Radiolab - Rumble Strip: Finn and the Bell

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

A couple years ago, our producer Annie McEwen listened to an audio documentary that, she said, “tore my heart wide open.” That episode , “Finn and the Bell,” (https://zpr.io/TDjwQuXFDSz6) by independent producer Erica Heilman (maker of the podcast  Rumble Strip), went on to win some of the biggest awards in audio (including a Peabody, https://zpr.io/tu4hwhKQ3TWN), and the rest of the staff finally got around to listening, and it tore our hearts wide open, too. It’s a story about a death, but as so many of the best stories about death tend to be, it ends up mainly being about life, in this case, the life of a small town in far northern Vermont, the town where Erica lives and makes her show. We think you’ll like it. You can find more than 200 other episodes of Rumble Strip here (https://zpr.io/dwGNnSFmAEFX). Erica’s episode about The Civic Standard (https://zpr.io/GJMP95QENFKq), the community organization started by Finn’s mom Tara Reese and her friend Rose Friedman, is here (https://zpr.io/9HL9mpZT4LTM). A follow-up episode to “Finn and the Bell” is here (https://zpr.io/ycxSU7ceDXNi). The episode Lulu mentions about the camp for people with and without disabilities is here (https://zpr.io/cnyyUWrfQJey).Special thanks to Clare Dolan, Tobin Anderson, Amelia Meath and of course, Tara Reese 🥚. Rumble Strip is a member of Hub and Spoke, a collective of independent podcasts from around the country. EPISODE CREDITS  Reported by - Erica Heilman Produced by - Erica Heilman If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, there’s help available. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is open 24 hours a day at 1-800-273-TALK. There’s also a live chat option on their website(http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/). Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [e-mail]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s 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.

Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC. This is Radio Lab, I'm Lula Miller. A couple years ago, our producer, Ani McEwen, 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 Finn 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 art. She listens so closely and finds her way into private places that don't always make it onto the air. And Finn 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 America, Highlamin. Fair warning, this story involves suicide. He'd write little notes to find in weird places. 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 go 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 or compost pile. A perfect song being played at the perfect time.

What did he look like? He wasn't very tall. He was five, seven, or... When he was little, he had really long hair, like down close to, you know, his hip bones, probably. And then as a teenager, he would let it grow, 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, gun shop, car dealership, so there's not a whole lot, but it's definitely more than what Greensboro has.

What are the people like in Hardwick different from Greensboro? Well Greensboro, they're more, I've come across from working at Willis over here in Greensboro. The Greensboro folk are a little more high class, I guess you can call it. They have a little more pockets a little deeper. They're a little more liberal, I guess you could say, but then Hardwick, you know, I'm just a bunch of hicks, you have a chair on them. Hardwicks kind of like, it's the perfect combination of hippies and red necks, hippie, red neck, combination type of thing. This is Finn's friend, Ali.

For a lack of better word, like a cesspool of hip necks. What was Finn? Finn is a total hip-neck. He was the most ideal combination of a hip-neck you can get. He wasn't because sometimes there's some that are like 70-30% hippie red-neck. Finn was 50-50. He was right in the middle. If you needed him to help you weed your garden, you'd do it. If you needed him to help fix your truck, you'd do it. It was just, he was very much in the middle could do anything you asked him to do. A part took in activities of every single crowd around. This is Mack.

He was the star baseball player. He was the student council president. He was, he liked to go and fish and hunt and work on his truck. We did everything. That's why he was friends with everybody. Again, here's Finn's mom, Tara. You know, there's, it's a farming community, a logging community. People have lived here for six generations.

There's like last names that are last names, you know, and Finn was like, how long would it take for Rooney to be like a hardwicked last name, you know, and people were like, 200 years maybe, you know, and so we were like, we've got to work cut out for us. So he was, he was active in Bretton Puppet, a theater group and Glover, as a really low kid when we first moved here in 2010 He really wanted to do that so he joined the band kind of or he would like play in parades and stuff that first year we came but he was also looking for

establishing himself in Hardwick and that's a different trajectory and so he joined the volunteer fire department. He was a junior firefighter. When he was, I guess that would be the first year we moved here. But 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 major, theager would go off the middle

the night and Finn would get a scare on real fast and go out and but just 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 just... he was 17 but his mind was I think way more than 17. I first met Finn. We weren't fishing. This is Aaron. We had our fishing spots and people always wanted to go with us, but it was usually just me and him thing. It was really fun going to our fishing with him because he knew the river was 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 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're 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 puppet circus. He wrote poetry, embroidered, drove his truck really fast, pissed off the neighbors, loved

a good meal. This is so good, mama. I remember he would go out sometimes when I was making dinner and and and pick like seed heads, put them in a mason jar and stick it on the table, light candles, you know, without asking. He liked a well set table. This is Mark Hall, Finn's baseball coach. Finn had this glove that was given to him and during the game the strings would break and would be stringing it and We're like try to get him a glove. 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 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 tape they can wear metal. And then I see him at practice, he's wearing his old duct tape cleats up and I'm like vending you that 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 brought 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 of summer, was like the sound of a ball getting into a glove.

Come on Lyle, let's go outside and... I find baseballs in the yard, you know, 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 I want to hear that. Yeah. It was a Friday evening and I was at home in the phone rang. This is Hazen Union High School principal David Parago. It was our director of guidance telling me that she had some horrible news. And I said, okay. And she said, we have reason to believe

that one of our students took their own life this afternoon. And I shipped 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 fin 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 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 pussy foot 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 Finns family enormous credit They were generous in their grief and that was so helpful to the rest of us who are trying to figure out where do we fit here? Where do we, where do we fit in? People just rallied around us, like a go fund me, 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 Lyoh plays basketball, and I went to the games, which I can't believe now, because I was sort of in serious shocks still then, and we would sort of walk, and there would almost be like a like a sea parting but but not obnoxious like I can't 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 it was just care they'd play the national anthem, which is obviously like 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 Blackdirt Farm set up this bonfire where he burnt rafters from his barn, like a hundred-year-old very special rafters and hundreds of people from town came

and there were snow machines and there were farmers on John Deers singing hippie songs and it was deep during the primaries so politics were just really ugly at that time it was so eager for that to be over just so people can 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. Pam Lulimiller this is Radio Lab picking back up with Rumble Strips, Erica Hylman, 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 bell-free at Hardwick Academy in the middle of town, before the school was knocked down in 1970, and Hayes and 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 what he, because he 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 want 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 him being his truck and

and 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 Paragog 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 Grieves. 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 wicket's beautiful tone and I think it's going to be spectacular as old as it is it's an incredible tone so it's gonna hopefully you know I mean all the the games and the graduations that will ring forever and it will be restored to its glory.

My truck's at 83 Chevy K30. It's a single cab long bed. It's 8 inch lift, 40 inch tires. It makes about 500 horse. Had some transmission problems recently, but I hope it holds together for today's mission. Then wanted to bring this bell to Hazen. And Finn's family asked if 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-blood contract but are you nervous?

Yeah, I am. I don't know if my truck is going to hold together. I got the whole town hardwicking Greensboro on my shoulders, so I don't need to mess this up by any means, but if my truck does die, then Vennel would have definitely appreciated that. 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 in the Walden Fire Department, town clerks and farmers in the bread and puppet band and Alex with his enormous bright red truck. I had a box for me to kill 11 of mine. Oh, that's for half of the money. Oh, you got killed? Yeah? I had seven.

I had five. You did a good job. 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 wrung out to the community of Greensbowl 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. I 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 tremendous part of our community to inform, to celebrate, to unify, and to heal, a theme that is tremendous part of our beloved kids' legacy. Day we plan to welcome your bell to its new life as our youths bell. Sorry. We commit to caring for it in its new home and respecting its great history as it begins its new life and mission. Once again and into perpetuity sound its golden tone across

our beloved greater community. I'm going to bring that in a little bit, George. If you would like to motivate and inspire the scoop of people with the revving of your truck, that would be cool. That would get people like mobilized and realizing that we're allowed to go. All the fire trucks are 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 Convoy 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 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 this day was different, and his dad caught him at the door. We didn't, it was winter and we needed wood for the fire. And I said, I think, can you grab some wood for the fire? And he said, yeah, you need to go back outside and grab some wood for the wood stove. He was coming in through the mud room and I said, or his dad said, hey, you want to go out to get something to eat? And then he said, no, 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 next to the chimney and the chimney went through Finn's bedroom. So we were probably down there for five minutes. The sound might right down the chimney and it took a long time to sort of, I mean it probably was half a second, but in my head it, I knew. Then we all started screaming pretty much except Lyle, he was just standing there and uh I'm just gonna go get Bletch, but we'll 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, and one was fins and one was liles, like bogs. And they were both left feet. And I was like, I was watching it all, I can't explain, but not like, it's not that I wasn't present, I was like fully present, but also watching it at the same time. I don't know. That makes any sense.

But I got to their barn. They have this big flood light on their house. I got there and it was snowing. And sometimes when you look up at a light and it's snowing, it's like so beautiful. And I stopped screaming. I'd been screaming this whole way. And I looked up at that light, it was snowing and...

It felt like there was no time, like at all. Like in the whole life-fleshing before your eyes thing. I guess there was a part of that because I could see Finn and all of his ages, all at once. All at once. And me, all at once, and like, everybody had ever met all at once. It sounds so, but like, you know, like volcanoes and dinosaurs and the big bang seasons, like rapidly changing, you know, like me getting old without him. Him being old, like I... It kind of was like me fitting God. I'd say that's the best way I've ever described it.

And I felt like sin was like gathering, like... Like all of what was left to him, like the energy that was still like all, like everywhere, because he was just such a big person. And I was like, sort of waiting kind of patiently, almost, for it to all gather and then it was like it just sort of got in me somehow is how I felt it. I've explained this like very few times but it was like infinite compassion for like Every single person that had ever lived like including me and including Finn for doing this I remember saying out loud. Oh

Like I understood for for just a second there, like why we were alive. And it feel like I'm going to die. I'm going to die. There we go. There we go. Back, back. Back, back. Back, back. We're going in, Daryl. Back, back, back.

Back, back, back. Back, back, back. We're going in, Drill! Oh my God! Oh my God! Lulu here again. It has been about a year and a half since the bell first went up. And Tara says it's been wrong anytime of high school soccer team or baseball team or any of the teams win a game. It rings for parades. She says anytime she hears it, 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. ... The Fin and the Bell was produced by Erica Hyelman with thanks to Claire Dolan, Tobin Anderson, Amelia Meath, and of course, Tara Reese and all of Fin's family and friends. If you like 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. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abhamron and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Thanks so much for listening. Catch you next week. Rachel Kusik, Kedi Foster Keys, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindu Nyanasumbadam, Matt Kilti, Annie McEwen, Alex Niesen, Sara Curry, Anna Rosquette Paz,

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