The Tornado Siren That Played Taps
The weekly siren test in our little town went wrong one Wednesday noon, and for three minutes the whole county stood at attention.
Every Wednesday at noon, our town tests its tornado siren. It is a point of local pride. The siren sits on a pole next to the water tower, and it has wailed through a hundred years of wind and warning. We all know the sound, and we all know to ignore it at noon on Wednesdays. I was in the feed store that day, loading mineral blocks onto a cart, when the siren started up, and the pitch was wrong.
It was a long, falling tone, slow and mournful, and it rose and fell in a pattern that I knew from somewhere. Then it came to me. It was Taps. The siren, which had been repaired the week before by a technician from out of town, had been wired to the speaker the volunteer fire department uses at funerals and parades. In place of the usual wail, it was playing a bugle call, slow and clear, over the whole town, at twelve o'clock on a sunny Wednesday.
Everyone stopped. In the feed store, six men took off their hats and stood in the aisles. A clerk placed his hand on his chest. Outside, a man on the sidewalk stopped in midstride, with a sack of groceries, and held very still. A woman in a pickup bowed her head. The dogs across the street sat down and listened. For three full minutes, the whole of the town was absolutely silent, standing at attention, honoring we knew not what.
The last note faded, and nobody moved. Finally, the feed store owner cleared his throat and said that he supposed it was over. We put our hats back on. We went back to our mineral blocks. The fire chief called the technician, who said that he had followed the diagram and was very sorry. The siren was fixed that afternoon, and the next Wednesday, it sounded like a siren again. But for years after, people would pause at noon, just for a second, and tip their hats at the water tower. A good weather safety page, like the one at NOAA, will tell you to listen to the siren. We listened. Cowboy poetry on farm.FM has a verse about it, and I believe the author was there.
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