent. There's a couple grocery stores, but they ain't big by any means. There's a Walgreens, there's a couple banks, two hardware stores, a gun shop, a Ford dealership. So there's not a whole lot, but it's definitely more than what Greensboro has.
And what are the people like in Hardwick, different from Greensboro?
Well, Greensboro, they're more. I've come across from working at Willie's over here in Greensboro, that Greensboro folk are a little more high class. I guess you can call it. They have a little more, their pockets are a little deeper, they're a little more liberal, I guess, you could say. But then Hardwick, you know, just a bunch of hicks you got to share with them.
Hardwick's kind of like, it's the perfect combination of hippies and rednecks, hippie redneck combination type of thing.
This is Finn's friend, Allie.
For lack of a better word, like a cesspool of like hipnecks.
What was Finn?
Finn was a total hipneck. He was the most ideal combination of a hipneck you could get. He wasn't, because sometimes there's some that are like, 70-30 hippie redneck. Finn was 50-50. He was right in the middle.
If you needed him to help you weed your garden, he'd do it. if you needed him to help fix your truck, he'd do it. It was just he was very much in the middle, could do anything you asked him to do.
He partook in activities of every single crowd around.
This is Mac.
He was the star baseball player, he was the Student Council president. He liked to go and fish and hunt and work on his truck.
He did everything, that's why he was friends with everybody.
Again, here's Finn's mom, Tara.
It's a farming community, a logging community, people have lived here for six generations. There's last names that are last names.
Finn was like, How long would it take for Rooney to be a Hardwick last name? People were like, 200 years, maybe.
We were like, we've got our work cut out for us. He was active in Bread and Puppet, a theater group in Glover, as a really little kid. When we first moved here in 2010, he really wanted to do that, so he joined the band. He would play in parades and stuff. That first year we came, he was also looking for establishing himself in Hardwick.
That's a different trajectory.
He joined the volunteer fire department. He was a junior firefighter. I guess that would be the first year we moved here. Butch, our neighbor, was the assistant fire chief and had been in the fire department for 50 years or something, and offered Finn to go. We had a pager.
The pager would go off in the middle of the night. Finn would get his gear on real fast and go out in Butch's truck, and Butch would take him to these fires. And he was very interested in everything.
This is butch.
He paid attention to every last thing that was going on and he wanted to learn everything that was going on. When you're out of fire. He was right there, wanting to see how everything was done and why it was done, and that was him. He was 17, but his mind was, I think, way more than 17..
I first met Finn when we went fishing.
This is Aaron.
We had our fishing spots and people always wanted to go with us, but it was usually just a me and him thing. It was really fun going trout fishing with him.
Because he knew the rivers pretty well.
That's as much as Aaron wanted to say to me. I asked if, instead of talking, he could take me to one of their fishing spots. This is good.
So this is one of me and Finn's fishing spots.
Where are we?
We are at one of me and Finn's fishing spots.
You're not going to tell me where this is.
No, I won't tell anybody where this spot is, it's me and Finn's spot.
This is the sound of the Bread and Puppets circus.
He wrote poetry, embroidered, drove his truck really fast, pissed off the neighbors, loved a good meal.
Like, this is so good, mama.
I remember he would go out sometimes when I was making dinner and pick seed heads. Put them in a mason jar and stick them on the table. Light candles, you know, without asking.
He liked a well-set table.
That's it, Finn.
This is Mirko Finn's baseball coach.
Finn had this glove that was given to him and during the game, the strings would break. And we'd restring it. And we'd try to give him a glove. And he's like, coach, this is the glove. And he had these cleats that were duct-taped up, There's a new pair of cleats that were given to him. We never had metal cleats and at this level, they can wear metal.
And then I see him at practice, he's wearing his old duct-taped cleats up, and I'm like, Finn, you got a new set of cleats. Coach, those are for games, only, I wear those for games. So then after every game, he'd take them off and wipe them down and put them back in the box.
We'd brought in some teams in New England.
And we represented Vermont. And the coaches from the other team would come up to me and say, Who's that center field if I had nine players like that?
So even coaches that never coached him could see his work ethic and his love for the game.
Lyle and Finn would every day, for hours. That was the sound of summer, it was like the sound of a ball getting into a glove.
Come on, Lyle, let's go outside.
I find baseballs in the yard, in the field, all the time, still.
Because before we had the sheep, the grass would just get too big and they'd lose them.
The ball, that sound.
I give just about anything in the world to hear that.
Yeah.
It was a Friday evening and I was at home and the phone rang.
This is Hazen Union High School principal David Perigo.
It was our director of guidance telling me that she had some horrible news and I said, OK. And she said, We have reason to believe that. One of our students took their own life this afternoon. And I shook my head and just said, How do we know that?
What do you mean? We have reason to believe, and who are we talking about? And when she told me that we were talking about Finn Rooney.
I just didn't know what to make of it, and, you know, within a couple hours we had confirmed that it had happened.
And I went to bed that night thinking I don't know what to do. I want to go to sleep and I want to wake up. And I want this all to be gone.
And I went to sleep that night, and when I woke up this morning, I was like, we've just had a terrible thing happen to our community. It's really big and we've got to step into this and figure it out. And finally, that morning, in a conversation with Finn's mom, Tara. We had to have that conversation about how we were going to deal with this in the community. We had to communicate to the larger community that this had happened.
But from the very beginning, Tara was very clear. We are not going to back away from the fact that this was a suicide. This was a suicide. And I can't tell you how helpful that was. I mean, that lifted such a burden from our shoulders about trying to pussyfoot around some kind of gentle way of breaking this to people. That was going to be half true.
Because everybody in this community knew exactly what had happened, and I give Finn's family enormous credit.
They were generous in their grief. And that was so helpful to the rest of us who were trying to figure out. Where do we fit here? Where do we fit in?
People just rallied around us like a GoFundMe.
And a meal train and somewhere for us to stay for a couple of weeks, boxes of toilet paper and tea and bourbon, so much bourbon.
And Lyle plays basketball. And I went to the games, which I can't believe now because I was sort of in serious shock still then. And we would sort of walk and there would almost be like a sea parting, but not obnoxious. I can't explain it, it was just like reverence.
Almost, that's not the right word. Reverence isn't the right word. It was just care. They'd play the national anthem, which is obviously a big thing for baseball.
And I was like a mess like sobbing every time they play the national anthem. But then whoever I was sitting by would like put their hand on my shoulder. And whether it was like a logger or like a mom or a, people just held us.
Tom Gilbert, from Black Dirt Farm, set up this bonfire where he burnt rafters from his barn, like hundred-year-old, very special rafters. And hundreds of people from town came, and there were snow machines, and there were farmers on John Deere's singing hippie songs. And it was deep during the primaries.
So politics were just really ugly at that time.
Faye was so eager for that to be over. Just so people could have a bonfire, he used to say, I just wish we could all have a bonfire.
And there it was, and it was really beautiful.
Really transcendent.
And really sad.
So that's Finn when we come back the bell.
The Democrats have spent the week partying, the Republicans are fighting to get back in the headlines. And let's be honest, the main thing a whole lot of people really want to know right now is who's winning. That comes down to how voters in a handful of states feel about these presidential tickets. I'm Kai Wright and this week, a swing state pollster joins me for On the Call Our Notes from America pop-up series on the election.
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Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. This is Radiolab. Picking back up with rumble strips. Erica Heilman telling us the story of Finn and the Bell Before the break, We met Finn, now on to the bell.
Finn was student body president at Hazen Union High School. And in the months before he died, he heard a story about a bell, an old bell that used to hang in the belfry. At Hardwick Academy in the middle of town before the school was knocked down in 1970, and Hazen Union High School was built right up the hill. He heard that they would ring this bell when Hardwick teams won away games, so that the whole valley knew about the win altogether. Finn Rooney loved this idea, which maybe isn't surprising. He was a kid who had some notion of community being something inclusive and participatory, a verb even. He wanted to live in a town where there was a bonfire and everybody came.
Finn was not a fan of smartphones or the internet in a lot of ways. So this was a way that people communicated. That was different than posting it on Facebook. And he really loved that idea. He also thought that it could bring together different people in Hardwick.
The whole election and stuff was really bumming him out and he thought this was a way of everybody would be excited to hear the bell. So he ran for student body president and that was sort of his main platform. Was that he was going to get the bell back to Hazen, and there was, yeah, and actually, everybody was like, kids didn't know about the bell. But he explained that there used to be this bell and that he was going to get the bell back. But that he also didn't want it just to be for sports, that he was going to make it. Like, if somebody won a spelling bee, or if somebody was born, that they would ring the bell.
We talked about it a lot at dinner. His dad says he remembers Finn being in his truck and talking about the bell. It was just this thing, and so then, when he died quickly, there was a lot of talk about getting the bell. It sort of took on a life of its own.
Finn passed away in early January, the first week of January, and his passing just rocked the community at a level that was inexplicable. No one would have ever believed that this could have happened to Finn. So when Finn passed, the community was in shock for quite a long time. And this memory of this dream that he had about the Hardwick Academy Bell began to resonate with people.
It turned out some people in town didn't want to give up the Hardwick Bell, but then Dave Perigo got a call. There was another bell lying on the bank outside the Greensboro Town Hall. It was the bell from the old Greensboro School, which also had closed. When the schools unionized and Hazen was built, and the people of Greensboro were glad to donate it to Hazen.
The fact that he felt strong enough that Hazen's community could use a bell that would bring the school together. For all of our high points, you know, games and graduations just to ring out, you know? I think that's a wonderful thing, and, surprisingly, no one had come up with that before.
This is Greensboro Town Clerk Kim Greaves.
Everybody was supportive of having our bell taken care of in a way that obviously we had not done. And I mean, it's got a wicked beautiful tone and I think it's going to be spectacular. As old as it is, it's an incredible tone. So it's going to. Hopefully, you know, I mean, all the games and the graduations that will ring forever and it will be restored to its glory.
My truck's an 83 Chevy K30.
It's a single cab long bed, it's an 8-inch lift, 40-inch tires makes about 500. Horse. Had some transmission problems recently, but let's hope it holds together for today's mission.
Finn wanted to bring this bell to Hazen, and Finn's family asked if I wanted to haul the bell with my chevy. I mean, it is a real sharp-looking truck, but....
Are you nervous?
Yeah, I am. I don't know if my truck's going to hold together. I got the whole town of Hardwick and Greensboro on my shoulders. So I don't need to mess this up by any means. But if I do, if my truck does die, then Finn would have definitely appreciated that.
Right around the circle and come out on the other side, that'd be beautiful.
So on a rainy day in the spring, people gathered in the parking lot at the Greensboro Town hall for the moving of the Bell. Baseball players, Butch and the Walden Fire Department, town clerks and farmers in the Bread and Puppet band, and Alex with his enormous bright red truck.
I haven't heard of them yet last couple of nights, so did you.
Yeah.
I had a fox come in and kill 11 of mine.
Well, that's what happened to mine.
Oh, you got to kill them.
Yeah.
I had seven, then I had five.
So thank you all very, very much for joining us on this very special occasion here today. When we began to launch this bell project, one of the things we thought of was that we might get our own bell. We might have a bell made for us special. And then when this bell appeared, we realized, what a gift, not a new bell, a young, inexperienced bell.
But a bell with maturity and spirit. A bell that has rung out to the community of Greensboro throughout its history, and a bell that will become our bell in Hazen. So we are incredibly grateful to the Town of Greensboro for this, so in our appreciation today, we would like to present this letter to the Town of Greensboro.
Dear Greensboro Select Board and residents of the town of Greensboro, On behalf of our entire union, we would like to extend our deepest thanks to our friends and fellow union members of the Town of Greensboro. For your gracious gift of the former Greensboro School. Bell to Hazen and the entire union. The gift has allowed us to advance a dream, first articulated by our former student body President Finn Rooney, to bring a working bell back to Hazen. To once again ring out over the hills and the valleys of our community to inform, to celebrate, to unify, and to heal, a theme that is a tremendous part of our beloved Finn's legacy. Today, we plan to welcome your bell to its new life as our union's bell.
We commit to caring for it in its new home and respecting its great history as it begins its new life. And mission to once again and into perpetuity, sound its golden tone across our beloved greater community.
♪♪♪。
-♪♪♪。
How we doing got to bring that in a little bit more.
There you go.
If you would like to motivate and inspire this group of people with the revving of your truck.
With the.
That would be cool.
That would get people like mobilized.
And realizing that we're about to go, the truck's already down there.
-♪♪♪。
-♪♪♪。
And so Alex and Lyle and a few other guys loaded the bell into the back of Alex's 83 Chevy K30. And the whole party, along with the Walden Fire Department and the bread and pop-up band, convoyed down to Hazen Union to deliver the bell to its next home. Just like Finn wanted.
It never felt clumsy.
It was like, so not clumsy in a town that maybe a lot of people consider clumsy. And sort of, you know, Hardwick, I mean, you know, there's all sorts of jokes about Hardwick. It was sort of that idea of Hardwick that was actually the most beautiful.
Real human experience of my entire life. I'd walk to the go to my mechanic and he was sobbing and like, Can I change your oil? Or, like, the diner has a sandwich named after him the one-year anniversary, there were people made snowflakes with his name on them and taped them all around town.
The Bell.
He came home, I was on the couch and normally, as soon as either of the boys come in, I would check in with them. You know, look at their face and ask them how their day was. And they very rarely even got up the steps without us talking for 10 minutes or something about their day. But it was a very special day for me.
But this day was different. His dad caught him at the door.
It was winter and we needed wood for the fire. And I said, Hey, Finn, can you grab some wood for the fire? and he said, Yep, and he went back outside and grabbed some wood for the wood. Stove was coming in through the mudroom and his dad said, Hey, you want to go out to get something to eat?
And Finn said, Nah, I'm not hungry, and he went upstairs.
His dad and his brother and I were all sitting downstairs in the living room next to the chimney, and the chimney went through Finn's bedroom.
So we were probably down there for five minutes.
The sound went right down the chimney.
It took a long time to sort of.
I mean, it probably was half a second.
But in my head.
I knew.
Then we all started screaming, pretty much except Lyle, he was just standing there.
I'm just going to go get butch, Butch will know what to do. He's on the fire squad.
And I went outside, it was snowing, it was beautiful. I put on whichever boots I could find, they were mismatched.
One was Finn's and one was Lyle's, like boggs, and they were both left feet.
It was like I was watching it all. I can't explain.
It's not that I wasn't present, I was fully present, but also watching it at the same time. I don't know if that makes any sense. I got to their barn, they have this big floodlight on their house.
I got there and it was snowing. Sometimes when you look up at a light and it's snowing, it's so beautiful.
I stopped screaming, I'd been screaming this whole way, I looked up at that light and it was snowing.
It felt like there was no time at all.
And the whole life flashing before your eyes thing. I guess there was a part of that because I could see Finn at all of his ages.
All at once.
All at once, and me, all at once, and everybody I'd ever met, all at once.
Volcanoes, dinosaurs, the Big Bang seasons rapidly changing.
Me getting old without him, him being old.
It was me, Finn, and God. I'd say that's the best way I've ever described it.
I felt like Finn was gathering.
All of what was left of him, the energy that was still everywhere, because he was just such a big person.
And I was sort of waiting, kind of patiently, almost, for it to all gather.
And then it was like, like, it just sort of got in me, somehow, is how I felt it. I've explained this very few times.
It was like infinite compassion for every single person that had ever lived, including me and including Finn for doing this.
I remember saying out loud.
Oh.
Like, I understood for just a second there, like, why we were alive.
And it felt like it was for each other.
We've got ten minutes here we go.
Here we go, Andrew.
Oh my God, hi, how are you?
Lulu here again. It has been about a year and a half since the bell first went up, and Tara says it's been rung. Any time a high school soccer team or baseball team, or any of the teams win a game, it rings for parades. She says any time she hears it, as she's downtown going about her life, she feels quote joy and sorrow, all mixed together.
She says It feels like a hug from Finn.
This summer, on Finn's birthday, she hung out with some friends, drank some margaritas. And then they all went up to the Bell Tower. And she pulled the rope and just rang the bell over and over and over.
Until she said it felt like it had, Quote said what it needed to say.
Thank you.
Finn and the Bell was produced by Erika Heilman, with thanks to Claire Dolan, Tobin Anderson, Amelia Meath, and, of course, Tara Reese and all of Finn's family and friends. If you liked this, there is so much more to discover over at Rumble Strip. There's actually a kind of sequel to Finn in the Bell. That is called Civic Standard, which is about this kind of community center. Slash party Palace that Tara and her friend Rose Friedman put together to try to carry forward Finn's dream of community mending by having fun. That one, again, is called Civic Standard. I also super love this one about a camp for, quote, people with and without disabilities.
That one's called Camp Zeno. Rumble Strip is a member of Hub and Spoke, a collective of independent podcasts from around the country. Thanks so much for listening. catch you next week.
Our co-hosts, Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, Lachetti. Foster-Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Jnanasambadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sarah Kari, Ana Rascoet-Paz, Alyssa Jung Perry, Sarah Sandbach, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.
Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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