Authors: Michael Northrop
We’d all pulled chairs into a semicircle around the radio, which was set up on a desk in Gullickson’s room. Even Elijah had joined us for the occasion. Jason was working the dial.
He’d spent the afternoon working on his go-kart until it got too dark in the shop, I guess. We’d actually sort of waited for him. We didn’t have a lot of events around here, and it seemed a little cruel to leave him out of this one. Plus, a quick look out the window told us there was no hurry.
The road out front was still buried, with another foot or two on top of what was there before. There was still no movement up on Route 7, and the house on the hill that was closest to us was up to its gutters in snow. I couldn’t see any smoke coming from its chimney like I had before. Maybe it was just too dark, but I didn’t think so.
More to the point, it was still snowing. Was it harder or softer than before? I just had no idea. It was all starting to look the same to me, and I was already sick of trying to gauge it. It would lighten up for a few minutes and you’d think maybe this was it, you know? And then two minutes after that it was coming down twice as hard. It was almost better not to look.
The radio was black and boxy, with a telescoping antenna that we’d pulled out all the way. At first, it offered us a wide variety of static, but part of that was because Jason was working
the dial too fast. At least I think he was. It’s not like I had much experience with old radios with dials. I mostly just listened to the radio in my mom’s car, and that one had buttons and “auto-seek” and all that. This one seriously looked like it was from the ‘80s or something. Finally, Pete was like, “Slow down there, Flash.”
Once he did, we started to get little slivers of actual human voices. The first thing we landed on was technically a recorded voice, I guess, but it was still something:
“This is an official announcement of the Emergency Broadcasting Network. A severe nor’easter has stalled over southern New England. Conditions are extremely hazardous, with deep snow and high winds. Stay off the roads. Conserve heat and food. Under no condition should you attempt to leave a functioning shelter. Authorities are aware of the situation and will assist those judged to be in the most danger first. Repeat: This is an official announcement of the Emergency Broadcasting …”
The voice repeated the whole thing again, and then there was a long electronic beep or tone or whatever. It was really loud and piercing. I guess it was designed to get people’s attention, but it wasn’t great when everyone was already leaning in to hear every word. We leaned back and started talking, pretty much all at the same time.
A nor’easter … You couldn’t grow up around here and not know more or less what those were, but now people started trying to mesh their “more” with the other guy’s “less,” and Les actually seemed to know more than most of us.
“It’s like a machine,” he was saying, “like a wheel. And part
of it is coming up over the water and part of it is coming down, and so it’s like rotating and gaining power and sort of, like, swirling.”
“That’s a tornado,” said Julie, but she was wrong.
“No, these are slower and a lot bigger,” he said. “Like a thousand times bigger. They just keep going ‘cause there’s all these different, like, air currents and clouds, and it all just blenders up and … turns to snow.”
“Why?” said Julie. “Why would it just turn to snow?”
“'Cause it’s cold?” Les said. He had reached the end of his knowledge on the subject.
“It’s ‘cause there’s cold air coming down from the north,” I said. I’d seen something about this on TV the winter before. “It’s formed between two big, like, masses of air—or, wait: air masses. Anyway, one’s warmer and one’s colder. That’s why it rotates like that. It’s, like, opposing pressures. The warm air picks up moisture out over the ocean, but when it rotates into the colder air coming down, that moisture freezes and gets too heavy, so it dumps it. But there’s still that pressure pushing it along and more warm air coming in behind it, so it rotates back down. Then more of the warm, moist stuff rotates up and around, and the whole thing starts over again. It just does it over and over until it breaks up or moves on or runs out of energy.”
I paused for a second, mainly to catch my breath, but also because I wasn’t entirely sure of all of it. Last winter was a long time ago, and it had just been some little segment on the news. I was kind of hoping someone would correct me, but no one did.
“That’s what I just said,” said Les.
“But where does it get the energy?” said Julie.
I waited for someone else to answer, but no one did, so I went on: “From the fronts? From the difference between the warm and the cold?”
But by then, I really had reached the end of what I knew, just like Les had. The beep came back on, and we turned our attention back to the radio.
“Try another station,” said Krista.
“Try WKAR,” said Pete.
WKAR was the only local radio station the three towns that fed into Tattawa had to offer. It was located in an old train station in downtown Little River. In fact, Little River being what it was, the radio station was about one-fifth of the downtown district. The station, the post office, the town hall, and a few little stores, one of which was a tiny antiques shop that was only open on weekends. Still, there was the radio station: “99.9 on your FM dial!” It broadcast the high school football and basketball games and ran these really embarrassingly amateur ads for local businesses. It would be like one of your classmates’ dads advertising the pizza place in a fake Italian accent.
“They’re not going to be broadcasting,” I said, and they weren’t.
Jason moved the dial slowly now. We all watched the little line crawl over the backlit numbers. It could not have been more perfectly centered: halfway between 99.8 and 100. And still, all we heard was static.
“Transmitter’s probably down,” said Jason.
“Yeah,” said Les. “That little place is buried.”
Everyone except Elijah offered an opinion about what to try next.
During our trip up the dial, there’d been no wacky drive-time DJ’s, no crappy oldies. I don’t know if the stations weren’t broadcasting or if the storm was just smothering our reception. I’m sure it didn’t help that the radio was a piece of junk. But when we got to the big classic rock station out of Hartford, we got something. It was faint, but it was an actual, live human being. Jason held up his hand and Pete and I gave him five.
Jason turned the volume up and we leaned in. Even before we could make out what the guy was saying, it was pretty clear that the man was rambling. Part of his voice fading in and out was the radio, and part of it was him. He sounded distracted, like he was talking to himself, and I think maybe he thought he was. He probably didn’t know if his station was broadcasting either, but it was, and seven kids were hanging on every little stutter and hesitation.
“Man oh man oh man oh man,” he was saying. “It is nasty out there, seriously nasty.”
He sounded tired and his voice was a little hoarse, and I wondered how long he’d been talking. Had he been stranded there for the whole storm like we were? But he was in Hartford. It couldn’t possibly be as bad there. I mean, in a city, the buildings are connected and stuff like that. There are walkways and overpasses, so people could still get around. Still, it was pretty clear that the next shift hadn’t arrived for this guy.
“I’m looking out the window now,” he continued. “Not much happening in The Insurance Capital of the World. And I hope
everyone’s homeowner insurance is in order. Home … auto …” He stopped short of saying “life.”
“I see one guy out there, skiing down the middle of the frickin’ road. And, yep, he just fell over. It’s funny, he really does look like an ant from up here. And he’s up! He’s up, ladies and gentlemen. Covered in snow. He looks like a powdered donut. I hope that dumb son of a gun has someplace important to be, because he should not be out in this. And he’s down again.”
A gust of wind rattled the windows, like it’d been doing ever since we’d been in this room, and I could picture that lone skier out there.
“And he’s up … he’s down. I can’t watch this. Again, folks, I can’t emphasize this enough. Stay inside if at all possible. The snow is up to, well, last I heard it was eleven feet in downtown Hartford and higher in outlying areas.”
I looked around at the others because it didn’t get much more “outlying” than this Podunk school on a dead-end road out in the middle of what used to be farmland. I could barely see their faces, though, and I realized that the emergency lights out in the hallway had blinked out again. I thought about saying something but everyone was just watching the weak glow of the radio dial.
“And that’s on top of what was already there. If you’re in a single-story or ranch-style house, you need to be thinking about ventilation. Keep your chimney clear, if you have one. This is dense snow, and there are some layers of frozen stuff in there. Air won’t necessarily make it through on its own.”
Les slammed his fist down on a desk and swore. Elijah looked
up at the ceiling and mumbled something. They lived in singlestory houses, I was guessing.
“Heck, stick a broom up through there. The important thing is just to wait it out. This storm is, and I’m quoting the National Weather Service here: ‘unprecedented.’ I guess there’ve been some historical cases but … Anyway, these things require lots of energy” — what I’d been saying before, except this guy seemed to know what he was talking about — “and that energy can’t last forever.”
And then the guy sang a few words of a song:
“Forever! Forevvvv-errr!”
And I recognized his voice, even if it was tired and hoarse.
“It’s Andy,” I said.
“Holy crap,” said Pete. “You’re right.”
Yeah, it was Andy, one half of Randy & Andy, the station’s star personalities.
“I wonder where Ran —” Pete began, but the girls shushed him, and Les gave him a look with the same message.
So we turned back to the radio and listened for a while more, until Andy’s voice cracked one time too many, and he put on “Born to Be Wild.” We sat there and listened to it, which was kind of dumb and useless, but really, who doesn’t like that song?
His voice came back on afterwards. I guess he’d had a glass of water or something. “And that was Steppenwolf, of course. But seriously, folks, do not get your motor running. Do not head out on the highway. Stay where you are. That is the advice we’re getting from the State Police. They are beyond swamped and
won’t be able to assist you in most cases. They are waiting for this to pass, just like we all are.”
And so we basically knew we were on our own for the duration. Seven kids in an enormous high school, with blankets and enough food to feed four hundred people for a week? And meanwhile, people were in danger of suffocating in their houses, so why would they rescue us? Where would they rescue us to?
“The National Guard has been called in, but no sign of them yet, not even downtown. I wouldn’t be waiting for Uncle Sam, folks. You know those weekend warriors have two left boots….”
“Screw you, Andy!” said Jason. He was not going to listen to a radio personality bad-mouth men in uniform. Any men, in any uniform. “Let’s try another station.”
But we didn’t. Andy may have been one half of a goofball comedy team five days a week, but he had become an actual newsman, on his own and under backup power. And he was getting information from somewhere, official information.
We were hungry, though, and we needed to make dinner while there was still enough light coming in through the windows. We didn’t know when or if the emergency lights would come back on. Maybe because of that, it occurred to us to turn the radio off while we ate. The radio was old, and there was a decent chance the batteries were too.
We sat there in silence and near darkness, eating sandwiches. We had a choice this time, cold cuts or PB&J. Most of us went with the flat, slimy cuts of meat, because it seemed like, even as cold as it was getting in here, we should eat that sooner rather
than later. Then we ate pudding straight out of the can. We’d found a jumbo-sized roll of plastic wrap along with the food, and after we finished, we wrapped the leftovers up tight and put them on a windowsill with the rest of the food.
Up against the window was almost as good as in a refrigerator. I put my palm against the windowpane: It was bitterly cold outside now, and you could feel the bite right through the glass. A gust of wind bounced the window against my hand and seemed to rock the whole building.
We listened to the radio for a while after that. Some guy was filling in for Andy now, taking short shifts. It was just some other guy from the building, not even from the station. The guy was nervous and hard to listen to. I guess Andy knew it too, because he was playing more music. He didn’t seem too concerned with the playlist either. It was supposed to be a classic rock station, but that’d kind of gone out the window. There was some new stuff and some Top 40 and even some country mixed in — like that rock sort of country — and all of it was better than listening to the wind tear into the side of the building.
But mostly it was classic rock. When they played “Atlantic City” by Bruce Springsteen, Pete talked our ears off about “The Boss.” Pete had been born in New Jersey and was, like, weirdly proud of that fact.
“The Boss was born in New Jersey, you know,” he said.
“Yeah, so was Snooki,” I said.
I meant that as a put-down but I’m not sure he took it that way. I wasn’t even sure it was true. I can’t keep track of all those reality TV stars, except for athletes, which is kind of the same
thing. I mean, it’s real and it’s on TV. Those guys have talent, though, not just egos and nose jobs. I ran through the Celtics’ schedule in my head: They were playing tonight. And they were on a West Coast swing, at the Lakers, so they’d definitely get the game in. It didn’t seem strange to me that people were playing basketball with this huge storm going on. It seemed strange to me that I wasn’t.
Anyway, a Lady Gaga song came on after that. It was catchy and the girls were into it, singing along with the chorus, but if Lady Gaga is classic rock, we’re all in trouble.